Some vertical, some horitzontal: BMW’s big grilles are here to stay – report

MUNICH – WHEN it comes to car design, few topics are as widely debated as BMW’s modern styling language, and more particularly, the huge grilles that we’ve seen on some of its latest products, such as the BMW 4 Series and the iX electric crossover.

But will the controversy cause BMW to tone things down a little with its future models?

That certainly doesn’t appear to be the case, according to recent statements made by BMW’s design boss. In an interview with BMW Blog, Adrian van Hooydonk hinted that the oversized kidney grilles would only become more prolific in the future.

“We want to spread it out a little bit more: vertical kidneys on some cars, horizontal on others,” Van Hooydonk told the publication.

“We want our customers to be able to recognise the BMW in the rearview mirror, not just as a BMW, but also, after a while, they know what BMW that is.” This of course means BMW will also be looking to differentiate its various models to a greater degree, in the process avoiding the ‘onesausage-different-lengths’ philosophy that its rival from Stuttgart has often been accused of.

“We want each of our products to have a stronger character of its own, because each of our products has different competitors,” the design boss said.

But what else can we expect from BMW’s future designs? In the aforementioned BMW Blog interview, Van Hooydonk said we can expect simplified shapes with “fewer and reduced” lines, while the lines that were used would be sharper and more meaningful.

“We are now working on cars for 2025 and beyond. And [the design] will continue to evolve. We want to keep these strong characters.

And, yeah, the brands I think will develop faster now. “With BMW i, we started a cleaner form language for the electric cars, and now that electric is going to be part of the core of the brand, of course you’ll see that the design of the i-products will begin to influence the core of the brand, so it’s going to be a cleaner look,” Van Hooydonk told BMW Blog.

But not everyone in the industry agrees with BMW’s approach. Last year Jaguar’s design head, Julian Thomson, hinted that BMW had gone too far with its bold frontal designs.

“I feel some of our competitors have gone really overboard in trying to overemphasise the brand, the face of the car, and in a fairly crude manner in a lot of cases,” Thomson told Car Throttle.

He reiterated that Jaguar would never “torture metal” into faces “only a mother could love”.

– IOL

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