BMW GINA Light Visionary Model, Rose Bronze

The GINA's home today is the BMW Museum in Munich, where it stands as a record of how far BMW's designers were prepared to question their own methods. It was never intended to preview a production model. Work began in 2001 under Chris Bangle, then BMW's head of design, and the company kept the project from the public until June 2008, when it revealed a roadster built on Z8 underpinnings but skinned in polyurethane-coated fabric over a movable wire frame. Its name, Geometry and Functions In 'N' Adaptions, set out the brief: a car whose form could change to suit the moment.

This example is finished in a rose bronze metallic, a warm, brownish metal with a pink cast and a coarse flake that shows best on the curves of the wings, over a white and light grey interior. The steering wheel is rimmed in white around a BMW roundel, the dials sit stacked in the centre console, and outside the open headlamps flank the twin kidneys while paired tailpipes and a carbon-weave diffuser finish the tail. The plaque, carrying the BMW roundel, sits on a stitched grey base. Built at 1:18.