I write this as the owner of an E39 which I adore, so it hurts me to see pig faces, mole teeth and Lexus tail lights passing for BMWs these days.
BMW used to have a very strong design language, IMO not rivaled by any other manufacturer besides maybe Porsche (911). There were 3 things that were always a given in any BMW between, from say, the 70's up until the early 10's:
- Kidney grilles
- Hofmeister kink
- 4 round headlights
A few other design traits were also common:
- “L-shaped” tail lights
- Driver oriented center console
Of course things like the grilles date way back but the quintessential BMWs that we can all identify in seconds showed up around the 90's. Those are the models in which you couldn’t try to photoshop the kidneys or add a KIA or a Lexus badge on them and make it feel right. They were shaped like BMWs. An E30 was completely different from a Corolla of that era.
Sure, there were outliers that only kept 1 or 2 features and still looked great, but they were not easily identifiable as BMWs. Show them to the uninitiated and ask them what they are:
Nice TVR!
Nice Ford Probe!
My point is, for a BMW missing most of its characteristic traits, it has to look AMAZING to justify not having them, otherwise it will fall into the generic/bland bucket and you can easily make it pass for a KIA. This is the problem BMW has right now. The only thing they kept with the new pig nosed 7 Series and the crime-against-humanity M3/M4 are the kidneys, so they chose to blow them out of proportion to compensate for the lack of character. They have tried adding stupid things like the beemerang or keeping vestigial quad headlamps using DRL but every other car manufacturer is doing the same thing.
See, there is no Hofmeister kink here, those headlights would be just fine in a Focus hatchback, the tail lights, while attempting to retain the L shape only do so when lit up and the car is not a beautiful or elegant design for people to say: “oh man, I love the direction in which BMW design is moving”. Squint and a G80 is not too different from a K5:
The only way I can reason what’s happening in BMW is that any publicity is good publicity and they fully embrace the controversy. It will drive sales because people who are not into cars will eventually read an article about “ugly BMWs”. This is giving them a lot of free ads everywhere you look. If Bangle proved something is that controversial trends get copied, keeping your original version looking somewhat modern, and a lot of people seem not to care about how a car looks if it’s a luxury brand anyway.
I love when manufacturers try new things and dare to be different, but different doesn’t have to mean fucking hideous, overdone and forced. BMW has shown that it’s capable of daring designs which almost completely forgo conventions and end up being beautiful classics. Coincidentally, none of those unorthodox BMWs had angry faces.
Remember that it was BMW who gave us DRLs as a design element, which is now ubiquitous. This is a scary takeaway.
