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Peter van Binsbergen is about to climb Kilimanjaro and, with 10 days to go, explains that he has deliberately done very little training.
“You shouldn’t train. You should be unfit, so you walk slowly,” the CEO of BMW Group South Africa tells me cheerfully.
This strikes me as a sufficiently alarming proposition that I wonder aloud if this maverick approach to very big obstacles reflects his management philosophy. It is to his credit that he laughs and plays along. “Maybe it’s because of BMW that I have had no time to train.”
We are at our monthly “Most Wanted Winemaker Dinner” — this time accompanied by Old Road Wine Co and head winemaker Ryan Puttick — and Van Binsbergen arrived looking faintly apprehensive about being subjected to Hot Lunch questioning in front of a live audience of proper hardcore BMW enthusiasts.
He needn’t have worried. The petrolhead conversations I overhear in the ladies’ bathroom indicate that he is laying his soul bare in front of some serious superfans.
He was born in Zimbabwe to Dutch parents, where his father, a graduate in tropical agriculture, farmed tobacco. Then, as Van Binsbergen describes it, his dad had a Damascene conversion, or rather “a change of heart from tobacco to church”, and the family moved to a mission station in Rwanda, where his father ran maintenance at the mission hospital.
I married my wife a week after marrying BMW. So it’s very easy to remember. We’re both 32 years
— Peter van Binsbergen
Van Binsbergen was two when they arrived and seven when they left. He remembers Rwanda vividly, including almost drowning in Lake Kivu after slipping through a tube. He found a rock on the bottom, pushed himself up for air, sank again and was eventually rescued by his father.
There was also a childhood encounter with Dian Fossey — his parents visited the celebrated primatologist — although Van Binsbergen was too young to remember her. Now, before turning 60 next year, he wants to stand on Africa’s highest point. “It was on my bucket list. So it’s got to be this year. No alternative.”
After Rwanda came Holland briefly, then Cape Town, school and mechanical engineering at UCT. His love affair with cars had begun much earlier, playing with toy cars on the floor in Rwanda. “Anything with wheels, basically. Cars, motorbikes, bicycles, skateboards, whatever.”
As a schoolboy he wanted to become a mechanic. His parents suggested an engineering degree might provide a useful fallback, so he eventually completed a master’s involving internal combustion engines. Ironically, after joining BMW in 1994, he never formally used it again.
First, though, came Eskom. “When I started at Eskom, we had too much power,” he says, to considerable amusement around the table. “Seriously.” It was an era when the utility was mothballing older power stations because there was surplus capacity. “But I left before the problem started.”
Power stations could never compete with cars. Van Binsbergen imagined he might start at Nissan and work his way towards BMW. Instead, BMW hired him immediately. Some 32 years later, he is still there.
After a decade in South Africa, he was sent to Munich to build his network at the mothership. A year later he was dispatched to Japan to run marketing without speaking Japanese, an experience he describes as a profound lesson in leadership and trust. Japan led back to Munich, and what was originally a three-year foreign posting eventually became 18 years.
“I married my wife a week after marrying BMW,” he says. “So it’s very easy to remember. We’re both 32 years.”
Along the way the couple accumulated three children; generally, he jokes, adding one each time they changed continents.
Eventually, in a leadership meeting, a colleague asked why he had never returned to South Africa. “I said, ‘Well, no one ever asked.’” Would he go back? Absolutely. In 2021 he did, to run BMW Group South Africa.
When a car gets a nickname in the local lingo, I think that’s a sign you’ve become accepted as part of the country
— Peter van Binsbergen
It is an interesting moment to be running a car company. The global industry is negotiating three enormous disruptions simultaneously: rising protectionism, the transition from internal combustion to electric mobility, and formidable new competition from China.
For South Africa, Van Binsbergen sees particular danger in declining sales of locally produced vehicles as imports grow. “That’s bad for South Africa because it takes jobs and costs South Africa economic growth.”
Yet he remains bullish about BMW’s local manufacturing future. The Rosslyn plant, BMW’s first factory outside Germany, dates back to 1973, and the X3 plug-in hybrid is produced exclusively here for global markets.
South Africa, in turn, occupies an unusually intimate place in BMW mythology. There were models created here specifically for us, including the legendary 745i and the 3 Series derivatives that became embedded in local car culture. And then there is the E30, the boxy BMW that became the foundational object of that most South African of motorsports: spinning.
“When a car gets a nickname in the local lingo, I think that’s a sign you’ve become accepted as part of the country.”
Cars, I suggest over another glass of wine, are peculiar objects. Like handbags, watches and indeed wine, their functional purpose hardly explains our emotional attachment to them.
Which raises the obvious existential question: what happens to sheer driving pleasure when the car starts driving itself?
Autonomous cars will come, he believes, initially in large urban centres where vehicles can communicate with one another. “Can you imagine a driverless car and a taxi meeting each other at a junction?” he asks. Eventually autonomy may make cities safer, cleaner and less congested. But he thinks humans will be reluctant to surrender something the motor car has given us for more than a century: independence.
Sunday Times Lifestyle
