What is BMW doing?

Someone should cut out an original set of kidneys and tape them to the front like roadkill.

Leak of 2022 7 just revealed.

R
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R

@rkuchinsky
lol

I really don’t get car designers sometimes. Most of those I know are masterful at what they do. They out-sketch all the other designers and their feeling for shapes and proportions is usually incredible. And those hired by companies like BMW are supposed to be the best of the best. Yet they again and again manage to produce absolute turds like this. And I don’t think I know a single person that thinks this is awesome.
The most likely thing is I simply overestimate how much say the designers in a huge corporation like that actually have, with very few product releases per year and a huge marketing, sales, engineering backend, not to forget all the car “enthusiasts” who all think they know it better without actual design experience that probably work in a company like this. I think us “regular” industrial designers can be happy about how much say we actually have in the whole product developement process and how much room we (usually) get to actually propose a somewhat tasteful vision of the future.

Gosh that’s nasty. The ‘2022 version’ is only slightly nastier. How could any manufacturing-minded designer propose a hood line like that? Am I seeing a little wiggle in the hood cut line, just above the headlights…? WHY.

Ya, I dunno. I’ve kinda been saying the opposite for years. Car designers (don’t really know any personally) are great at sketching, yes. But are they good designers? Is it really a case where everything wrong is done by non-designers? Or, are designers not making sketches that translate into manufacturable/saleable products? Are designers not advocates enough for their work? Surely designers are responsible for this atrocity. How are designers not to be blamed when they sketch concepts with 26" wheels and 3" of DLO and then the real car looks stupid on normal sized rims with actual space for humans?

R

I think it is an industry with a lot of siloization… I’m not sure that is a word, but let’s pretend it is.

You have product planning groups deciding what ever part of the car will cost before any research has been done into the product and user, so no matter what you design, at the end of the day, the steering wheel assembly can only cost x.

Then you have an engineering run culture where many decisions are made by what is manufacturable and what did competitors due last year vs what do users actually want and where do we think our competitors are going.

Lastly there is a design culture that seems to want to ignore these things and just do hot sketches. Those hot sketches get selected and then manhandled to fit into the budgets already approved by the first group and the architecture already designed by the second. I think the culture develops that way because the internal teams are so competitive that they are always trying to out sketch or CAD model each other for internal presentations to win internal favor vs focusing on doing the right thing for the end product.

It doesn’t work that way in all companies. I have a few friends at smaller car companies who say because of the smaller scale of the company it is more integrated and decisions are made faster with less people… but in those cases the brands tend to be saddled with old platforms, engines, and tech because they can’t afford the R&D costs.

Certainly with these BMWs there is some serious creative direction pushing them. I’ve read they are very focused on the Asian markets and on harvesting the equity of the brand by getting cheaper products in every possible category with better margins. Those are not design decisions but they are the strategies that design is responding to. If I were them I would enter the Asian markets with a product line that looks more Germanic, not less. They will have to charge a premium to be there so they better have some differentiation. My other thought is what happens once all that brand value is harvested? How will they capture another generation? It seems like ti will be a tough hole to climb out of.

Good thing for us enthusiasts there are always vintage cars :slight_smile:

So everyone is to blame?

I just find it kind of laughable that what used to be the pinnacle of design (cars) is for the most part, terrible. What % of new cars would you say are actually good design (in all senses of the term)? 10%?

Nothing newer than 2001 if I can help it (though been looking at some 3rd Gen Range Rovers recently and could maybe wrap my head around that - especially the models that were BMW underneath before they turned Jag).

R

Yup. Basically everyone has a hand in it.

On a side note… someone from design trends 101 posted the Audi response… which inadiately made me think of the actual production Toyota Avalon. Please note, the Audi is photoshopped but the Avalon is not. That image is right from the Toyota website.


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What are they thinking? It’s obnoxiously massive :face_vomiting:

Reminds me of this

I still won’t forget my first and only experience inside the auto industry was at a cross-functional student design/engineering project kickoff with GM in ~2004.

The designers came in, gave an impassioned brief about how we were to design an ultra functional and beautiful sports car, like an Ariel Atom. Something where both the design and engineers worked together for a fantastic result.

Literally as soon as they finished and left the room the head of the team immediately stood up and said “No, we are not doing that. Your job is to design a compact car to compete with the [recently released] Mini Cooper”

Our designers tried for about 2 weeks to live up to that original brief, at which point we were removed from the project for insubordination.

GM got bailed out < 4 years later and I vowed to never try to be a car designer ever again.

WHOA!!!

Nothing subtle about that Avalon, but its grille seems more ‘authentic’ to their brand in a way, than the BMW direction. At least its not sacrilegious.
(I’m a Toyota apologist, since I work in a manufacturing environment.)
However that grille approach would be 180 degrees out from the Porsche design mandate of “being fun to wash by hand”. Ugh all those little hexagons.
The upcoming Camry TRD actually has a grille that somewhat works. Its still obnoxious but less confrontational.

That series of C77 front-page articles on “what its like to be a car designer” were really fascinating and illuminating especially on the silo’d approach and political/personality-driven competitive environment in big car studios.

Bigger grilles and more ‘graphics’ and lights and gills will play better in Asia and other areas where subtlety concerning material possessions goes unrewarded. Make the logo bigger, gold-plated, and hang it on four surfaces.

I hans’t heard that before. What a lovely conceptual framework.

Its from some interview I found with Grant Larson at Porsche. Much, much better execution to a clear directive than whatever BMW is doing. Granted they are not 1:1 competitors.

"“The 911, because it has become such an established car, has become the foundation for our identity. In German, the expression is Marke Identität, which translates to ‘marque identity’, and this is what makes you instantly recognize that the car is a Porsche, and not only that, which Porsche it is. We take certain features and apply them to our other cars to give them this unmistakable Porsche identity. Porsches have a very wide body with a tapered cabin, and these characteristics apply to all our vehicles.” A video Larson showed next graphically demonstrated another characteristic – the roof “fly line” – the remarkably similar long arcs from the top of the windscreen to the rear of the vehicle, whether it is 911 or Macan or Panamera. “Just one glance at the vehicle,” the narrator intoned, “and you can feel the unique Porsche design DNA.” Or as Larson described it, Porsche’s “design authenticity.

“Whenever I start the design of a new car, do I have to follow all that stuff,” Larson asked rhetorically.”No. But it serves as an orientation. And if you deviate, you must be very careful.” As he summed up, he brought a laugh: “You notice our cars are always soft, round shapes. Sensual is a perfect word for that. But it’s always our goal to develop, to design cars that are fun to wash by hand.”

I’m,icing reading through comments on Facebook and Instagram posts about the new 7. Pretty much all hate the grille. And BMW can’t reply fast enough to the odd positive comments to keep up the visual of support. Def keeping my e38 forever now.

R

I actually saw one in my neighborhood… but they guys was proudly standing next to it so I didn’t take a photo…

Those three photos on their FB page seem almost…exploitative. Its like pr0n in a way, just focusing on the ‘money bits’. Not a good clean inspiring look.

It is fun to read seasoned car designer Peter Steven’s opinions on all this grille growth: Peter Stevens - What is happening to car design in... | Facebook

More surfacing nightmare fuel to add to the mix.

The X5 variant seems to be at least somewhat well resolved in this area, but I have no idea what amateur blobject this thing came from.

My neighbor borrowed an X6M for a couple weeks last summer. It makes almost no sense as a vehicle, but man does it have a beautiful growl when you start it up…