Ihle and the origins of BMW’s signature grille

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Today’s Friday lady is only a prelude to a nut we’d love to crack. The car she’s seen in is a DKW sports model of 1934 but a frontal view of it would probably have misled you because of its radiator grille. Read on.

According to BMW, the first car to have their signature kidney-shaped radiator grille fitted was the 303 of 1933. One of BMW’s press releases states: “Up until the Second World War, the twin kidney grille became ever narrower and thus more elegant on each BMW model – such as the legendary BMW 327/BMW 328 – but it always followed the shape established by the BMW 303.”

Remarkably enough, there are plenty of earlier BMW cars with this emblematic feature. Several late 1920s and early 1930s Dixi 600s and 3/15s come with the double oval-shaped grille. And it gets even more remarkable when you find that other German cars of the same period have them, too. There are Fords, Opels, NSUs and DKWs with kidney-shaped grilles. What they have in common is that they all have sports bodies, most of them two-seater roadsters, like the one seen here. What really links these cars though is that their bodies we designed by the brothers Fritz and Rudolf Ihle of Bruchsal (that’s Bruchsal where Bertha Benz was famously helped by a blacksmith to mend a broken chain during her legendary tour in 1888, but that's another story...).

It would be nothing more than logical to think that BMW simply adopted the grille design from the Ihle brothers for all their subsequent cars. But BMW think differently. They say the distinctive grille design was the work of Peter Szymanowski. Polish-born Szymanowski had previously worked for Horch and came to BMW as a stylist, later leading the design department. He is sometimes even credited as the designer of the 328. When exactly did he join BMW? Time-wise it’s sketchy. BMW only mentions his career as starting in ‘the mid-1930s’. Hmmm…

So when did the Ihle brothers start? That’s also kind of vague, although one source mentions that Fritz and Rudolf took over an existing company (from a man named Friedrich Ruck) in 1931. Were the Dixi BMWs perhaps cars that were rebodied when they were a few years old? Or did the Ihle brothers start work on them earlier after all? Were they even made under Ruck’s reign? We found somebody who had written this: “The Ihle Sports was first shown at the BMW Autoshow in February 1933; most surviving Ihle Sports are described with an earlier date because they are rebodied earlier cars, which has led to the misunderstanding.” Really? Who told you that, son? BMW perhaps?

We’re not convinced. Not at all.

Words by Jeroen Booij. Photo from the archive.

Originally published on July 16, 2021

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