A classic Fifth Gear episode finds the gang in a fake parking garage, flogging a quartet of potential getaway cars including the BMW 540i.

Accidents do happen, no matter how careful you are. Luckily, BMW’s been hard at work on safety research since the early 1950s.

It’s ironic that so many years of history can be distilled into short alphanumeric combinations. However, that’s exactly how the past four decades of a German automotive powerhouse can be summarized – with short strings of characters such as BMW, M, 3.0 CSL, M1, and M3.

Before Chris Bangle’s flame surfacing, there was flash design. The E34 BMW 5 Series was a rolling showcase of it.

As you can imagine, having your BMW covered in real silver would be prohibitively expensive and cause your car to be too heavy to drive. BMW Individual has come up with the next-best…er…actually, better…thing: Pure Metal Silver paint.

The following Petrolicious film shows us all that a young man can bond with his father and his mother through a love of cars. In this case, those cars – all of them – are E28 BMW 5 Series.

It turns out the BMW M5 came from the I6-powered M535i of the early 1980s.