HARRISON BOUDAKIN
THE BMW X1
COMPLACENCY AND ITS INTERPRETATION BY THE GERMAN MIND
Wer rastet, der rostet. He who rests, grows rusty.
On the face of it, the Germans seem to understand it with characteristic clarity. These people, after all, are the kings of doing. To be complacent with one’s success, they say, is to tempt the fate of failure in stagnancy. Their saying, Aller Anfang ist schwer: All beginnings are hard, represents an almost religious calling to their greatest thinkers, a summons to take what might be substandard and despite all difficulty create a sort of wonder within it. To inspire through what is created is nothing short of a German national tendency. Yet, the crucial irony of this enduring thrust for creation is the inevitable drive for perfection that goes with it, and in automotive terms at least, it is this very culture that has also underpinned the Germans’ unassailable reputation as masters of the art of evolution. Beharren eine Kunst, they say. Persistence is an art. They are the one’s that doggedly pursue iterative development and considered design, which for generations ignored the very essential notion of planned obsolescence.
Basically, then, in a psychological sense, over the years most of the prominent German automotive companies have at points exhibited bipolar tendencies that seem to derive almost entirely from a basic philosophical struggle within the German worldview of product development. How, it seems they endlessly ask, might we push the outside of the envelope without losing sight of what lies within it? In other words, the Germans’ ultimate goal appears to be to revolutionise in an evolutionary way, to innovate within the bounds of reputation, to simultaneously challenge and reinforce the stereotypes they create for their own companies. God, no wonder the cars are more often than not absolutely brilliant. Only this level of tortured genius could give us designs of such unparalleled excellence and venerable ubiquity as the Mercedes-Benz S-Class, the Porsche 911, the BMW 5 Series, the Volkswagen Golf.
But what happens when this genius spills over into madness, and causes these tortured craftsmen to lose the plot? It may seem melodramatic, but this is not a uniquely German, or even automotive, predicament. And here we arrive back at the idea of complacency with which we began this discussion. Quite simply, when great minds create success, they become vulnerable to a distressing internal conflict in which they struggle to reconcile a fear of becoming lazily content, with the uneasy prospect of changing what they have created to avoid irrelevance. We can draw much from Shakespeare in this regard, in watching the young Prince Hamlet soliloquise his fear of losing everything to death at a moment when his life is at its greatest and most clear in purpose:
Conscience of loss does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the place cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
Indeed, history is littered with enterprises of great mirth and moment that have lost the name of action, great ideas let grow stale by minds too hesitant to develop them for fear of tainting their established successes. As a result, the term complacency has come to accumulate seriously negative connotations of flux and self-consuming destruction, that weighs and preys heavily on the conscience of those who are forced to consider it. In the late 1990s, this idea was the seed that would bring about one of the most surprising U-turns in the living memory of automotive design and engineering, at a company whose philosophy up until that point had seemed, in the typically German way, unshakeable. The Bayerische Motoren Werke AG. BMW.
The last decade of the twentieth century represented a period of subtle tumult for the German automotive industry, one in which the threat of complacency began to haunt two of the titans of Deutsche car making. The chronology of how this came to be is crucial, because at the first it allows an understanding of why such a huge philosophical shift came to be. Most crucially for this discussion, however, is that it foregrounds the manner in which each recovered from curiously abandoning their engrained Weltanschaung. It’s this second point that is strongest in relating this thesis to the BMW X1.
At first, things really couldn't get much better for the Bavarian volk at BMW as the world left the 1980s behind. In 1991, they watched the unassailable confidence of their deadliest rival, Mercedes-Benz, deteriorate into a devastating cavalcade of complacency that culminated in the overwrought, overweight and overblown W140 S-Class. Here, after decades of market dominance with inwardly innovative, yet outwardly evolutionary product, Mercedes-Benz finally overstepped the mark, offering a cathedral of a car that seemed to worship the cardinal Mercedes-Benz values of solidity and over-engineering in a manner that harked directly to a bygone era of conspicuous consumption and unsubtle expressions of social ascendancy. Suddenly, at a stroke, the once mighty übermensch of the German auto industry swayed under the weight of stinging criticism of its flagship naval destroyer, particularly unsettling when most of it seemed to emanate directly from the usually unreservedly-loyal German press.
