Question about BMW's chassis codes

[kevinf]

Hey guys, never found my answer through search but I've always wondered about this. We have E series chassis in the past and now F's and in the future we have G series cars. How come we've never had letters before E? This has been bothering me for a while now lol and I want to see if there is a reason.

[GuidoK]

No it was always E. (at least from about the 60's before that they had a numeric code, like 507 or 102 etc)
E stands for Entwicklungscode, which means developmentcode.
When the E was full, they went through F.
But they used E for a long time because they had less models back then and 1 model got 1 code for sedan, estate, coupe and convertable.
It went really strange with the z3, which also got the e36 code (because it was based on the e36 compact model) but with a /6 designation, so e36/6

Somewhere BMW decided that each submodel should have its own code and each model its own complete decadigit.
It used to be (for example) e36 (3 series), e39 (5 series), e38 (7 series), e34 (older 5 series), so pretty much filling out all numbers.
Apparantly at one point they changed that because it was more convenient.

[kevinf]

Ah. thanks for the explanation. So E was the only one that actually had meaning. Then they just went with the next letter in the alphabet.

[jkoral]

Originally Posted by GuidoK

E stands for Entwicklungscode, which means developmentcode.

Interesting.

Do you know what the R stands for the first and second gen MINI models? It's interesting that for the third gen MINI they went to F.

And of course their RRxx codes need no explanation.

http://www.bmwarchiv.de/e-code/

[Chihuahua]

Originally Posted by kevinf

Ah. thanks for the explanation. So E was the only one that actually had meaning. Then they just went with the next letter in the alphabet.

Correct. Once BMW got into the 'F' codes, the cars lost all meaning.

[MightyMouseTech]

Originally Posted by Kyle B

Correct. Once BMW got into the 'F' codes, the cars lost all meaning.

"F"uckit.

[AntDX316]

Originally Posted by kevinf

Hey guys, never found my answer through search but I've always wondered about this. We have E series chassis in the past and now F's and in the future we have G series cars. How come we've never had letters before E? This has been bothering me for a while now lol and I want to see if there is a reason.

because the idea wasn't thought of prior to E

[note46]

Originally Posted by GuidoK

It went really strange with the z3, which also got the e36 code (because it was based on the e36 compact model) but with a /6 designation, so e36/6

Z3 was E36/7, coupe version was E36/8.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_3_Series_(E36)

ti model was E36/5. Not sure which one was E36/6, maybe the convertible.

[GuidoK]

sorry, meant /7 for the z3 roadster.

/5 was the compact