BMW Says It Needs Design Controversy As It Drives Up Gross sales

BMW has no intention of firming down its present design language, noting that courting controversy is a crucial plan for it to attempt to increase gross sales.

The designs of recent BMW fashions have come underneath fierce criticism lately and the styling of the all-new XM has raised lots of eyebrows. Nevertheless, throughout a current interview with Automotive Gross sales on the U.S. launch of the brand new 7-Collection and i7, BMW chairman Oliver Zipse stated it needs its automobiles to get individuals speaking.

“After all it’s a plan, in any other case we wouldn’t do it,” he stated. “If you wish to change design, any step into the long run that’s perceived as new will probably be controversial routinely. There’s no such factor as a future oriented design with out controversy. That’s the trick: to have controversy and the result is ‘I wish to have it’ and ‘I prefer it’, and naturally it’s a plan.”

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Whereas talking with the Australian publication, Zipse added that BMW has adopted a extra conservative strategy to the designs of its mainstream fashions, such because the 3-Collection, 5-Collection, X1, X3, and X5, and that it’ll push the design envelop with a few of its extra area of interest fashions, just like the all-electric i7 and the hybrid XM.

“We drove this morning by Palm Springs and in the event you checked out all the opposite vehicles, all of them look alike,” Zipse informed the media. “They’re aerodynamically streamlined, there are usually not ugly vehicles any extra. They’re not nice, however they’re not ugly vehicles. They appear very a lot alike. If you wish to have fashionable, future-oriented design, you’ll routinely get controversy and naturally we would like that. That doesn’t imply individuals gained’t purchase it and naturally we wish to begin a dialogue about ‘what are they doing right here?’”

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Zipse believes that getting individuals speaking is the important thing to driving gross sales and implied that the controversial E65-generation BMW 7-Collection (pictured above) designed by Chris Bangle outsold its predecessor partly due to its wacky form.

“I would like controversy,” he stated. “Within the early design in the event you shouldn’t have controversy, that’s the error you make. Out of the controversy you get engagement. You get individuals serious about it and serious about alternate options.”