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Michael Taylor9 Mar 2015
NEWS

GENEVA MOTOR SHOW: The weird world of Borgward

Porsche is about to be supplanted as Stuttgart’s second biggest car-maker. No, really

Every now and again, the Geneva motor show throws up a genuinely head-shaking moment. This year, that moment came in a conversation with Christian Borgward.

Borgward is reviving the Borgward car brand, which has lain dormant since his grandfather, Carl Borgward, drove it to bankruptcy in 1961.

Now, though, Christian Borgward (pictured with rear of 1955 Isabella) insists it not only has more than 1000 employees at its Stuttgart headquarters, but that it will sell more than 800,000 “accessible premium” cars a year by 2020.

2020, by most counts, is less than five years away. Porsche, currently the second biggest car-maker in Stuttgart behind the giant Daimler organisation, plans to deliver 'only' 200,000 cars this year.

That would mean making Borgward four times the size of Porsche after a 54-year hiatus from making cars and with no dealer network, supplier chain or brand recognition, even in Germany where it prospered long ago.

But that’s just the first phase of the Borgward business plan. Phase two calls for 1.6 million cars a year by 2025.

It plans to achieve all of this as a stand-alone company, with no technical partnerships with other car-makers and no input from any of the car industry’s traditional large suppliers like Magna or Bosch.

The rebirth of Borgward began when Christian Borgward and Karl-Heinz Knoess (pictured alone) registered Borgward AG in Lucerne, Switzerland, in May 2008. And yet Borgward insisted in Geneva that it has been working on its comeback car for more than a decade.

It will, Borgward president and co-re-founder Knoess said, build its own engines, designed from scratch in-house.

“We want to become one of the top players in the automotive industry,” Knoess told journalists in Geneva.

Knoess, who has a CV that includes executive time at General Motors and Daimler, said it would all come off the back of modular chassis architecture and its own petrol, diesel and hybrid powertrains.

For all that, though, the only thing Borgward had on its Geneva motor show stand was a 1950s classic and a handful of brochures.

Instead of the big bang of a concept car, Borgward claimed, it would instead deliver the bigger bang of a full production car at September’s Frankfurt motor show.

The car will be a petrol- and diesel-powered SUV and Borgward will start selling them in early 2016.

And yet, when journalists asked seemingly obvious questions, like where the cars would be built, where the offices were and where the financial and technical backing was coming from, the Borgward management seemed surprised and confused.

They seem legitimate questions to ask, especially given that normal car industry product development timelines would have pilot production cars already out testing on public roads ahead of a Q1 2016 launch.

And yet Borgward either can’t or won’t tell us where the cars will be built, with Knoess ruling out only that contract builders Magna in Austria and Valmet in Finland were involved.

The only backer they admitted to in Geneva was Beiqi Foton Motor Company, China’s 18-year-old commercial vehicle giant, which tested its first successful truck as recently as 2001.

Foton, as it’s known, founded a joint-venture with Daimler (called the Beijing Foton Daimler Motor Company) in 2012 to build the Auman medium- and heavy-duty trucks in China.

Yet nobody we spoke to at Daimler or Mercedes-Benz seemed to have any inkling of what Borgward was all about. And Daimler, burnt by its own failed attempts to revive a once well-known German premium brand (Maybach) despite the backing of enormous financial, technical and design resources, would be a highly unwilling participant in reviving an even less well-known German premium brand.

On top of that, neither Porsche nor Daimler executives we spoke to off the record had heard of a startup car company searching for a new headquarters for 1000 people, with room to grow to everything needed to build and sell 1.5 million car a year, anywhere near Stuttgart. That sort of thing could normally be counted on to get tongues wagging in a car town where everyone knows everyone.

Its design chief, the Norwegian stylist Einar Hareide (pictured with front of Isabella), couldn’t even tell us how many people worked in the design team, nor in what country it was based.

Hareide developed the original four-eye face for Mercedes-Benz’s E-Class and worked on Saab’s 9000 series models but has hardly been an industry star over the last decade or so.

“Borgward was famous for introducing new innovations with every car. We intend to follow this principle,” he said.

While Knoess freely admits the first car will be an X5-sized SUV, he offered little on the second model’s body style, even though he admitted it would be shown at next March’s Geneva motor show.

Borgward’s great-grandfather founded Borgward in the northern German city of Bremen in 1919 and built 200,000 cars before the company was wound up in 1961, with the 1949 Hansa and the 1955 Isabella perhaps its most famous cars.

In one of those nice pieces of irony, Mercedes-Benz bought the old Borgward production plant from the receivers and now builds the C-Class and the SL and SLK sports cars there.

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Written byMichael Taylor
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