Bobby Hitt, BMW Manager of Media and Public Relations

So there's an interesting blend that has occurred. The cultures started to merge. We got more cautious and detail-oriented; they got a little of our cowboyism. I'm told by some of my German colleagues that it's a trait that they find they have to lose when they go back home, but they enjoy it while they're here. We hired our first group of production associates, and we were going to send fifty or sixty of them over to have some experience in our German plant. And I remember we had to set up a class just to make sure they understood that if they went to the toilet, and if it said H-E-R-R on the door, it was for "Herren," not for "her." Germans are great travelers. Wherever they go, they want to look at all the landscape and soak it all up. They like taking an impression of things and using it as a learning tool. One day, a couple of them told me they'd found this awful town over in Georgia, one of those little tourist villages made up to be like a German town, with little Heidelberg houses and bad German food - a tourist trap. These BMW guys came back and said "It's a terrible place. I think they mistook us for Austrians."