Forget being shoved in an old folks’ home, the thing that worries me most about getting really decrepit is the prospect of one day having to turn in my driving license. Personally, I plan to keep on driving til I drop dead, and just hope that the two things don’t coincide, but some conscientious law-abiding folk volunteer to turn in their licenses when they realise they’re no longer safe on the road.
The finality of that act, the admission that you’re no longer as capable as you once were, and the loss of freedom that quitting driving will mean, must cause some real emotional stress, and it’s a theme that BMW explores in an “emotional” video it’s now pumping out across multiple social channels. It tells the fictional story of…okay, I know it sounds like it’s doing to be schmaltzy, and it is, but would you hang around if I told you there was an an E30 3-Series in it?
Thought so. Anyway, Freude Forever (“Joy Forever”) tells the fictional story of a middle-aged man, Christopher, taking his father, Robert, to the local licensing office to hand in his little ID. Christopher tries to assure his dad that “it’s just a little bit of plastic,” when they and we know it’s actually so much more. The video then briefly switches to black and white to show us the old guy taking his son, then just a teen, to the same office to receive his own license years earlier.
Related: 83-Year-Old Man Caught Driving Without A License For More Than 70 Years
Remembering the euphoria he felt that day, Christopher later asks Robert if he’d like a go in his i4 – on private land at their company’s offices – and we flit between shots of the current-day pair driving the new EV and their older selves kangarooing around the same car park in an E30 decades earlier.
The film closes with Robert’s previous frown turned upside down, which is probably what happened to the E30 as soon as Chris was let loose to explore the vintage 3-Series’ combo of semi-trailing rear arms and woefully long steering gearing on Germany’s wet roads back in the 1980s.
