Engineers had spent days pumping heavy drilling fluid into the leaking well head on the ocean floor in a high-pressure bid to smother the gushing crude and ultimately seal the well with cement.

These are mostly "easy things" like fiddling with aerodynamics or pumping coolant "on demand", says Hans Rathgeber, BMW's head of vehicle architecture.

The active systems consist of several pumping systems of varying discharge pressure and flow rates, e. g., high head injection system, low head injection system.