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The BMW R75 is a World War II-era motorcycle and sidecar combination produced by the German company BMW. The BMW R75 stands out by its integral two-wheel drive design, with drive shafts to both its rear wheel and the third side-car wheel, from a locking differential, as well as a transfer case offering both road and off-road gear ratios, through which all forward and reverse gears worked. This made the R75 highly manoeuvrable and capable of negotiating most surfaces. A few other motorcycle manufactures, like FN and Norton, offered optional drive to sidecars. The BMW R75 and the competing Zündapp KS 750 were both widely used by the Wehrmacht in Russia and North Africa, though after a period of evaluation it became clear that the Zündapp was the superior machine. In August 1942 Zündapp and BMW, on the urging of the Army, agreed upon standardization of parts for both machines, with a view of eventually creating a Zündapp-BMW hybrid (designated the BW 43), in which a BMW 286/1 side-car would be grafted onto a Zündapp KS 750 motorcycle. They also agreed that the manufacture of the R75 would cease once production reached 20,200 units, and after that point BMW and Zündapp would only produce the Zündapp-BMW machine, manufacturing 20,000 each year.
The myth that the Soviet Union purchased five units of the R-71 (the R-75's predecessor) via Swedish intermediaries to study and subsequently build their own version, the M-72, is propaganda. The tooling was acquired under license from BMW as part of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939.
A Chinese variant of the M-72, the Yangtze River 750, went into production in 1957