The situation was so dire that only a few short months after the magnitude of their one billion dollar mistake had become painfully clear, a small junta of very elite figures within the Benz hierarchy met in secret to flesh out an informal agreement at what they called, this most critical fork in the road. On a single sheet of paper, in black ink besides some of the most powerful signatures in the entire automotive industry, they scrawled the words,
From this day forward, we will never look back.
In that moment, they changed the course of German car design and manufacturing, for better and worse, so profoundly that the industry itself is to this day still shaped by that historic conclave. This was their Yalta moment. Like Truman, Churchill and Stalin in 1945, Jürgen Schrempp and his men - whether they intended to or not - did so much more than reshape what already existed. Instead, they created a powerful precedent for a future far beyond their own. Mercedes-Benz would never be the same again. No one knew at the time, but neither would BMW.
The results of this Fork in the Road meeting were immediate and delicately seismic. In the space of just two years, Mercedes-Benz had begun producing cars espousing a remarkable new value set, which stood in complete contrast to its once resolute focus on creating The Best or Nothing. That mantra had, for the best part of the company’s history, defined its pursuit of building models that exuded an aura reminding buyers they were engineered like no other car. Now though, the square-rigged, strongly horizontal lines of the 1980s began to give way to flowing, curvaceous sheetmetal. Rectangles were replaced by circles. Straight-edged, geometric interior shapes morphed into elegant dashboard sweeps and swathes of lively upholstery. Most crucially, though, for the Stuttgart marque, its pathological, quasi-OCD engineering of even the smallest, most hidden components was now abandoned, in a desperate attempt to cut costs as a response to a market that had increasingly struggled to see the value of Mercedes-Benz’s pricey, spartan and over-designed models. And indeed, it did work, waking it from its brush with the wrath of complacency and jolting the company from its stupor, rejuvenating within that its sense for the market’s pulse.
But it would be short-lived. What started as a zestful, fresh reinterpretation of the Mercedes-Benz brand quickly spiralled into a decade of devastating decline into the clutches of poor build quality, questionable niche expansionism and a curiously unconfident and disjointed aesthetic language. The act of fighting complacency had brought about a new struggle in uncertainty. The mid 90s to mid 2000s was Mercedes-Benz at its nadir, struggling to express what it once done with unrelenting confidence. Values had given way to valueless advancement. It was nadir from which the company has only just begun to recover.
Enter BMW. By 1995, the company was in a very different place to its great arch-rival. The boys from Bavaria were entering a period of absolute primacy, on the back of a product offensive that seemed for almost two decades to completely fulfil that ultimate German vision of automotive perfection - evolved innovation and designed-in superiority cloaked in the veil of subtle self-assuredness. The Yuppie-crazed 80s had served the marque well - in much the same way as the Porsche 911 became synonymous with the swagger of merchant bankers, BMW’s core 3, 5 and 7 Series effectively became inseparable from the young, upwardly-mobile professionals that saw the cars as extensions of their thrusting personas. But their real success was the translation of this design philosophy into models that remained relevant in the more conscious, friendly 1990s, something Mercedes-Benz had decidedly failed at before the fork in the road. For a while, then, BMW’s models like the E39 5 Series and the E36 3 Series represented almost untouchable pinnacles of excellence in design and engineering. Cloaked in confident, restrained sheetmetal, the post mid-90s BMWs worked with a flowing, oily German precision - bursting with an air of barely contained power and self-content, from the way their taut, supple suspension danced two tonnes of metal with alacrity and dexterity, to their sombre interiors so beautifully considered they seemed not to speak of any sort of design philosophy, but rather a perversely wonderful state of Germanic neurosis. Let there be no doubt - as an expression of the German Auto, BMW was king. Its great rival in Benz was now playing catch up.
