Chris Bangle, who quit as the BMW Group’s chief of design back in 2009 after 16 years with the Munich-based automaker, has lamented the lack of “freshness and change” in current car design, calling for an end to the “banality”.
Speaking to Automotive News at the Frankfurt Motor Show after visiting the stand of a former rival automaker, the Ohio-born 60-year-old said that he had “seen this all before”.
“It’s a wonderful stand, it has a wonderful amount of technology they are showing. But as a designer I am used to a set of uniqueness and freshness and change … for the life of me I can’t find a new idea,” he said, according to Automotive News.
“I would love to and they have really good designers, but I’ve seen this all before in other places,” he added. “Companies like that are getting so good at putting a sheen on what you already know that they’ll convince everybody that it’s new,” Bangle said.
“And the young designers don’t know their own history. There is very little understanding where the past came from for car designers today because they are worried so much about just learning the tools. They’re being asked to do little more than just ‘give me a little twist on what we just did’.”
Bangle suggested that the majority of today’s car designs are mere rehashes of older ideas.
“I know this stuff from the past. I know these graphics, I know these surfaces, I know these proportions,” he said.
So, how can the industry get away from this apparent “sameness”?
“When people ask me what is the problem with cars of the future, I say it is the mental barriers in the heads of designers. It is not the management’s fault or the customer’s fault or technology’s fault, it is these things in our heads. We’ve got to end the banality. We’ve got to get rid of the normal,” he said.
