February 2010

BMW Designer Adrian van Hooydonk who is one-year deep into his tenure as the head of BMW design. The Dutch native takes the reigns from Chris Bangle and is responsible for the BMW, Rolls Royce and MINI brands.

We spoke at the 2010 North American International Auto Show. It was late in the day, and I had the last interview slot, indicating that Van Hooydonk had probably given at least 20 interviews at this point, and auto show fatigue was setting in. Nonetheless, he was candid, and extended the conversation to espouse on the direction of BMW design and its relevance to industrial design and the green economy. The first half of that conversation is circulating via Coolhunting. I bring you the extended play version here:

GT:What are the hallmarks of your design?

When you do an electric car even with a show car you have to be very conscious about the weight, the car has to be extremely light. The lighter you make it the further your range will be. And it has to be very good aerodynamically speaking because that extends the range of the vehicle. Again, I believe that this idea of lightness that has to be expressed in the design. Also aerodynamics also doesn’t have to be a hindrance because it can lead to very interesting new design features. Those two things we have played with in the concept car we have showed in Frankfurt. Even details like wheel design can have an aerodynamic function. We showed that on this concept car in Detroit. And then last but not least, the vehicle should look clean, because it will be clean from an emissions standpoint. And of course since we are BMW group, It will have to a have a premium. It will be a new kind of premium. Right now premium luxury cars are all about having a lot of everything.  More wood is good, having more chrome is better.  Having a lot of everything makes it even better. When you’re going into this whole electric vehicles weight is an issue so you have to be very careful with the materials you’re going to select and also the capability. It cannot just be something that has to do with the drive train, it’s how you produce the vehicle.

Van Hooydonk and the BMW Vision Effiecient Dynamics Car

You’re talking about using new materials. I’ve already seen from my team a lot of interesting suggestions about materials that are not being used in cars today but they would allow us to make a premium car that looks very different from what we have today. I thinks that’s going to be very interesting.

GT: Do you draw from motor sports technology in the design process?

F1 and other fields of motor sports. For motor sports in a lot of parts of Europe, out and out horsepower is not going to necessarily win you the race. It is handing that is going to win you the race. Typically the race track has several corners. If we’re talking about the Nurburgring, it has 72 corners, and that happens to be the place that we test our vehicles. So out of our racing experience yes we learn about light weight, we learn about aerodynamic performance. We learn about weight distribution, we learn about materials that help make a car light.  We’ve just recently opened a new wind tunnel in Munich that has a rolling floor. That’s something that up until now was only used to test racing cars, and now we are doing that also for normal production vehicles.

We as designers we have a very strong creative team that does a lot of design research around the world. I think we are entering a very interesting period in the automotive industry. I think our customers expect change. The concept car that we showed in Frankfurt was very futuristic so much so that I thought people are going to be apprehensive about it, but quite the opposite occurred. A lot of people told us that they would like to have that car right now. There seems to be a very high desire for different shapes, different designs, because people expect the world to change quicker.

GT: Do you designers go to places like Salone in Milan for inspiration?

I’ve been going to Salone de Mobile in Milan for many years. I was originally trained in industrial design myself. And I worked as such before I joined BMW. And the BMW group has Designworks USA, a design consultancy in which we do design for other fields. I ran that for five years.  So we have a lot of resources to tap into and a lot of information out of areas that are not car design. We learn from all these areas and we are able to give what we learn from the car world back to our customers at Designworks, so we have a lot of this kind of content.

GT: What trends are you currently seeing in the industrial design world that are influencing you?

Materials in the industrial design world or even jewelry for example have really taken big steps.  Stereo lithography. This a quick way of plastic arriving in which they use a laser. They are using that more in the the furniture industry and even jewelry these days. I think we will see it in the car world as well.

In terms of sustainability the furniture industry is not as far as I thought they would be. They are actually a little behind because they haven’t really had to deal with it. Somehow the whole focus is on the auto industry right now. We have to sort this out, and the furniture industry is tagging onto us, they are asking us. We are in contact with a couple companies that supply the furniture industry. They want to learn from us about sustainability and then out of the electronics industry we can learn a lot because the way you use a lot of interfaces has changed. BMW has contributed to that with our iDrive system. There’s more to come. That stuff is going very quickly. Through Designworks we are very aware of what the next steps are going to be – the flat screens, the more 3-dimensional displays.

Do you look at the aesthetic element of the artistic expression?

I do.  In all of our brands – BMW, Mini and Rolls Royce, design is the #1 reason for purchase. This is why our customers come to us. The design is a promise and when they drive the product we will deliver on that promise.  When it looks like it’s going to be precise – it does do that in terms of handling, steering, braking and that kind of stuff. I being a designer look for emotional cues things that people can relate to on an emotional level to the point that they want to touch it and really have this more personal relationship with this object. I see a lot of that in many other industries – even architecture.

A building used to be a box with a front entrance and side entrance and now architects are using the same tools we have been using for years in terms of computer modeling and the car industry, and out come buildings like Frank Gehry’s that are much more free flowing and much more 3-dimensional.

The 5- Series Gran Turismo car has the same amount of space and luxury that a 7-Series long wheelbase has. At the same time it cannot be categorize so easily. It doesn’t look like a big sedan. It has more functionality, flexibility and versatility. It will allow people to do more with one and the same vehicle.  When people part with this amount of money which is significant for BMW, they want more in return. They want a design that lasts longer or they want functionality to go over and beyond what their previous car allowed them to do. Also people’s lives have become more diverse. People go snowboarding one weekend surfing the next. All these kind of things and they expect their vehicles to do these things.

With iDrive we pioneered that with one big display in the dashboard, but now it’s become the industry standard you find it in almost every car in the show. It is the right way to deal with driving information in the vehicle. We’ve gotten very good at presenting the information that the customer can actually deal with it and digest it while they drive. There’ s more to come in that well.

TW: The interiors of the car seem to be more thought out.

In color and material we develop a specific set of colors and materials in each vehicles. What we are seeing is that there are warmer metallics coming up. A couple years ago silver metallic was the color of choice. Now in the last few years I’ve seen more and more demand for warmer silver, a champagne kind of color which we offer on the new 7 Series and on the Z4. On the Z4 it’s call orion, on the Seven Series it’s called cashmere. It’s essentially a warmer hue of metallic silver. Before we used to have silver and gun-metal gray and they were both kind of colder colors so now we see a shift to warmer colors even to copper and brown metallics. I think we’ll see a bit more of that in the future. I see our customers getting a bit more warmer in the color palette and the same is true in the interior. It was always black with some wood and now we offer a bit more beige with some grays. People seem to want to have a warmer environment and why not? The car is a technological product but, like you say, you spend a lot of time in it and you need to feel good and wide awake preferably when you’re in the car. We have developed a lot of interesting colors, brown tones and gray tones that fit very well. In terms of wood we have developed that further. In the X6 we are offering bamboo and in the X5 which is very modern, a renewable resource, no other wood grows this fast so it’s a good story. We are going to develop materials that people haven’t seen in cars. in a nutshell that’s what I see happening in cars.

More BMW on Gotryke:

Jack Pitney’s Dream Car

BMW and Jeff Koons Art Car

Tamara Warren and Lee Quinones on the 7 Series

Related articles:

• Interview with BMW Design Director Adrian van Hooydonk (coolhunting.com)

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