What Makes a BMW Timeless? Ronnie Fieg (Kith) and Oliver Heilmer (BMW) Explain

Monterey Car Week is a blur by design. Six days, a dozen venues, and more press releases than any one person can read on a plane home. But there’s usually one hour that sticks with you longer than the rest, and this year that hour happened at the BMW Villa, where I sat down to host a design conversation with Ronnie Fieg and Oliver Heilmer.

If you don’t know the names, you know the work. Fieg is the founder of Kith and the guy behind four increasingly ambitious chapters of Kith x BMW builds, most recently the Inka Orange 3.0 CSi and M6 that anchor Chapter IV, alongside the new X5. Heilmer runs design for BMW Compact Class, Neue Klasse, and M, which means he’s had a hand in essentially a lot of the current and future products.

I’ve hosted a few panels so far, but this was one of the best. Both guys answered with real depth and humor, and about twenty minutes in, I realized we could have gone another hour without running out of ground. Favorite BMWs each of them has owned, unreleased projects neither could really talk about yet, how the business side of a collaboration like this even gets negotiated in the first place. We didn’t get to any of it, but I have a feeling a follow up in the future could happen, and should happen.

Staying True To The E30 M3 Crowd

The panel opened on something both men clearly think about often: how do you keep a brand moving forward without alienating the people who fell for it decades ago. Fieg pointed straight to his own history with the E30 M3, calling it his gateway into BMW, and said every project he touches now gets built with that same enthusiast in mind, even as he tries to bring in a younger audience discovering the brand for the first time.

Heilmer took the same idea from the design side. He talked about how details that were never meant to be iconic, like the E30 M3’s box flares, became iconic simply because BMW was willing to take the heat when they first launched. His point was that BMW’s history of getting criticized for new designs, only to have those designs age into classics, isn’t an accident. It’s closer to a pattern the brand has learned to trust.

What Makes Something Timeless

This was the best stretch of the conversation. Heilmer used the Eames lounge chair as his reference point, the idea that nobody can quite explain why it still looks right today, and said that’s the bar designers are actually chasing, whether they say it out loud or not. He also brought up something I hadn’t thought about before: how a hood surface on a brand-new BMW can echo one from forty years ago closely enough that you feel it before you consciously notice it.

Color got its own extended detour, which made sense given the setting. Fieg described himself as a colorist before anything else, and said his own car collection functions less like a garage and more like a color-driven archive. That’s the same logic running through all four Kith x BMW chapters: Cinnabar Red, Vitality Green, Techno Violet, and now Inka Orange on the restored 3.0 CSi and M6. Heilmer offered his own read on where color is headed at BMW, betting on more solid, non-metallic finishes going forward, and pointed to the new Monza Red on the M Concept Neue Klasse as an example of a shade that feels new and familiar at the same time.

The Fun Part

We closed on a “swap jobs for a day” question that got funnier answers than I expected, and a free-reign, no-budget round where Heilmer said he’d design a sailing boat and Fieg said he’d bring back cars like the 507 or the M1 as one-to-one limited reissues, built with today’s engineering underneath.

Neither of them could say what Chapter V looks like, and I don’t think that’s a dodge. The whole partnership seems to run on the two of them staying in dialogue rather than working from a fixed roadmap. Watch the full conversation above, and if there’s a question you wish I’d asked, leave it in the comments. There’s a decent chance we get a part two.