The Mundy Award for Engineering recognises outstanding contributions to the automotive industry. Named after Harry Mundy, an engine designer who was also a staff writer for Autocar, the award is normally handed to a prominent engineer. Renault's Philippe Krief, Nissan's David Moss and GMA founder Gordon Murray are among the previous winners.

This year, given the team effort behind it, its excellence and its potential significance, our winner is BMW's Neue Klasse architecture, for the meaningful developments and progress it has made in the electric car world, while still allowing BMWs to drive like BMWs.

The man leading the development of this EV architecture was Mike Reichelt, head of Neue Klasse. It was an unusual project for the automotive industry and a unique one for him.

"I was the man [then CEO] Oliver Zipse called in 2020 and asked if I would lead, from the early beginning until the launch, not only the iX3 but the whole Neue Klasse family," recalls Reichelt.

That family begins with the iX3 SUV but will be quickly expanded by the i3 saloon (an electric 3 Series) and then a host of other models.

"It was the biggest chance, for me as an engineer, to make something incredibly new," says Reichelt. "We started on a blank sheet of paper, from scratch. That's not normal in the automotive industry. Normally you have an evolutionary development: you use something from an existing drivetrain, you make something a little bit better, you integrate a few innovations in the next car generation. But this time, in 2020, we thought some technologies were on a breakthrough point: technology, computing power, the user interface. We went all in and pushed every single technology to the boundaries, to lead BMW into the future."

And yet "the name Neue Klasse you know from the history of BMW", says Reichelt. Indeed we do. The 'New Class' was a line of cars that the company made from 1962 to 1972, beginning with the 1500 saloon and later including the 2000 saloon and the E9 and 02 coupés.

To revive the name "was a signal inside BMW at the time for us", says Reichelt. "It was a step, like in the 1960s, to revolutionise BMW for the future - but this time from a strong position."

That part seems important. This wasn't, as so many company reinventions or growth plans seem to be, coming after a downturn in fortunes. The BMW Group made 2.4 million vehicles in 2025, up 0.5% on the previous year. Profit was £6.43 billion. And the product profile was diverse: 290,000 Minis, 5664 Rolls-Royces, 203,000 motorcycles and 2,169,739 BMW cars, one in 10 of them an M performance model. It made its three-millionth electrified vehicle last year, and one in six BMWs were purely battery-powered.

"Over the past years, we've adopted the right strategic positioning," said Zipse in March, "and we're benefiting from that today: in a challenging environment, we don't need to change direction but can maintain our course and continue implementing our strategy systematically."

It's not as if BMW was behind the electric curve, but still "we felt it was necessary to do this [engineer the Neue Klasse architecture from scratch], because the technology had jumped in such a revolutionary direction."

Particularly the software. Indeed, BMW defines the iX3 and other Neue Klasse EVs as 'software-defined'. But what does that mean?

"It means that all the functions, or close to all the functions, have an electronic part inside," answers Reichelt, although "a software-defined vehicle doesn't mean that hardware isn't important in the future".

"The best fit is if you have a perfect mechanical DNA - for example, in the driving experience: the stiffest body, perfect kinematics of all the axles. But you use central computing as a superbrain - the fastest computer we can use today," he says. "We integrate all those functions into one ECU. And with this fastest computing power, we have the chance to steer the mechanical systems as fast as possible."

Which means that a Neue Klasse BMW still drives, well, like a BMW. Our favourite part of the iX3 is that it behaves like one. But that isn't only down to the hardware beneath it.

"That car doesn't drive like a 2.3-tonne car," says Reichelt. "It drives like it's lighter than two tonnes, because the software reacts so fast that the car reacts in the moment you initially move the steering wheel. And that's sensational. Software and hardware in symbiosis. And that's the way of BMW."

"I think every BMW engineer looks at what is the next big thing to make BMW," continues Reichelt. "We don't build a BMW to present the latest technology. We use that to make a BMW a better BMW.

"I'll give you an example. We didn't want to sit behind a display wall. That's not driver intuition in the way of BMW. So when some engineers came with this cool idea to use the windscreen to project all the information from pillar to pillar, and I saw their Panoramic iDrive in mock-up, I had goosebumps. And then, with a small team, we promised 'yes, we want to realise this for series production'. This is the BMW way."

We found Panoramic iDrive to be one of the big successes of the iX3, projecting as it does the instruments at the base of the windscreen, beautifully clearly and with a longer focal length than a screen pitched right in front of you - and configurable to your own preferences.

"We felt the potential in the early moments," says Reichelt. "Those were the moments when we said that we wanted to realise [this new] technology within the Neue Klasse.

"We had a big discussion inside BMW. 'Is it possible to realise this in perfect quality? Is it the right step?' And it was really intensive. But today everyone who drives it, including people inside BMW, is so happy that we took this step."

"Hands on the wheel, eyes on the road: the information you need is there without any driver distraction," says Reichelt. "It's another way; a symbiotic drive. You know, when you drive some cars today, when you want to interact with the ADAS, you have to fight against them. Here you are the boss, you are the driver, and the system is there to support you. You don't have to fight against this system."

The panoramic dials have other benefits too, says Reichelt: "We saw the advantage for our design colleagues. You have no instrumental panel in front of you, so there is a chance to create a spacious and cool-looking interior, a modern interior. Normally you sit behind the instrument panel and so there isn't the space to create something new."

This process is all tempered by the fact that in some quarters there has been a resistance to moving to electric cars.

"We looked at reasons our ICE customers don't jump into full electric cars: the range, charging speed, charging infrastructure and price," says Reichelt. "We said we want to solve these topics, that no customer should have the problem. So this was the beginning: to say 'what is the biggest wheelbase we can make with the same footprint [to maximise battery size]? Which cell technology, for 20% more energy density? What are the most efficient axles we can use?'"

Reichelt acknowledges that this project will define his career: "To start on a blank sheet of paper is revolutionary, and we won't repeat it in the next one or two decades. You don't do it. And now we will normally develop it further and further but more in an evolutionary way."

Despite the newness of it all, the Neue Klasse architecture has been well received as upholding the best BMW standards.

"Ultimately it feels like a BMW," says Reichelt, "but a completely modern one and a new interpretation of what being a BMW should be. And that's the biggest compliment we can get."