BMW: Driven by Design

The goal was to come up with a radical successor to the X5 sport-utility vehicle, which was being readied for production in Spartanburg, South Carolina. But there was another equally critical goal: to get engineers to advocate for design and to get designers to champion engineering. Deep Blue's members were cut free of the FIZ and allowed to relocate so that they could work far from prying eyes -- including, says Bangle, his own eyes. The team leased Elizabeth Taylor's former home in Malibu, California. After six months of grueling work, it had produced six product statements for what would eventually become the X3 SUV.

"Both the designers and the engineers learned that the key to a passionate BMW is a synthesis of engineering passion and design passion," says Bangle. "They saw that engineers do a better job when they work with designers, and designers do a better job when they work with engineers. You can't teach that. They had to learn it for themselves."

Rival Designs: My Colleague, My Competitor
If collaboration is a crucial piece of the design process at BMW, then so too is internal competition. Just as BMW's designers compete against Mercedes-Benz and Audi, they battle each other to create a winning car. Bangle typically assigns as many as six teams to develop concepts for a single new BMW. The competition can be intense, but it all plays to BMW's advantage. While the designers work out their visions for the next coupe or sedan, the company leverages all of their ideas.

"The key here is diversity. If our people all thought the same way, we wouldn't have a design culture; we'd just have mass opinion," explains Bangle. "That's why internal competition is a fundamental premise of this organization: It gives us this dynamic exchange of viewpoints. The outcome is far more powerful than what a single person could produce."

It's up to Bangle to draw the best designs out of each artist and keep his teams fresh over the three-to-four-year process of evolving a new car. It's a complex challenge. Experience has shown him that the early front-runner often will not turn out to be the winning design. Bangle prepares for such an outcome by instructing another team to come up with a concept that's diametrically opposed to the front-runner's model. Such was the case in the competition to design the new 7 Series. While the early leader followed the middle road, Van Hooydonk chose to take the road less traveled. There were many setbacks along the way, but eventually, his unconventional design emerged as the winner.

Bangle contends that BMW is willing to live with this high-risk strategy over the short term, in hopes of nailing big, long-term gains. Ultimately, the market will decide whether the 7 and the Z4 are the right cars for the time. Bangle's thoughts are on the future. "BMW's mandatory retirement age is 60 for senior management, which means that I've got just 14 years left here," he says while exiting the FIZ. "That's two generations in car years -- just two shots at making an impact." And with that, he was gone. He was last seen heading west, head held high, driving a bold, red 7.

Sidebar: "Take Notes on the World. There Will Be a Test."

Where do car designers get their inspiration? It's a mystery even to the designers themselves. As they once stood looking at the final prototype for the new 7 Series, Chris Bangle turned to Adrian Van Hooydonk, the 7's designer, and asked, "Where did this come from?" Van Hooydonk shrugged; he really couldn't say.

In broad terms, BMW's designers get their ideas from the world around them -- though not, they hasten to add, from the world of cars. "If I were to list my influences in car design, I'm afraid you'd have to think pretty synthetically to make sense of them," says Bangle. "Architecture, airplanes, boats, botany, cathedrals, domes . . . just go through the alphabet."

Bangle fills notebooks with cartoon-like sketches of his travels and observations, with quick captions written in German and English. There's a star chart for locating the Southern Cross; there are notes from last year's World Economic Forum, including a whimsical sketch of Hillary Clinton's begrimed high heels and a free-flowing illustration of the gateway to the Alamo, in San Antonio, Texas. Tellingly, there's not a single sketch of a car. Bangle won't comment on his jottings (too personal), but as he closes the journal, he offers a cryptic bit of advice: "Take notes on the world. There will be a test."

Ultimately, argues Bangle, a car designer is really a sculptor. "To paraphrase Michelangelo, We try to reveal the figure within the stone. That's what a boy does with a girl in the backseat of a car on a Saturday night -- he's trying to reveal the figure within. And that's what a designer does when he confronts that block of clay."