Is Chris Bangle’s design really groundbreaking for BMW?
I look at this thing, the rear of BMW’s 4th gen 7 Series-the Bangle Butt:
and I wonder…How the hell was this design different, groundbreaking, revolutionary…Like what. How does such a conservative design elicit any criticism from Chris Bangle’s fellow car designers?
I think there is this fundamental issue in the way people perceive things-how they define what “revolutionary”. I mean, I get it OK: people don’t like changes. But a lot of people these days hate changes that so subtle that they are bearly worth noting. Take a look at this comparison:
To me, the above two cars looks pretty much identical, the ways the LED day time running lights are shaped-very similar.If anything, I would say that the lower portion of the front fascia is more conservative on the 2020 version. And yet…and yet…people are just POURING over the grill of the 2020 7 Series. No, I don’t think the grill is outrangeous at all.
Back to the question: why was this bangle butt eliciting so much hate and admiration. From my experience usually, when people start hating so something, it can only mean one of two things. One, the thing is truly aweful. Or…Two, something great is afoot. In the case of the Bang Butt, I want to examine what exactly was elicitng the hate, how big a steeraway was the Butt in design language from the previous generation of 7 Series’s butt.
Now let’s dive into the history of BMW dtesign and then into the details of the Bangle Butt that the particular generation of 7 Series through which Chris Bangle singlehandedly ripped down the design blueprint on the wall of BMW’s design center that it had been using for the 50 years prior and threw it in the trash.
In 1992, Chris Bangle made the headline in the automotive design world for being the first American to be appointed BMW’s global chief of design. Now, if Chris Bangle was really revving up a design revolution at BMW, I would expect him to do around then. But the model of 7 Series-codenamed E65-BMW pushed into the market was of a very conservative design at the time:
The 1994 redesign look much similiar to the car it replaces in proportion, bodyworks, the way the C pillars are shaped. Nothing different here to see, the front has that same wide, horizontal feel, except the headlight module are now encased and look more integral.
It wasn’t until 10 years after he was enthroned that this happened:
The design now is noticeably different. The side profile is different, the outline of the window is different. On a larger scale, the design is simply more rounded-literally, in the shape sense. But the body remains distinctly a sedan.
The design language of the interior remains largely unchanged over a 10-year span:
So going back to the question that I am trying to answer through this essay: was Chris Bangle’s design really groundbreaking for BMW? The keyword here is BMW as we are not talking about the whole car industry. In the same year that the 2004 E65 came out, Audi also had their A8 and Mercedes their S class.
When you these three cars belonging to the same class and price range together, it is no hard to see the reason why Bangle got so much shit from his fellow car designers. The 7 Series features a distinctive trunk that protrudes upward on the side where the taillights are. Whereas Audi and Mercedes both went with a trunk lid that lied flush with the tail, BMW went with a design that accentuated the trunk’s separation from the rest of the tail and further accentuates it with the two-piece taillights.
In the end, Chris Bangle got what he expected when your poured onto people’s lives a cold bucket of changes that no one had been expecting. But today, his legacy lives on. Instead of “Bangle Butt”, the conspicuous truck line Chris invented existed on most of the cars today-especially the sporty ones-and has a different name: shoulder line.
