Don't Stop Strong Design

The “Stop Chris Bangle” website has not been taken down yet, but it should be.

For years, the site has been telling the world BMW's design has taken a terrible wrong turn. It asks visitors to sign a petition that begs BMW management to fire Bangle, its global design chief, so he won't “design (ruin) any more of your wonderful BMWs.” By late January, there were 13,065 signatures.

Problem is, there is nothing left to “save.” Bangle now has left his imprint on almost all the auto maker's vehicles. The result of the controversial designer's violation of BMW's former Teutonic crispness: 1,328,000 signed petitions in Bangle's favor just last year. And these petitions can be taken a bit more seriously. They are sales contracts.

BMW Group sales were up 9.9% globally in 2005 in what was a lackluster year for most other auto makers. Die-hard Bangle haters try to attribute the company's continued success solely to the growth of its hot Mini brand, but if you strip out the 200,400 Mini sales last year, BMW brand sales alone are up even more: 10.1%.

The much-maligned 7-Series — the car that started all the fuss — is up 5% globally and 7% in the U.S. Some critics also predicted the dramatically redesigned 5-Series was sure to get Bangle tossed out a window because it was even more radical. Instead, the car is at the top of its segment in global sales volume.

These numbers sit against a backdrop of whispers in media circles about “emergency redesigns” going on behind the scenes to “fix” Bangle's awful rear-end treatments, known derisively as “Bangle butt.”

Critics got their final comeuppance at January's Detroit Auto Show when it became painfully apparent other top auto makers now are borrowing Bangle's allegedly misbegotten ideas.

“Suddenly, everyone is trying to do the kind of styling for which the auto journalists criticized the BMW Group so loudly,” BMW CEO Helmut Panke declared triumphantly at the auto maker's media dinner in Detroit last month.

“You look at the (new Toyota) Camry rear end and you see another 7-Series. It is not the ‘Bangle butt’ anymore.”

Bangle's vision has spread through the BMW lineup and into an increasing variety of other vehicles, and it all looks much less alien. Meanwhile, BMW's old “classic” 7-, 5- and 3-Series designs have started to look as ordinary as three sizes of sausage.

Like it or not, standing behind its controversial design chief has made BMW a styling leader.

There's a lesson in this. Not for designers, who usually are confident to a fault, but to the top executives and board members who must give final approval to new designs.

Three or four years before they hit the road, it takes courage to approve new designs that look frighteningly different. And it takes backbone to stand up to the inevitable traditionalists who hate new designs when they come out.

BMW didn't chicken out on either front. That is why it remains at the top of the automotive heap while others have tumbled off.