Controversial BMW designs to continue

No other car company has delivered as many visually challenging and confronting designs as BMW in recent years, and now the German car-maker’s boss has confirmed what many industry observers believed.

The controversy has become the plan.

“Of course it’s a plan, otherwise we wouldn’t do it,” said BMW chairman Oliver Zipse at a round table interview during the US launch of yet another controversial design, the new BMW 7 Series limousine and its electric i7 sister model, last week.

“If you want to change design, any step into the future that is perceived as new will be controversial automatically,” said Zipse.

“There’s no such thing as a future oriented design without controversy.

“That’s the trick: to have controversy and the outcome is ‘I want to have it’ and ‘I like it’, and of course it’s a plan.”

Design forums around the world have heaped criticism on BMW for the beaver-toothed M3 and M4 sports machines, the clunky BMW iX electric SUV, the 7 Series limo, the X7 large SUV and the very different XM performance hybrid, but Zipse said they all did their job and either have or would grow sales.

It is, Zipse implied, a strategy developed from the analysis BMW did after the much-pilloried, Chris Bangle-designed E65 7 Series that shocked the luxury car world in 2001.

It replaced the elegant E38 7 Series, but outsold it despite – or because of – the controversy, selling 343,073 to the E38’s 310,000.

But that controversy put BMW’s name in the press and into the public’s mind for years, for free, and Zipse believes that equates to sales.

“I want controversy,” Zipse admitted.

“If we don’t have controversy [in the early design process], I already know it’s too easy.

“In the early design if you do not have controversy, that’s the mistake you make.

“Out of the controversy you get engagement. You get people thinking about it and thinking about alternatives.”

Where arch-rival Mercedes-Benz has gone down a more organic, smooth-surfaced design approach and Audi continues with its large, single-frame grilles, BMW’s latest offerings seem to court controversy from every angle, whether it’s the absence of the traditional BMW Hofmeister Kink for the M4 or the large nostrils on the XM.

Leading designers from other car companies have privately questioned what was happening at BMW design, while respected designers like former BMW brand design head Karim Habib left the company for Asian car-makers.

“We drove this morning through Palm Springs,” Zipse said, “And if you looked at all the other cars, they all look alike. They’re aerodynamically streamlined, there are not ugly cars any more. They’re not great, but they’re not ugly cars. They look very much alike.

“If you want to have modern, future-oriented design, you will automatically get controversy and of course we want that.

“That doesn’t mean people won’t buy it and of course we want to start a discussion about ‘what are they doing here?’.

“We see a lot of that with the XM. There are a lot of discussions here, but almost everyone loves it.”

Well, not “almost everyone” if social media responses are to be considered valid, because the XM V8 plug-in hybrid has been even more pilloried and mocked than the iX was and the new 7 Series has already had more than its share of criticism.

“Of course, some people think you’re nuts. BMW always built this sporty limousine in the six cycles before,” Zipse defended.

“Then you ask the customer and they say it’s a great car, but only for the driver.

“After six generations, is that what you still want to hear? You want to be in that luxury segment and you always make the same mistake again?

“There was controversy inside BMW and after we made that decision the controversy was over.”

But if BMW defends its design direction as being breakout design that the rest of the world needs to catch up with and only customers need to understand, how could it ever accept that if it got something wrong?

Sales volume, apparently, is the main arbiter of design success or failure, which car-makers only actually find out when they’re deep into the design of their replacement models anyway.

Zipse confirmed BMW’s designs will always be more conservative for high-volume models like the 3 and 5 Series, the X1, X3 and the X5, while more niche machines will push the design envelope further.

“When a car hits the road, it’s the end of a very long process. It’s the start for you guys but it’s the end for us,” he said.

“We start with design sketches many, many years earlier, and the decision for which design to go with is many years before.

“Especially, the i7 is very unusual for BMW. You could say it’s much too big: it’s 5cm wider, 6cm higher and only as a long version, with a big kidney grille.

“It will never be a mass-market car. It will only be a super minority of people who will sit in that car. The majority of people will never sit in that car.

“It only must be appealing to the customers who are in that segment, not anybody else.”

BMW has also attracted criticism for not designing its existing and upcoming EVs to take advantage of the design possibilities freed up by smaller electric motors.

Other companies have responded to the EV revolution by doing away with grilles altogether, bringing frunks into play where engine bays once sat and delivering low-line noses. But not BMW.

“We don’t believe and we never believed that the drivetrain should dictate what a car should look like because it doesn’t depend on the drivetrain,” Zipse defended.

“It [the design] depends on the customer taste, customer behaviour, functions they would like to have and that’s the foremost thing.

“A drivetrain is necessary and important, but not THE most important thing when you create a car. It’s customer needs, especially in that [luxury] segment,” he said.

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