anyone else disappionted in new BMW styling?

[Planter91C2]

i thought the japanese were supposed to steal design from the germans, not vica versa.

did you see any pics of the new 5 series?

it is an altima, camry, maxima clusterf*ck....

[BlueSkyJaunte]

Didn't see the new 5, but the Z4 is pretty disappointing.

Can't believe the opportunity lost in not releasing a 2002 2002.

But if anything BMW corporate is WORSE than Porsche corporate these days. Just ask any BMW motorcycle rider with EFI surging.

[CJFusco]

The Z4 is ugly, but at least interesting to look at...

the 7-series is FRIGGIN HIDEOUS...

and the upcoming 5 is even worse.

The 3-series, however, just keeps getting more beautiful. Simplistically, un-complicatedly beautiful.

[Nabeel]

Bangle's designs are growing on me. I initially dod not like the exterior design of the 7, but now I like it. The Z4 looks nice in certain colors, and the new 5 looks pretty good. The 3-series is supposed to look like a mini 5-series when it is redesigned in 2005. I LOVE the way it looks currently, I hope they don't screw it up.

The thing I dislike the most about the new designs is the interior styling. The flat-dashboard look is similr to old American cars from the 80's. Not appealing at all. The 'cockpit' style of the current 3/5 series and older Bimmers is so much better.

[CJFusco]

"The shortest time a BMW has ever gone before being reworked. "

Understandable. The auto press slammed its styling and the sales slumped when the 7 was restyled (it just so happened to coincide with the failing economy - so was it the economy or the styling that was to blame? Discuss).

RE: the Z4. It looks good from the rear quarter, looking down on it a bit. How do i know? My school's gym is on the third story, looking right down onto Huntington Ave. From the rear, it looks too S2000ish, from the side it looks like crap. From the front it looks even worse.

The Boxster also looks incredible from the same best-angle as the Z4. Given the choice, even if price were a factor, I would pick the Boxster hands down every time.

IMHO, the 944 looks best from above, looking down on the rear end. It is my favorite angle of the 944, it just looks so sleeeeek. The 911? Well, the turbo (930) looks best from straight on at a slight angle, so one side's wheel arches are really prominent.

[Z-man]

I think the current 'over-the-edge' edginess of the BMW's started with the X5: there were 2-3 too many creases in that car, and as new models were introduced, each one had more unwanted creases.

And the rears of the cars (7 series & Z4) look like an afterthought, or a transplant from another, smaller car, esp the 7. It was like, "Gee, Hanz, ve are out of time: letz jus use ze back end of zis car instead!"

Just my $0.42

-Z.

[CJFusco]

kinda makes you glad that the new Porsches are so smoooooooth, doesn't it, Zoltan?

[Adam]

I nearly barfed the first time I saw a new 7-series on the road. I am very fond of BMWs, but I fear that the last "Ultimate Driving Machines" were built as E28/E34s, E32/E38s and E30s. I am not a big fan of E36s, although I've driven a few and they're great cars.

BMWs used to be considered among the top, serious sporting sedans & coupes on the roads, and used to be purchased by people who bought them for their driving experience, build quality and sporting appeal. Nowadays, the cars are marketed at the latte-sippin', Haiku-writing, image-aspiring crowd who want to be seen in something hip. I think with E36, the company started selling "the badge" instead of the car.

That said, I also like 70s/80s Benzes more than the 90s versions, so there's probably something wrong with me...

[wdarner]

They don't make PORSCHES anymore, OK we knew that! Now they are no longer making BMW's! COOL!

[tchanson]

I've finally had my fill of the fitfully self-absorbed Mr. Bangle. First the 7, then the pointlessly angular Z4, and now my 5 is going to be replaced by this odd creation with the Dame Edna headlights?

Bad design does not grow more attractive over time. As the immortal B.B. King once sang, "beauty may be only skin deep, but ugly goes straight to the bone"...

With apologies for the length, the following is a great article from Salon.com from last December that I found to be on point.

Tim

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bilbao on Wheels

Cadillac's hard-edged "Art & Science" styling may or may not wear well, but
it looks good now. The same can't be said for BMW's competing attempt to be
radical, which the company's design chief Chris Bangle calls "flame
surfacing" - a styling jag so distressing to modernist import-buyers that it
recently made the front page of the New York Times. (Does editor Howell
Raines know his demographic or what?) When I first dissed Bangle's new Z4
roadster, several readers e-mailed to suggest that I would soon get used to
its forced collision of shifting planes and curves, recognizing it as the
pathbreaking masterpiece that Bangle -- who says it is "as big a jump in
terms of aesthetic value systems as there was between an Eve before the fall
... and an Eve after the fall." -- clearly thinks it is. They laughed at
Frank Gehry too, etc.

