Chris Bangle Talks Change at BMW, Life in Italy and What the Future Holds.
“It’s easier for people to make decisions about what they don’t like,” says Chris Bangle. “So you really have to spend some time explaining to them why they don’t like it.”
Bangle is sitting in the hills above Northern Italy, a compound of sorts he converted from an old farmhouse in, Clavesana, a small village on the outskirts of Turin. Far from the towering offices of Munich, Bangle likes this place, the Borgata; he says, "because it’s so weird,” “people who come here, are by the sheer nature of the place, not at home, so they know everything is a little bit different, it helps.”
Chris Bangle has his fingerprints on some of the most recognizable cars ever to come out of Munich. And 14 years since announcing his departure from both the car industry and BMW, it’s arguable that his influence is more visible now than it ever was.
Under his reign as the company's Design Director, Bangle became one of the most talked-about designers in automotive history. The radical transformation of BMW's styling language, from staid yet successful to an industry-changing phenomenon, catapulted him to levels of media attention few designers have ever experienced.
Once famously proclaiming, "We aren't copying anyone else's design language, not even our own!"
Bangle's mentaility stood in stark contrast to the approach BMW had subscribed to in the past. Recounting a story about his boss at the time, Dr. Reitzle, further highlights this shift in perspective. “A long-serving, very young, very personable, very telegenic manager,” Bangle says of Reitzle, “he was absolutely convinced on a particular design style. Underlining it with phrases to the press, like, ‘We know our style; we don’t have to define a new one. We know what we are.’”
“Which all sounds good,” says Bangle, “but where’s this gonna go?”
And it’s this simple question that seems to have landed him the job at BMW. Bangle’s hiring as the company’s first American Design Director was unexpected. But then again, so was the situation at BMW.
By 1992, the company had gone two years without a Design Director — a gap which Bangle characterizes as “really painful.” Noting that despite Dr. Reitzle’s beliefs, BMW had no reason to change, not all at the company shared this view.
Chris Bangle
"We aren't copying anyone else's design language, not even our own!"
“At that time, there was an expectation in the wings of the board of directors that this situation will not last,” Bangle says. It was an expectation shared by many at BMW, a sense that despite the company’s successes, BMW needed to change. But surprisingly, not a sense that Bangle necessarily arrived with. “I was not here to change this company,” he says, “I was there to learn, but the more I learned, the more I realized everyone wanted to change; they didn’t want to be on that track. They wanted to be somewhere else, but they didn’t have a way to express it.”
Bangle paints a picture of a somewhat divided BMW “You had people who, on the one hand, say we’re convinced of what we are no need to change anything, just adapt it.” He says, “But then you have this other view, which is, I want to see where we’re going,” “let’s decide on how far downstream we can we can pick, and then we run to it!”
“And it’s just a different vision for what the company is,” he adds. “But I was a layer underneath that. And so politically, not at all on those kinds of exchanges, but still, the expectations always come to us [the designers] to lead that vision.”
It’s a vision that did not realize itself immediately. Bangle, then 36, entered the company two years after the sudden departure of his predecessor Claus Luthe. This awkward gap in management meant that Bangle was inheriting a design program with its roots firmly in the late 80s — it wouldn’t be until the 2001 7 Series ended its six-year model run that the last car designed under Luthe’s management would leave showroom floors.
Bangle’s first ground-up project began development in 1993; the fourth-generation BMW 3 Series — dubbed ‘E46’ internally, it came at a pivotal moment in BMW’s history — a new CEO in the form of Prof Joachim Milberg meant Bangle had a management team which, according to him, felt “a sense of a need to move forward.” And BMW’s acquisition of the Rover Group meant the company was venturing into new markets with models such as the X5.
“Reasonable,” Bangle calls the X5 — it was perhaps the last vehicle produced by BMW still influenced by Luthe’s design language. He notes, “It’s a lot of credit to Chris Chapman and the design team that they managed to make it into the first real, upscale SUV.” And as a new model line for the company, the X5 needed to remain instantly recognizable as a BMW — resembling “a kind of blown up giant. Three, Five series wagon.” Says Bangle in a complementary manner.
The X5 was a sign of things to come. Bangle recalls that during this time, one of the biggest challenges the design team faced was that with each consecutive generation, engine heights relative to the rest of the car had to increase by a few inches. Anyone familiar with car design realizes the domino effect this instigates, raising all parts of the vehicle along with the engine, meant that after just a few generations, the design language that BMW had relied on for so many decades was quite literally at a breaking point.
“The engineers, though,” says Bangle, “always thought the last design we did was perfect, so why shouldn’t it be the same all over again?” “So what we [designers] usually did was we took the old design from the existing car, and we put it on the new package and showed what it would look like in those proportions. And that usually made everybody ill because it looks like crap.” “So they decided, okay, either we have to go back into the proportions in the package, or we accept the fact that you need a new design language to deal with this, which is basically when we did the radical stuff, how we got away with it.”
