Heads Continue To Roll In BMW's Design Department With Departure Of Chief Designer

Uh. What???

Bring back Chris Bangle. He was very talented and got a bad rap. In fact, he may have been the first corporate "bullying" victim - much like certain performers who were shamed into turning down the Trump gig, were publicly ridiculed until they backed out.

Can this idiot BobM be banned from the site already? Unless the owners like having woefully ignorant and racist comments at the end of the articles, in which case by all means carry on.

Van Hooydonk needs to be fired as well. He was a part of the horrible Bangle regime of ugliness. BMW is screwed for a good decade given product cycles. The 7, 5, and probably 3 are going to be all-new-new-but-look-the-same-as-the-old-car ditto the SUVs.

At this point, BMW needs to find a new design team that can make a radical style reinvention happen and put the billions behind restyling and retooling.

Bangle was styled-on-acid.
Post-Bangle (Van Hooydonk) was a return to tradition.
Habib embraced dull and lifeless.

Kind of makes you wonder if the styling malaise will weaken BMW to the point that Toyota swallows them whole.

BMW styling is so boring it gives me vertigo.

BMW's conservative design evolution has cost it dearly. It lost the 2016 U.S. and global sales titles to Mercedes-Benz and its U.S. sales fell much more than the competition. The 7-Series can't compete with the Mercedes-Benz S-Class in terms of global sales. The new 5-Series might even see its sales decline compared to the current version. The new 5-Series looks so similar to the current 5-Series that current owners won't feel the need to get the new one because 99% of people won't be able to tell the difference between their car and the new one.

The bread and butter 3-Series sales fell 25% in 2016 - a huge problem for BMW.

Without a much larger design difference from one generation to the next, BMW's sales will continue to trail Mercedes-Benz's both in the United States and globally.

Discounts on the 7 Series were as high as 40% to purge the 2016 models. That's a Kia K900 level of discounting.

Sure, blame Habib, but Van Hooydonk could have done something. Moreover, BMW management could have said "Where's the new car?" when shown the styling.

Will firing Habib solve this? No. Will firing Van Hooydonk solve this? No. Firing both of them, finding designers who aren't incompetent, and pouring billions into emergency restyling and retooling is the crap shoot BMW now faces.

How quickly can BMW act to change its design strategy? Marc Lichte was named design chief at Audi at the end of the 2013 and the new A8, which will debut at the end of this year, will be the first model he had 100% oversight of.

That's 4 years from appointment to first production car. BMW might very well be acquired in 4 years if it can't change its design enough to keep pace with Mercedes-Benz globally and a surging Audi in the U.S. market.