BMW sports sedans instead of SUVs: the end of big car armor?

Auf die viel gestellte Frage, wie die Zukunft des Automobils aussieht, kann man schon jetzt eine ziemlich präzise Antwort geben: Die Zeit der Allrounder ist vorbei. Die Zeit, in der man mit dem Volkswagen Käfer (früher) oder mit dem großen SUV (heute) sowohl zur Arbeit als auch in die Ferien, zum Bäcker wie zum Kindergarten fuhr, wird bald ihr Ende finden, denn etliche der aktuellen Probleme des Planeten rühren daher, dass sehr viele Leute es angemessen finden, mit einem über zwei Tonnen schweren, über 240 Stundenkilometer schnellen Komfortpanzer ein etwa ein Meter großes Kleinkind zum Kindergarten zu fahren und anderweitige innerstädtische Kurzstrecken zu erledigen und die dortige Luft gleich mit. Wäre es nicht viel sinnvoller, zu unterscheiden zwischen sehr kompakten, sehr leichten Vehikeln für die Innenstadt und Überlandautos für weite Fahrten – und zwischen dem Auto als Fortbewegungsmittel und dem Auto als Kunstwerk, das man nicht für den alltäglichen Transport, sondern für Ausfahrten und zum Spaß bewegt?

Bei einigen der blechummantelten tonnenschweren Sofagarnituren, die auch BMW gerade im SUV-Segment in die Verkaufsräume rollt, kann man sich fragen, wo die viel beschworene „Freude am Fahren“ da bitte sein soll – und entsprechend erleichtert ist man, dass der Autohersteller trotz der Geschmacksverirrungen von Marketingabteilung und Kundschaft offenbar noch in der Lage ist, wieder an den Punkt zurückzukehren, an dem der gute Ruf der Marke als Hersteller leichter, eleganter, eher kompakter Sportlimousinen einmal entstanden ist.

BMW recently presented the “Vision New Class”, a bright concept car that, with its small shark nose, Hofmeister kink and lots of glass, is a bit reminiscent of the good old sports saloons of the sixties and seventies without being too retro, and this time it is powered by an electric motor. To improve the CO₂ balance and mood, there is yellow corduroy and white recycled materials instead of thick chrome and real leather. The taillights are architectural and clearly drawn like a coffee table from the Ulm School. The outer skin of the concept car is as smooth as an iPad or iPhone. The object that shapes the 21st century, the mobile phone, is now also influencing the design of the automobile that was able to shape the previous century.

Before the new class comes onto the market, BMW is adding a car to its range that showcases the old virtues that have been lost in the SUV era: the current 2 Series Coupé embodies everything that the 2002 BMW and the first 3 Series once stood for: small, fast, compact, greenhouse set far back, short notchback, two round headlights, clear shape. The new model is available with a semi-sensible four-cylinder engine and – for those who do not see the car primarily as a rational means of transport, but as an entertaining work of art made up of engine sound, body acceleration and shape – also as an “M2” with a three-litre inline six-cylinder and 460 hp. This model can be recognized by a front that no longer has any chrome at all. While Mercedes’ competitors are increasingly resorting to tinsel kitsch – glowing Mercedes stars as radiator grilles, Swarovski stones in the headlights, fake, heavily chromed exhaust pipe imitations – BMW’s design department is opting for an aesthetic reminiscent of Italian industrial design and the brutalist architecture of the 1970s with the geometric plastic nose of the M2.

The front of the M2 with its chrome-free nostrils is plastic in two senses – as a material and as a synonym for “sculpture”. This is perhaps no coincidence when you know the background of the man who designed it: José Casas, Senior Exterior Designer at BMW, was born in Mexico City, the country where the car is also built; his parents are architects. As a child, he says, he always went to their office after school and drew; from an early age he was enthusiastic about German and Italian cars and the idea that you can design an object that will then appear in large numbers on the streets, “that you can touch and use” and that moves people in two senses, says Casas. Eventually, his adventurous path led him to work as an intern at the Italian bodywork manufacturer Pininfarina – and then to BMW, where he designed the “Vision M Next” study, which was celebrated by the car magazine “Autostrada” as “the best-looking BMW in about 15 years, no, since 1979”. The study was stylistically groundbreaking: the thin taillights, the profiled nostrils that look like two tunnel tubes at the front of the car and the geometrically complex variations of the kidney motif – everything about this shape was more architectural than baroque-biomorphic and very different from so many other cars of recent years, which were more reminiscent of bloated Chinese dragons.

In this, Casas’ idea of ​​car design is reminiscent of a great in the field, the recently deceased Marcello Gandini, who in 1968 radically ended the era of anthropomorphic automobiles with their swelling metal bodies and round headlights and instead created architecture on wheels: Gandini’s Alfa Romeo Carabo and the Lamborghini Countach he designed were wedges whose flat surfaces were artfully composed, there was no chrome and no decorative wood, and apart from the wheels and the steering wheel, nothing about them was round.

Casas says he is also a fan of simplicity; he doesn’t want hundreds of holes and bulges and air intakes and textures. The fact that the shape of his BMWs is geometrically complex and dynamic is perhaps due to Casas’ interest in the 2002 BMW from the 1970s, which he cites as a reference, but perhaps also to his enthusiasm for the other major area of ​​contemporary design, in which even more money is spent on technical optimization and seduction through form: the designer has a large collection of sneakers. One can suspect the roots of Casas’ preference for pastel, neon and signal colors here, but also in the company’s history with the 1972 BMW Turbo concept car, which was designed by the legendary French car designer Paul Bracq, who is now 90.