Sorry! The path isn't breaking for me. The Z4 seems less like Gehry's
masterpiece, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, than Mather House, a high-rise
Harvard dorm situated on a spectacular bend of the Charles River. Mather
House's architect reasoned that anyone could design a nice building that
looked out on the river. It took a true genius to design a building that
completely ignored the river! So the only river views in Mather are from the
small windows in the bathrooms, while the building faces instead toward the
shabby neighborhoods of central Cambridge.

Likewise, it's easy to design a sexy, beautiful two-seat, rear-drive
roadster. Stick a halfway decent body on a chassis as good as BMW's, and
you'll sell hundreds of thousands of units. It took a true genius like
Bangle to produce a two-seat design so visually jarring that BMW executives
actually have to worry about whether it will sell.

Anyway, they didn't laugh at Gehry. Bilbao was instantly recognized as a
triumph. Bangle's car looks Gehryesque, with its undulating planes and
surprising cuts - e.g., the so-called "Bungle line" extending down from the
windshield angle to the running board. But it's a car, not a building, and
functionality has greater claims on it -- for one thing, it has to be
aerodynamic in a way the Guggenheim museum needn't be. (Why didn't Bangle's
designers make the wheels an irregular quadrangle while they were at it?)
Some car shapes -- like the shapes of beautiful women, or men, or rivers --
may innately more appealing than other shapes that clever, well-educated
designers might invent.

Britain's Car magazine calls the Z4 "demanding to look at," a nice way of
putting it, and Automobile's estimable design critic, Robert Cumberford,
goes a step further, proclaiming it "largely successful." Cumberford, like
my e-mailers, predicts that soon we "all will have become so well used to
the new look(s) of the various [BMW models] that ugly is the last word we'll
want to use to describe BMW's in the twenty-first century." OK. I won't use
"ugly." I'll say the Z4 is a joyless, fish-mouthed jumble and (my
prediction) a commercial misstep. Like the Z3 before it, it manages to be
simultaneously too effete and too macho. Unlike the Z3, it's cleverly done -
various unnecessary lines flow into various other unnecessary lines in a
seamless, laboriously thought-out fashion. But the extra lines add nothing -
any attraction the car has comes from the basic shape, not the grim riffs
Bangle and his crew have added to its surface. (Another objection to the Z4
is that its weirdness is only superficial, applied like make-up; for a
profoundly weird car, take a look at the Fiat Multipla.)

Even if you like the riffing, the Z4 has a fatal flaw that Cumberford notes
-- the "relative weakness of the rear fender form." Basically, the bulge
over the rear wheels is too small relative to the curve over the front
wheels, giving the car a wimpy, declining profile. The Z3 had the same
problem, leading one to suspect it's a congenital Bangle defect. For all the
Z4's convolutions, if you squint it looks like a fat little tub (though,
admittedly, not as fat a little tub as the Lexus SC 430 ).

When I first got a longish look at the Z4 in the flesh - a black version,
heading away from me, at night -- I thought I'd have to rethink this
assessment. And BMW's print ads also manage somehow (Photoshop?) to make the
haunches look more powerful. But now I've looked at a dozen Z4s, in various
colors, in bright sunlight, and I can say I've never been less excited by
the sight of a new two-seat sports car. Erase 50 percent of Bangle's
brainstorms and you might have something - I felt like grabbing a tub of
Bondo and smoothing it out right there in the dealer's lot. It didn't help
that the Z4's paint job, which is supposed to reflect light from its complex
surfaces in interesting ways, was not as good as you'd want for
$34,000-45,000.

I suspect the main reason we won't get used to Bangle's "flame-surfacing" --
the reason the prediction of Cumberford and my e-mailers is wrong - is that
BMW itself will chicken out and pull back from faux-Gehryism. Take a look at
the spy photos of the new 6 series and 5 series. They have Bangle's high,
Dodge Stratus-like rear deck, but none of the draughtsman's-compass-run-amok
"flame surfaced" planes. They look less like "moving works of art" than a
3-year-old Pontiac Grand Prix. Not that there's anything wrong with it!
It's true that Bangle has said that his radicalism would be applied to lower
volume niche vehicles rather than high-volume sedans. And the New York
Times' Phil Patton recently suggested that "flame surfacing" will live on,
as BMW pursues not one but two radical styling directions, one for luxury
cars and one for the company's "sportier, more dynamic models." Patton notes
that the expensive new BMW 7 Series, also controversial, was actually based
on a design by BMW's Adrian van Hooydonk, while the "flame surfacing" of the
Z4 came out of a 1996 brainstorming session and two concept cars by Chris
Chapman of BMW's California studio. Under this two-style theory, which seems
to emanate from company headquarters, the Bilbao-on-Wheels look will
continue in the company's forthcoming small "1 Series" cars, as well as the
Z4.

