BMW: Driven by Design

"When you spend an enormous amount of money developing a new model, you don't just throw all that money out the window seven years later and do something completely different," he says. "Instead, you refine the car, you improve it, and you get your money out of it. Ultimately, you develop two generations of cars that are very close in their evolutionary nature. But then, 14 years later, the conditions have changed so radically -- competitive pressures, technological advances, safety and environmental regulations, consumer preferences -- that it's time to make the big jump."

For BMW, it's time to make that jump. The company is resisting the lemming-like move of so many carmakers to target every sector of the industry and pump out high volumes of product. BMW has mapped out a different route, attacking one end of the industry: the high end. The company's new chairman and CEO, Helmut Panke, explains BMW's decision to stick with what it knows best: "I cannot recall having ever seen a clear and convincing correlation between size and success. At the moment, it seems as though the greater the size, the greater the number of problems. Our own goal is clear: to be the leader in every premium segment of the international automotive industry."

BMW's executives are gambling that a profound shift among consumer preferences will mean that in the next decade, the worldwide market for luxury cars could grow by as much as 50%. (BMW expects that the demand for mass-market cars will grow by just 25%.) "The car market seems to be bifurcating between more expensive, prestige products and very inexpensive, high-volume products," says Tom Purves, chairman and CEO of BMW North America. "The middle ground is the killing fields -- the worst business to be in. You have to achieve enormous numbers to make any money at all."

With a global recession under way and many carmakers awash in red ink, BMW has decided that now is the time to unleash an extraordinary product offensive on the luxury and near-luxury end. In the early 1980s, it produced four lines of cars: the 3, 5, 6, and 7 Series. Within the next six years, it will break out 20 new models and 3 new engine series, including the 1 Series, which will target young buyers; a new 6 Series, which will be aimed squarely at high-end Mercedes models; an X3, which will take on premium SUVs; variants of the Mini; and a new generation of super-luxury Rolls-Royces.

The redesigned 7 Series is leading the charge, and it has met with plenty of return fire. Bangle's design team reshaped the 7's back end by raising the trunk lid and widening the opening. It also introduced a digitized system, dubbed iDrive, which enables drivers to control 270 features -- from the navigation system to the built-in phone to the surround-sound stereo -- by using a mouse-like device to scroll through menus on a screen situated atop the dashboard. The radical look and the attempt to reimagine the human-computer interface in a car have shocked some critics and buyers. More than 2,000 people have signed a "Stop Chris Bangle" petition on petitiononline.com, calling on BMW to fire its design chief. (Presumably, the entry "I hate myself for that design!" signed by one "Chris Bangle" is a fake.)

BMW counters that sales are running 17% ahead of those for the previous 7 Series during the same early months of its life in the mid-1990s. Adrian Van Hooydonk, president of Designworks and the man who first sketched the new 7 and developed its styling, contends that BMW's flagship car was in danger of being stifled by the weight of its own history.

"Over the years, we've been very successful in defining the BMW look, which we've done by being very precise in our designs," he says. "But when you make only incremental changes, you find yourself in a corridor that gets narrower and narrower. Finally, you reach a dead end, and by then, the customer has abandoned you for a car that's fresh and new. We had to break through that corridor. The goal for the new 7 was to push the boundaries as far as we could. You can't be a leader if you're not out in front."

"One Sausage, Three Different Lengths"
The effort to envision a new generation of BMWs began a decade ago. Soon after Bangle joined the company in October 1992, he participated in an upper-management workshop that attempted to look 10 years out and pinpoint what premium-car buyers would want. They concluded that the first decade of the new millennium -- the time we live in now -- would be a dynamic world of near-constant movement. BMW would have to build products that move people both physically and emotionally. It could no longer be just a car company. It had to be a mobility company. It had to become a company that let people motor.

This new vision finds its purest expression in the ad copy for the Mini Cooper: "When you drive, you go from A to B. When you motor, you go from A to Z. . . . Nobody can tell you when you're motoring. You just know." The brief for Bangle and his team was straightforward: Design cars that give people the motoring spirit.