But deep within BMWs Bavarian nucleus, amongst the men and women of gravitas and influence, the mood was restless. The company could see the world was still changing, and, having watched Mercedes-Benz reinvent themselves with some initial success only after falling prey to their own complacency, the top brass in Munich more or less decided the game was up. Why, they must have asked, should we too first allow ourselves to fall victim to the comfort of our own success before initiating some sort of corporate revival? In essence, the top brass saw in their own company signs of the supreme self-confidence and perspective-distorting dominance that had brought Mercedes-Benz to the point of crisis in 1991. With the cars conquering all competitors, their sales strong and their global image rock-solid, BMW hadn't yet arrived at their fork in the road. So, instead, they made their own fork and began to follow a path away from almost everything the brand’s reputation and market strength was founded on, in an attempt to get a jump on what they thought was inevitable. In the dying days of the twentieth century’s last decade, then, the fear of complacency finally caught up with Munich. Wary that their great enterprise was cowardly losing its name of action, a select enclave of the company’s leading lights conducted what has to have been the most dramatic U-turn in German corporate history, one where a single aesthete would soon emerge as the guru, to whose vision the designers, engineers, marketers, planners and strategists - all of them - began to adhere. At his behest, they picked up their company, and looked for a place to take it. What happened next has been well documented, much discussed and oft researched. But rarely has it been agreed upon.
It is rare that accusations of folly are ascribed so acutely to one person, but in the early 2000s, the purists, the critics, the buyers and even the board members joined in unedifying chorus in their scathing condemnation of one man, and one alone. The aesthete. Chris Bangle.
Never has a figure within the industry been so maligned by so many. A merchant of design as a commodity, Bangle was unique in his devotion to channelling the power of provocative aesthetics as a tool to not only create a brand identity, but brands within brands. Under his tenure, the American-born Chief Designer at BMW wielded audacity as an asset, eschewing the Russian doll, scaled identikit styling that did little to differentiate a 3 from a 7 Series. Instead, in came the doctrine of flame surfacing, a design ideology in which the art of surface form was explored as a vehicle to catch the eye and pique the mind, where traditionalist design cues were seen as unnecessary ornaments that if left to gestate too long might corrupt a far greater vision - the one of brand advancement through design unashamedly and absolutely detached from BMWs past. How else to justify the perverse collection of angles, slashes, profiles, flicks, curves and kinks that cut the posterior of the 2001 7 Series, the first fruit of the Dear Leader’s loins? Here, it seems, was a man who had derived an almost sadistic pleasure in taking what was known and accepted, and substituted it for a vision that was utterly foreign and widely condemned. To those who possessed even the slightest affinity for the Bavarian brand, for those who had the merest inkling of sentiment for the shark-nosed, classicist creations of the 60s on, the styling of the E65 7 Series was tantamount to sacrilege.
The 17th century European folk myth of the Wild Hunt intones the existence of a supernatural, ghostly force of wild huntsmen, sighting of whom is thought to presage some kind of indefinable catastrophe and plague, war and death. Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie of 1835 popularised that folklore, and in his pioneering work, he notes with particular prescience the characteristics of the Wild Hunt’s leader, Wodan,
It was he more than most
that typified the legend of the furious host,
he who had lost his sociable character,
his near familiar features and assumed
the aspect of a dark and dreadful power…
a spectre and a devil.
To most, then, the first truly Bangleised BMW was Wodan, an entity that had come amongst them to foretell of a dramatic aesthetic death within the company, one in which it abandoned its near familiar features. And there could be no question, from that day forth, every model that came after the seminal 7 exuded more Bangle than BMW. He ran riot with his flame surfacing doctrine, zealously slashing his trademark creases and curves over every one of the company’s models, one by one creating a range of distinctive and unique forms that in trademark Bangle style seemed to operate as their own entities. A post-modern Calligula, he bestrode his grotto, lopping the heads off the statues bequeathed to him and replacing them with his own, leaving in his wake unsettling, challenging, sometimes disturbing forms. The American had sown the wind, and now he was to reap the whirlwind. Much has been made of this difficult period in the company’s history, and the assessment of style still ultimately rests on the fulcrum of subjectivity - hence, the essential, beautiful futility of its examination.