When Bangle came to the board with this same realization, he was essentially selling them on a new direction for the company; it was clear that this path would mean buying into an expensive design program. It wasn’t just the price of a new 7 Series, but the price of the new 5, the new 3, etc... as Bangle put it, “to show what would happen if we really changed things.” He says that if you can convince people that what you’re doing is really in their interests, you have a much better chance than by “going in with this mega ego and just, you know, intimidating the living shit out of everybody.”
Bangle is quick to compliment BMW in this regard, “it’s a top-down company,” he says, “when they make a decision, they don’t backtrack.” But at the same time, it’s a company with a long-term game plan; they expect problems to be identified early and solutions proposed. He recalls that the CEO, Joachim Milberg, would come to him and say, “Don’t show me the next car, show me the next, next, and then I’ll understand why the next is what it is.” Bangle says, “When you show [the board] this is going to be a design format for our future, they want to know what comes after.” It was not enough to design the next generation of cars. Bangle and his team had to show what the multi-generational consequences of their current work meant BMW would have to commit to in the future.
Chris Bangle
“Either we have to go back into the proportions in the package, or we accept the fact that you need a new design language to deal with this, which is basically when we did the radical stuff, how we got away with it.”
It is largely in this regard that Bangle’s legacy continues to be felt today. The multi-generational consequences that he and Milberg discussed in the late-90s is the modern-day automotive world we currently live in. Walking into any design studio is like looking through a lens into the future. It’s by the sheer length of automotive development cycles that it may take three-quarters of a decade for a car to go from pencil to production, but in Bangle’s case — that lens had to be more than doubled. Developing a design strategy that looked generations into the future forced the 1996 design team to lay groundwork for cars that would be hitting showroom floors into the 2010s.
“[it] was all about multiple generation consequences of this [work],” says Bangle. He showed the board how his newly proposed design language turned a problem — increasing engine heights — into an opportunity for a new design format that could push the company’s products further. The board approved it, and by September 2001, The E65 7 Series, as it was dubbed internally, succeeded the well-regarded but conservatively-styled E38 model.
When the E65 went on sale in 2002, critics were impressed by the new 7’s engineering prowess but confused by the sudden departure in styling and the addition of iDrive, which even Bangle himself admits, BMW probably shipped “far too early” for its level of technical maturity.
The shock of the E65 thrust Bangle into the public eye. Even at the time, many people recognized the revolutionary nature of the work BMW was doing, but a violent few did not. The term ‘Bangle Butt’ was quickly coined in reference to the 7 Series’ raised trunk line, but largely by people who had never seen the car in person.
Bangle himself is the first to admit that his cars suffer in photos. During a Car and Driver interview, he said that “If, for instance, you’d never seen, then suddenly saw only a side view of the car, well, it suffers,” in reference to the E65 7 Series, “one of the most unusually proportioned vehicles ever.” He says. “For complex cars, you need to take that ‘memory walk’ 360 degrees around the car, and then you see how the different themes are connected.”
Bangle says that product lines follow a cycle of revolutionary generation followed by an evolutionary generation and another revolutionary generation. He believes it was a polarizing effect needed for BMW at that time. And it seems customers agreed; the 2002 7 Series sold 4,000 more units in its first year than any Seven before or since, with 22,000 vehicles delivered in the U.S. alone. The car was an unquestioned business success and, over the years, has become well-regarded as far ahead of its time.
“Design is the engine of the train,” says Bangle, “when everybody else is partying in the back of the train, saying, oh, look at the sales we’re having right now! We’re the first ones into the tunnel going; we’re going to be screwed. Because the packages are doing this to our cars, everything you love about them, you’re not going to have in the next generation. And then, while the rest of the train is in the tunnel, screaming and moaning, we’re the first ones in the light coming out of it saying, hey, no, and guys, don’t worry, it’ll work. We got it, you know?”
Prof Joachim Milberg — CEO, BMW
“Don’t show me the next car, show me the next, next.”
And he did have it; by 2004, Bangle was BMW’s Group Design Director when the all-new Rolls Royce Phantom VII was released. BMW controlled both Mini and Rolls, with the three marques being distinctively different; you’d expect Bangle to keep the trio intensely separate, but no. “The more you keep them separate,” he says, “the more they come up with the same solutions, and they think it’s there’s. You have to put them into the same room, physical space, where they can see it being developed, they can see Rolls Royce becoming its own self, they can see Mini becoming itself, they can see the motorcycles and the cars, adding their own bits of famous DNA to each other, and at the same time maintaining their own individuality.”
