BMW’s 4 Series design is one of the most heated topics in the car community today. The newly unveiled sports coupe brings a polarizing styling to the market which is bound to create some buzz.
Clearly, the number one topic revolves around the oversized kidney grilles. Even though the 4 Series has leaked several times before, some were still in denial. But the hopes of a smaller-sized grille came to a crash yesterday when BMW introduced the second-generation 4 Series.
Yesterday, in a roundtable, we sat down with BMW’s Head of Design, Domagoj Dukec, to talk about the car and, of course, its grille. According to the design chief, the 4 Series won’t necessarily open the door for other future oversized kidneys.
The goal with the BMW 4 Series was to differentiate the current lineup a bit more.
“We don’t want to have any detail repeating on a model, because every model should have a unique character,” Domagoj told us. “Cars like the 3 Series and 5 Series will keep more horizontal kidneys, and we really enjoy using the kidneys in different ways.”
“At BMW, we felt that the vertical kidneys was the right character for the car,” Dukec added. “And design is not always about beauty or ugliness, good design is about having a daring character. Customers are demanding that because the market is saturated with good products, so you have to stand out. As the needs of our customers are so different individually, we want to give each customer a different product.”
When our turn came up, we asked about a potential Chinese market influence on the 4 Series. According to Dukec, their design process doesn’t focus on single markets, but it has a rather global view. So when the new 4 Series project came to life, the idea was to style the car for all the markets, without looking at every single type of customer.
Furthermore, Dukec says that only about 10 percent of the 4 Series Coupe models sold worldwide are going to China, so this wasn’t a big factor at play here.
