BMW's Aussie connection

It’s not the most radical facelift you’ll see in the history of the car industry, but the redesign of the 1 Series has something in it that most BMWs don’t.

A piece of Australia.

More specifically, its new bits were designed by Australia’s very own Calvin Luk.

Growing up in Baulkham Hills, the 29-year-old was rarely seen without a pencil in his hand, sketching cars all over his school books and whatever other spare pieces of paper he could find lying around. Like a lot of kids all over Australia.

The only difference is that Luk took it to the next level. He started making imaginary modifications to the cars he sketched and even a stint in Adelaide did nothing to dull the spark.

When his family moved back to Sydney, they bought a BMW. It was a car that changed his life.  

“My family had just bought an E36 3 Series, so I sketched that every day for years,” Luk told motoring.com.au after presenting his new car to the media in Lisbon this week.

“I would focus on different details, then the overall look, then things I would do to change it. I know that car intimately.”

But it’s one thing sketching a car because that’s what makes you tick as a young guy. It’s a whole other thing doing something constructive with your talent.

“I wrote a letter to BMW and to Chris Bangle (then the controversial head of design) when I was just a kid,” Luk explained.

“I sent them a letter that included some of my sketches of their current cars and what I thought could be their future cars and how they could modify what they had.”

Pretty ballsy from a guy in school shorts in the other hemisphere, with no car industry background to speak of.

But, to its credit, BMW liked what it saw. Or, at least, it respected the effort and took the time to give Luk a considered response.

“I didn’t get a letter back from Bangle, but I got a letter back from a senior designer there,” he said, almost bursting with pride, with his bright blue BMW jacket shielding him from the wind whipping up off the River Tagus.

“The designer explained to me how to become an automotive designer and, specifically, a BMW designer. He laid out the path for me to take, if I wanted to.”

And he wanted to. He really, really wanted to and you get the sense that, if BMW wants to keep him, he’d be happy to never leave.

“It’s all I wanted to do. Ever,” he insisted.

He studied industrial design at Sydney’s University of Technology, but only for a year. And then he took the big step on the BMW-defined path to becoming a designer. Correction, to becoming a BMW designer.

As an 18-year-old in 2003, with no support network and no guarantees, he moved to Pasadena, California, to study at the Art Centre College of Design.

Not that it was all sitting around sketching and trying to understand what engineers could and couldn’t turn into production realities. He snared a General Motors scholarship, he did a four-month stint as an intern at Chrysler’s design studio in Auburn Hills in 2007, Michigan, and then he started a seven-month internship at BMW in Munich in 2006.

In 2008, after four years, he graduated, with honors, with a Bachelor of Science, Transportation Design. Which is just the kind of thing BMW likes on a young man’s CV, apparently.

Immediately after graduating, he was snaffled up by BMW’s Advanced Design Studio, where the concept cars come from and where the farthest-out of the far-out sketches originate.

Three years later in 2011, he was put in charge of facelifting the exterior of the 1 Series. And he’d officially made it all the way to being a production-car designer at BMW.

“There was never a question of where I wanted to go to work and I’m lucky to be here,” he admitted.

“I can’t remember ever wanting to work anywhere else or do anything else.”

A facelift is a good place to start for a young designer. Very little sheet metal can be changed (none in the case of the 1 Series), so there’s less pressure to deliver something from scratch.

Given the limitations, it also means you’re not going to cop the inevitable forum flack for not delivering something as revolutionary as they'd hoped for.

“Our job as designers is to push, to be creative and to deliver all of the options regardless of how far or how incremental BMW wants to take a model,” he said.

“But we have to trust Adrian (von Hooydonk, the BMW Group’s director of design) and his advice to know what is best for the company and its image and sales.”

In the case of the 1 Series, that advice seemed to be to push more than normal for a BMW mid-cycle facelift, which are typically very hard to spot (take the upcoming 650i, for example).

The 1 Series benefits from moving to LED headlights, which let Luk give it a slimmer light and, though he had to stick with the four rings, they’re flattened at the top and the bottom.

The kidney grille is wider and has more of a three-dimensional feel to it, while the air intakes are bigger, too.

The back-end is highlighted by a move to a two-piece tail-light, rather than the down-and-out pointing version in the predecessor. Again, with its LEDs in place, it is more sculpted than before and even shows up BMW’s L-shaped light traditions at night.

“Precision and poetry, that’s what BMWs are about,” Luk insisted. “We always try to show the character of the car in the design language.

“They are precisely engineered and we communicate this with very precise designs.

“Then there’s the poetry; the emotion of when you have a long day and you have that one chance at that one corner with no traffic and the car just powers through, making you feel everything and leavings that smile on your face. That’s the poetry. That’s what we have to convey.”

Naturally enough, Luk owns a BMW.

“I have an E85 Z4. I love it. It was a very bold move for us when they did it. I think this really expresses a lot of modernity with a completely new execution.”

And it also has a big, in-line six-cylinder engine sitting in its nose, which helps when you’re surrounded by autobahns and no speed limits.

Of course, it’s not that easy for someone used to Sydney (and California) winters to live an hour from the Alps, but the weather isn’t the only change he’s had to get used to.

There’s the work culture, for starters. Where Australians and Americans will work as long and hard as is needed, provided there is time and opportunity to blow off steam here and there, the German hours are more rigid.

“In Bavaria, everybody is gone by 5:30 or six, so they’re very, very focused while they’re at work,” he said.

“Maybe that’s where the reputation for seriousness comes from, because they’re trying to get everything done in more rigid working schedules, then they really relax outside the office.

“People like Adrian and Karim (Habib, head of BMW brand design) are really like gods in terms of where they fit into international design but they’re very approachable and warm and listen to everybody. They’re not quite what I expected from people in their positions.”

Another issue Luk’s had to get sorted is, of course, the language – a fact that either wasn’t included in the BMW’s original reply letter to Luk or was overlooked at the time.

“Oh, the language is difficult, but I am working on it. Yes, I’ve seen the comparative language videos on YouTube…

“But Munich is a great city and it’s fantastic that there is a car company right in the middle of a city like that. They’re usually out in suburbs or in towns and cities that aren’t exactly attractive places.

“Munich is a beautiful town and there’s so much to do in and around it. Did I tell you about the BMW Welt and the BMW Museum?”

No you didn’t, Calvin, but somehow we knew you'd get around to it…