Chris Brownridge: behind the wheel of a greener image for BMW

theguardian.com:

W hen, as a child in the 1980s, Chris Brownridge first admired his grandfather’s BMW saloon, the business of selling cars was a fairly straightforward exchange of cash for a vehicle. But when he joined the industry in the 1990s, it was in the middle of a wave of change. Readily available car finance suddenly meant the public could buy more expensive cars.

“It changed the type of car people bought,” says Brownridge, chief executive of BMW Group UK. Drivers could borrow to buy a pricier vehicle in the expectation that it would hold its value and could be sold on later.

Britons couldn’t get enough of it (low interest rates helped), and BMW rose to become the UK’s fourth-biggest seller of cars, despite the premium price tag of most of its models. And now the industry is facing an even bigger paradigm shift, with the transition to electric cars in full swing, and newer innovations such as connected and autonomous cars opening the door to different kinds of business.

“Things have changed a lot and are about to change significantly again,” says Brownridge, standing in BMW’s flagship showroom on London’s Park Lane. “I genuinely think we are on the edge of probably the most exciting time in the industry.”

Brownridge is a UK car industry lifer. He was born in Oxford – “close to the Mini factory”, which BMW now owns – but when he was small his family moved to Hong Kong so his engineer father could work on the city’s mass transit system.

“I’ve very fond memories of a very different culture,” Brownridge says. It was a very different world, with the UK ruling the city state until the handover in 1997. When Chris Patten, last governor of Hong Kong, left on the royal yacht Britannia with the then Prince Charles, it “was quite a sad moment,