For that, we can only thank him and wish him good luck in his next adventure.

There are two types of designs: proactive and reactive. Some companies (I include BMW in this category) create new designs before they become trendy. Others pick apart those designs like vultures and apply various traits from various other brands to their own cars (reactive car design).

BMW, at the moment, is sitting at a point where they have to choose whether they’ll continue to be proactive or whether they’ll stick with the general Bangle design philosophy and stagnate to the point where they’ll have to play catch-up later on.

Think about it like a relay race. The competition is closing in; will AVH take the baton from Bangle and haul ass to put more distance between himself and the rest of the pack, or will he continue on the pace of Bangle and eventually allow the others to catch up?

Thats a strange thing to say Vlad. Is it not in a companys best interest to go foreward? What if they decided that in the 30 cars will always look like that. Would you have cars looking like 30s design right now? Do you not like the new Z4? Should it have looked like the 328? To me thats backward thinking.

Look at Britten. They lost all their car brands because of this thinking. They said, “If it aint broken, why fix it.” Thats how you stay behind. Thats how you loose your edge. The Germans in contrast, are always striving for something better. BMW got a think tank division that through away a third of all their ideas into the bin. Only a third makes it into production. If it wasn’t for their willingness to try new stuff, we wouldn’t have ABS or DSC or PDC… heck, even the fuel guage came later.

The same applies to design. If you don’t come up with something fresh and new (Jaguar in the 80s for one example), some one else will and take that share of the pie.

If you ask me why I like BMW, this is one of the very good reasons.

Didn’t all cars in the 60s look alike? The 70s were even more cloned. The 80s brought a new sence of adventure to the automotive design industry -think Ford Sierra. How different was the Sierra to say the Aston Lagonda of that time. You can tell a 90s design apart from a 00 design, and now 2010 is apon us.

I think BMW design has a lot to do with the shape of the modern car. And I’m fully hopfull that the post Bangle era cars will continue to set this tone.

As I mentioned before… BMW hired Bangle, they will head the company in the right direction again.

Hell with it. Please go back and make more E39 M5′s and E38 740′s please. That’s my personal hey day for BMW…I want them to start retrogressing versus progressing.

I think this line shows exactly my point: “…especially with Bangle asses showing up on many competitor’s cars…”

The moment the competition catches up is exactly the moment that you must put even more effort to move back ahead, lest you fall behind and become yet another car company that’s struggling to simply “keep up”.

To me, it’s the perfect opportunity to move BMW in a completely new direction. Will you get some opposition? Absolutely. You’re going to get opposition regardless of what you do, though.

Yeah, but to play devil’s advocate, do we want to go in an entirely different direction? Look at the outcry in 2002 with the introduction of the E65. Granted, it was a success, I think I saw far more E65s than I ever did E38′s(thank you leasing!).

After all, BMW switched gears to the Bangle styling as a result of the fear that their line-up would become “same sausage, different links” styled. So I can see why BMW may follow suit once more and begin to head in a new direction, especially with Bangle asses showing up on many competitor’s cars and flame surfacing becoming popular.

It really depends on how Adrian Von Hooydonk decides to handle it. Will it be business as usual, or will he mix things up significantly and steer BMW into a completely different direction?

I came from the restaurant industry, so the easiest way for me to parallel it is with Certified Executive Chefs (CEC). A great CEC can make or break your restaurant. At the same time, they can also severely limit your growth into other areas. Every once in a while it’s important to let that CEC go in order to get some fresh blood into the place.

Same thing goes with car design. If you keep the same design team too long, you risk limiting your influences and opportunities.