Apologies to all you Six Degrees specialists for goose-egging last week’s Hemmings Six Degrees of Automotive Separation Challenge. I was traveling and just couldn’t bogart enough wi-fi to get a challenge up. To make up for it, this week’s will be a good one: BMW.

BMW’s always managed to remain independent, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t forged many connections with other auto manufacturers throughout the years. Feel free to use any of those connections in your answers today, but to add a little spice to this challenge, let’s only consider BMW history up to 1985 – the traditional 25-year cutoff for collector cars.

This week’s challenge will be of the fox-and-hound type, which means that the first person to respond get to suggest an automotive company to link to BMW in six degrees or less. Whoever successfully answers that gets to suggest another company to link to BMW , and so on and so forth. As always, a connection consists of one company owning another, merging with another or sharing another’s parts.