I happened to like the flame surfaced BMWs - edgy and distinct, stylistically unique and intelligent in offering visual cues that used careful, considered detailing to convey a feeling of random, absurd chaos. Many didn’t like it. Ultimately, that debate is eternal. But what we can discern is this: that first Bangle 7 Series of 2001 was not merely a portent of BMWs stylistic death and new life. No. The changes, the U-turn, the seismic shift in the attempt to stave off complacency went much further, deeper into a place more distressing and more unsettling than mere surface styling alone. The world may have focussed on the brutalism of Bangle, but in doing so, they might just have underestimated the treachery beneath the bodywork. After 2001, the absurdism of Bangle seemed to impart an unprecedented sense of creative license within the engineers at BMW, those charged with designing in those attributes of feel, mechanism and quality that had unquestionably given meaning to the company’s defining mantra, Freude am Fahren. The Ultimate Driving Machine. And this… this is where we finally arrive at how all this relates to the X1.
The engineers went berserk. To loose Bangle on the styling of their cars was not, seemingly, enough in the eyes of the company. To achieve a shift, they argued, the changes had to go beyond the aesthetic, and it was at this juncture that the avalanche truly begun. Innovation for none other than the sake of change alone became the unassailable focus for the Bavarian brand. Suddenly, a BMW was not a BMW if it wasn't decorated with gratuitous fixtures of challenging technology and new levels of stunning complexity. The subtle, powerful hand of engineering that had given BMW the enviable reputation as master of the art of ultimate driving pleasure now orchestrated a chorus of unutterable technological chaos. Delicately taut suspension gave way to corrupted, clattering amateurism as the engineers grappled with nascent run-flat tyre technology. Sinewy, velvet helms fell victim to the contamination of lumpen, variable ratio Active Steering. Deftly chosen suspension tune drowned beneath a cavalcade of selectable, adaptive technology that seemed to offer the driver everything in choice, and nothing in discernment. And inside, clean, ergonomic simplicity was decluttered and de-complicated to the point of stupefaction through the infernal iDrive. The planners got in on the act, too, seemingly fuelled by an almost Messianic vision to fill new niches with cars so abstract and absurd they would have challenged Jean-Paul Satre himself to give purpose and meaning to their existence. The X6 coupe-cum-SUV? The 5-Series GT coupe-stroke-estate? No. Satre himself noted, Life has no meaning a priori… It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose. It was as though BMW themselves truly believed it possible to ascribe what once gave their cars meaning to convoluted forms that were mere reflections of incessant product planning.
In it all, BMW lost their way, draining the purity out of their brand, dredging it of the heart and character that had so founded the very success on which the company’s fortunes were based. And that culture, that shift, that movement away from what was known, has had a profound impact so far beyond what Bangle, or the engineers, or even the men at the fork in the road meeting of 1991, could have possibly imagined. W. B. Yeats puts it best,
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
I got into the X1 carrying these thoughts. I got in with the knowledge of the mere anarchy that had been loosed upon this company. But knowledge of this blood-dimmed tide makes these transgressions no less sinful, no less painful. The heavy, lumpen steering; blundering, maladroit ride; absurd ergonomics and irreverent, hollow, gimcrack build quality - they confused the mind and puzzled the senses. I wanted to love the X1. I’ve always seen it as a rare glimpse of light within the post-2001 range, who’s modest proportions hid a vehicle of genuine talent - one that in theory combined the best bits of the E90 3 Series with the image and marketing zeal of the otherwise overblown X Models. I saw the X1 as the sweet spot alternative to the drudgery of its competition at the time of its launch in 2009, a car that amongst its peers advertised its BMWness. It said of its owner,
Yes! It was me who bought this machine!
I’m the driver. It was for me!
It was so low for even a quasi-SUV that it barely retained the pretence of imitating one. Its unusual long-nosed, cab-rearward stance so clearly betrayed its longitudinally-engined, rear-wheel-drive configuration that inevitably compromised it pragmatically, but enhanced its innate appeal to drivers. The practical concessions necessitated by its platform sharing with the E90 3 Series of the time, ironically, gave the X1 some conceptual hope. It gave it zest, a USP. It gave it a bit of its BMWness back.
