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Chris Bangle, BMW Design. A British website (www.autoexpress.co.uk) is reporting that Chris Bangle will be exiting BMW. After a decade of working at the German company's Munich headquarters, where he completely altered BMW's design character (to a negative degree as some critics insist, including us), the website reports that Bangle will leave after the global launch of the 1-series next fall, "before declaring that his daring brand rethink is complete and that the time has come for a new design boss to take over." As we've said many times before, transforming a brand's design character is one of the toughest tasks any automobile designer can face - especially when it involves such an iconic brand as BMW. If this report is true, we have no doubt that Bangle will end up in another top design job somewhere, but his legacy at BMW will be a mediocre one, at best, as far as we're concerned. Bangle didn't so much as revamp the brand's design character, as rip its guts out and hurl it into uncharted, and in some cases, unwelcome territory. Not that revamping a brand design's character shouldn't involve a measure of discomfort and some visually challenging design language, because it should if you believe in continuing to develop a look that will live and breathe in the future. But what Bangle managed to accomplish in one fell swoop was to degrade the integrity of the overall look and feel of BMW and diminish its all-important "presence" on the road - which is no small feat. He brought attention to BMW with his work, but much of it was unwanted attention, which inevitably forced BMW executives to constantly explain, justify and defend the look of their vehicles, instead of talking about the inherent goodness of them. In short, Bangle turned BMW executives into a bunch of apologists for the brand - something that did not sit well with anyone in Munich. Oh, they went out of their way to defend the look of the cars and to defend Bangle himself - dismissing the negative comments as insignificant and being generated by people who "just didn't get it" (the classic designer putdown to "outsiders") - and by implying that what BMW was doing was clearly over the heads of most people, which made things even worse. But the writing has been on the wall for months, with the declining sales of the new 7 Series clear proof that the revamp of BMW's flagship (along with BMW's death-wish fascination with electronic overkill) was a complete disaster. We also keep hearing reports of the factory helping some BMW dealers around the country to "buy back" the 7 Series from disgusted owners, and we wonder how much longer BMW can conceal this from the ever-vigilant automotive media constantly looking for a scoop. The final design tweak that Bangle did, which offended BMW purists to no end, was that he did away with the driver-angled instrument panel center stack - something as much a part of the "look" of BMW as the twin nostril front grill itself. As we mentioned in the item above, BMW has lost its way by losing touch with what made the brand appealing and special to begin with - and Chris Bangle has undeniably contributed immeasurably to its decline.
Source: Autoextremist
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I guess Rex's C&D cover is partially right then, now if only the rest would change...
Source: Autoextremist
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I guess Rex's C&D cover is partially right then, now if only the rest would change...