“I hate this word about DNA and cars,” Bangle adds scoldingly. “Because the difference between men and women is like, it’s like 12% DNA. And the difference between a man and a monkey is like 8%. So like, I always ask people what kind of what is the DNA you’re talking about?” “Is it the 8% that keeps us away from being a monkey?!?”
At Chris Bangle Associates — the Italian based design consultancy that Bangle founded after leaving the auto industry in 2009 there are no monkeys, and the offices are tiny compared to BMW’s Munich skyscraper but far more inviting — called a Borgata (the Italian word for a type of house collective that is too small to be a village but more than what would belong to a single farm). The area consists of just four buildings placed atop the Italian hills in an almost deliberate oasis away from the harshness of the modern auto industry.
Upon leaving BMW, the company asked Bangle not to re-enter car design for several years. He happily obliged, saying today that the projects at CBA are incredibly varied; working alongside his family and a small team of mostly Italian designers, anything goes, from a charming animated short, ‘Sheara,’ to V.S.O.P. Cognac bottles and Bangle’s only automotive project since BMW, a small electric city car called ‘REDS.’
Revolutionary Electric Dream Space, REDS, Bangle proclaims proudly, is “a car that is at its best when it’s parked.” It came about, he says, when ‘China Hi-Tech Group Corporation’ asked him to design a small car for their new company. Bangle initially balked at the idea and asked them why they wouldn’t “go up the street” to Pininfarina? “They’d love to do that for you,” he said in an Autoweek interview.
When the company insisted on Bangle, he cautioned them, “‘If you are going to go about it in a normal way, you are going to end up with the exact same kind of a piece that everyone else does, and I really don’t want to do that.”
Bangle wanted a car that would “invert the relationship between the vehicle’s looks and what it does with our general understanding of the automobile.” Spending two years working on a concept that, according to him, had no real aesthetic concerns whatsoever. Relaying a story in Automobile where one of his designers said, “‘I can’t do this,’ and he got sick, literally sick. He came down with a bad flu, and he spent three days in his hotel room, eating soup - and drawing what I had asked him to draw. And when he came out, he had created something no one had ever seen, and he said to me, ‘I am liberated.’” (Quote from Autoweek)
Bangle is keen to explain that “we previously understood cars that go between A and B, and therefore they have to look like they go between A and B, they have to look aerodynamic, they have to look all these things, right? REDS was designed for a mega city, China, where cars are not moving like 90% of the time.”
It’s in that 90% when the car “is at A and at B,” says Bangle, where REDS will have “superior performance.” It’s the sort of thing that he believes will differentiate electric cars in the future. “Once we embrace the 90% of the time the car is not moving, [you] realize that could be the real added value,” Bangle says, “you can use it, you can sit in it, you can do all kinds of things in it.” For the 10% of time, the car is in motion, all four seats face forward, but it’s in the 90% where you can flip around the driver’s seat to “create a face-to-face environment.”
In large cities, he says, where privacy can often feel like a distant impossibility, REDS focuses on giving people a private environment to use as they see fit. Young entrepreneurs, says Bangle, could utilize REDS’ flexible interior space as a private office or as a place to relax.
Bangle’s vision differs from that of companies who prefer autonomy as a potential ‘solution’ to this problem, assuming that customers will want to let their vehicles loose on a driverless Uber-like service. Bangle says he does not necessarily “see a future of nondriving non-driver drivable vehicles as being a bad thing; it’s almost inevitable.” But he does not believe that “people’s desire to want to drive and get the most out of a car personally as being a bad thing, either.”
Being quick to remark, “People like to think that the secret of the Automobile was that it provided people with a quote-unquote, freedom. But actually, I don’t believe that’s true.” “What the automobile provided was the ability for you to set your own pace.” He says people had horses and bicycles, which gave them freedom, but with “a car, you can actually get there ahead of everybody if you wanted to.”
“And if you look at the whole history of automotive legislation,” Bangle says, chuckling, it’s basically been to try and curb that one freedom.” He’s interrupted briefly by his wife, handing him an espresso, “Oh thanks darling, coffee’s arrived, thank you,” he says jovially — continuing, “electric cars seem to have this mono-dimensional idea performance in their head of acceleration, it’s Okay” He says demurely. “I mean, good, you’re accelerating. Everybody in the car threw up, you know; what the fuck?” He says accusingly. “I don’t really get into that that much.” Adding though, “I think in general, the driving experience per se, will change in its in its importance for the car,” Saying that so long as you want to drive cars, the experience of interacting with them will continue to be important, “but if your vision for the car is not something you drive, and half the time, you’re not the one controlling it you might as well experience something else.”
Special thanks to Chris Bangle for participating in this interview, for more information on his latest projects visit: chrisbangleassociates.com
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