But, on reflection, some of the car’s faults are simply unforgivable. My disappointment lies not in the concept, but the minutia of the execution. The indicator and wiper stalks, for example. Why do they defy intuition? The infernal key and the stupid, stupid, stupid starter button. WHAT WAS WRONG WITH TURNING A FRICKIN KEY? Why must I do two things to start the car now instead of one? Why is the radio unfathomable? Why do the Steptronic gearshift paddles protrude so gormlessly from the steering wheel and operate in a way that rejects every convention of instinctive design? Why does the dashboard sound so hollow when you tap the key against it? Why is there a stupid piece of stuck-on, shitty velcro-dot foam glued to the side of the seat belt clasp? Who the f**k signed off on what must be the world’s cheapest electric mirror controls? Which barely sentient mind thought run-flat tyres were a good idea? Why is the ride so firm? Why the body control so poor? And what possible logic justifies the steering that feels so heavy and lifeless I thought it was broken?
Simple. The fear of complacency. The X1 represents the antithesis of what once made a BMW great, the necrosis of every one of the living cells that made up the subtle handling, pleasurable steering, intuitively designed and ergonomically-centred driver’s cars that anyone - anyone - could appreciate and interact with.
And why? Because this is what became of a company that grew so fearful of its own successful formula, so terrified, that it consciously abandoned the philosophical and characteristic vestiges of its past, to the point where the act of innovation, change, progress, came at the sacrifice of what most understood as greatness. But there is a caveat in this argument. One that offers the merest glimpse into what once was, in a way that is permanently rooted in the present, and essentially an auspice for the future. It is the jewel in the crown of thorns. The quintessence.
The engine. Two litres. Twin turbochargers. Powered by the fuel of Satan himself, it revs with an alacrity that belies its humble diesel origins and deserves absolutely, unequivocally, nothing less than the Blue and White roundel that adorns its head. It’s brilliant in every way, and its affect is best surmised by critic Stephen Parker, in his obituary for the late, brilliant German poet and playwright, Bertolt Brecht. Struck by Sydenham’s chorea, the German suffered throughout his life emotional lability, extreme personality changes, obsessive-compulsive behaviour and hyperactivity. But Brecht’s genius was his capacity to transcend his stupor, as Parker eulogised,
What is remarkable is his capacity to turn abject physical weakness into peerless artistic strength, arrhythmia into the rhythms of poetry, chorea into the choreography of drama.
The X1s engine is Bertolt Brecht, capable of taking what is at times infirm and erratic, and extracting something truly wondrous from it. There’s a prophesy that infers the following: Happiness can be found in even the darkest of times. One only has to remember to turn on the light. Well, flick the 6 speed automatic into Sport, find a smooth ribbon of asphalt and wind up the sledgehammer 400nm of torque, and in the darkness of uncertainty, something truly familiar emerges. Subtly effervescent performance, turbine-esque smoothness and, on the most sinewy, unwrinkled tarmac, a sense of poise, balance, and of self-assured composure. The attributes. The tenets of BMW. They return. In the right moments, they’re there. Somewhere, deep in the X1, there’s that BMW magic, the glorious unflappability and sense of sheer, purposeful power. One just needs to turn on the light.
And that, ultimately, gives us hope. We may now understand why BMW embarked on this most audacious and challenging of philosophical shifts. We may now, with the warped power of retrospect, accept the rationale behind the seemed illogic and decimating improbability of the U-turn of 2001. We might, even, in time, accept the notion that a BMW wracked with the rot of complacency might have damaged the company so much more than the uncertain, difficult, challenging, and vexing era of innovation and change that we got instead. Or maybe we will not really ever know. But what we can see is this: It has not truly left us. That intrinsic BMWness - it’s there, among us, buried deep in the annals of what remains of Bangle’s revolution. It’s there, and it awaits its exhumation. W.B. Yeats understands it thus.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Yes, this company stands at such a juncture. It is waiting, once again, to be born.