I don't buy it. Is the idea really that wealthier BMW buyers will get
Hooydonk's smooth, powerful designs, while less well-heeled BMW customers
get sent in Chapman's uglier (sorry -- that just popped out) direction. What
kind of "branding" strategy would countenance this split? Usually it's the
style of the more expensive cars that's part of what sells the cheaper cars.
"Flame surfacing" made its first appearance, after all, in the silly
Gaudiesque details stuck onto the front of the current 3 Series sedan, BMW's
core, non-niche, bread-and-butter model. Now the expressionist outbursts are
to be confined to the niches and lower ranks. I suspect BMWs
different-styles-for-different-models spiel will turn out to be mainly a
useful theoretical cover while the company quietly snuffs out "flame
surfacing."

Spiel is the operative word here. Bangle is clearly some kind of talker --
"during an hourlong interview," reports the NYT's Danny Hakim, "he mentioned
Archimedes, Vermeer, Pythagoras, Euclid and the British art historian
Kenneth Clark." In this, Bangle's not unlike those modern artists who seem
to care less about what they draw or paint than the accompanying text, a
process effectively ridiculed in Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word.
If words were cars, Bangle would be in great shape. If cars were "art" - or
even architecture -- he'd be in great shape. But cars aren't art, and words
aren't cars, and cars aren't buildings, and he's not.

[wdarner]

Makes me long for the days when DOT headlights had to be round.

[CJFusco]

"Dame Edna headlights?"

You hit it right on the head.

This article is dead-on as well... Cadillac and BMW's edge designs (and Toyota and Ford, etc) cannot last for the very simple reason that they are ugly and faddish. The Boxster will last - it's already been called a classic, and it's, what? 7 years old? Why will it last? It envokes nostalgia (in its resemblence to the 550 Spyder), it is uncomplicated to look at(VERY unlike the Z4), and it is beautiful without being fussy. The Boxster is a great design, the Aston DB7 is a great design, the Ferrari 360 is a great design, but the new "edge" designs, IMHO, suck.

(The exception to this rule seems to be Lamborghini, who integrated "new edge" concepts into their Murcialago and Gallardo cars, somehow making them breathtaking. I can't explain it, they just did. Probably has something to do with a family resemblance in shape to the Diablo)

BMW is going to lose a lot of customers once this fad dies off; the cutomers that liked the smooth, square, unassuming lines of the last-gen cars will gravitate to Audi, and the customers that want something a little flashier will gravitate to the FAR more attractive Mercedes line.

[BlueSkyJaunte]

Originally posted by CJFusco

(The exception to this rule seems to be Lamborghini, who integrated "new edge" concepts into their Murcialago and Gallardo cars, somehow making them breathtaking. I can't explain it, they just did. Probably has something to do with a family resemblance in shape to the Diablo)

The simple answer is that Italians know how to make beautiful vehicles.

Personally I think the Caddy CTS is pretty good-looking. It evokes the F117, which is beautiful in an ugly sort of way. It looks, dare I say it, "purposeful". The new BMWs look like someone let RuPaul loose with a paintbrush.

[nostatic]

dame edna...LOL

They are trying waaay too hard. The Z4 has so many unnecessary angles mathemeticians everywhere are having nervous breakdowns. The bloated trunk in the 7 series has been a boon for mafiosos needing to transport bodies with cement galoshes.

I think the 7 series have been selling like hotcakes out here in LA though...I see them everywhere.

But what do I know...I love the M Coupe.

[Z-man]

Originally posted by CJFusco
kinda makes you glad that the new Porsches are so smoooooooth, doesn't it, Zoltan?

True that!

Originally posted by CJFusco
...BMW is going to lose a lot of customers once this fad dies off; the cutomers that liked the smooth, square, unassuming lines of the last-gen cars will gravitate to Audi, and the customers that want something a little flashier will gravitate to the FAR more attractive Mercedes line.

I like that! (Note: I work for Benz corporate US HQ! hehe)

Another thing I noticed is the slight re-style of the MY-2003 3-series front: the lower facia has no openings, and there's just two 'pin-point' fog/driving lights: I think it looks too bulky, too flat, and I wonder if that car will have any over-heating problems if track driven!

BMW definately need to hire a new design team!

-Z.

[BGCarrera32]

Agreed. If you want an attractive larger car, or even some mean looking mid-size stuff, Mercedes currently has BMW beat hands down IMO...

[CJFusco]

Zoltan,
One of my roommate's fathers works for MB corporate headquarters in NJ. Know a guy named Tom Gallagher?

[BlueSkyJaunte]

Brian K,

Your 535 is gorgeous.

I had a shot at a pristine M535 that I passed up for some stupid reason. I'll never make that mistake again!

[speeder]

I'm going to promote controversy and say that I like the new 7 series a lot, it took a little while, but now I think that they are cool. My daily driver is this old faithful horse, (1984 533i):

[Adam]

Brian, Denis... I knew I liked you guys!

It was with great regret that I parted with my '86 535i Euro a few years back. I have seen it on the road twice since I sold it and it really hurt me...

Mine was even the same Bronzit-Beige colour as Denis' car, although with more slender bumpers and 540i "cross-spoke" wheels. I'll dig up an old pic from my archive...