What I like about BMW is that there’s often a story and even a bit of romance about even the smallest detail,” says Steve Saxty, automotive design engineer turned author.
“It’s far from being the typically cold German company people might imagine it to be.” Through a selection of design details associated with the brand, Saxty hopes to persuade me of that.
However, before he runs through his favourite, heart-warming BMW stories, gleaned from research at the company for his latest tome, he wants to talk about PSD, short for proportion, surfacing and detailing.
“There’s a misconception about car design that you pop on a signature detail and you have a brand,” he says. “To begin with, there are the car’s proportions to consider. They’re determined by many things, not least the type of vehicle it is but also by factors such as national culture.
"Italian cars, for example, tend to have a more arrow-shaped front than the square-jawed stance of German brands.”
Surfacing, argues Saxty, is when a car begins to acquire individual brand character and distinctiveness. “BMW has had really innovative approaches to this. There’s the much-discussed ‘Flame’ surfacing of the Z4 but also the equally interesting Zeppelin-influenced surfacing as seen on the ‘E60’ 5 Series, where the skin is sucked in around the frame.
Tragically, the young Italian designer responsible for the idea died of leukaemia shortly after and the E60 was almost a homage to his vision.”
And so to the details. Saxty points out that while many may think BMW has a ‘toolkit’ of them, it uses its design signatures sparingly, adopting and adapting them when necessary: “If its grilles never evolved, the cars would always have the same nostrils. It’s one of the things that makes BMW stylistically avant-garde.”
Here, we look at eight familiar and less well-known BMW design details that Saxty rates as especially fascinating.
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I believe Saxty should add that the old kidney was Sexy, but the new Sixty feet kidneys are have been designed by a nephrologist