Chris Bangle’s cars illustrated by him

After moving to Fiat, Bangle realised one of his most famous creations, the Coupé, in 1994. A vigorous and aggressive car. Many will remember it for a curious detail, the large aluminium fuel filler cap that stood out from the body. “I am very happy about this car, I still like it a lot”, Bangle says, who tell us an interesting anecdote. “I was watching a film with Peter Fonda, Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, when at some point I saw a shot of the Dodge Charger from above, which is almost a co-star of the film. The camera flies over the car going back and forth and I stopped the video recorder and watched that scene I do not know how many times to get a good look at that huge gas cap clearly visible on the body”. Other interesting details include the bonnet and part of the front fenders that lift up together (“But I had thought of it in aluminium and opening forward”, the designer admits), the rear lights recessed into the body of the ‘Ferrary style’ car and the ‘double bubble’ front lights that looked like a woman’s breast. “When Ermanno Cressoni, then director of Centro Stile Fiat, presented the car, an engineer asked him: ‘How do you wash these headlights?’, his reply was ‘With love, engineer. With love’”. 

In the 1990s Bangle became head of design at BMW and revolutionised the brand. One of his first works, designed by the young Chris Chapman, was the BMW X5, a SUV destined to become a symbol for the Munich company. “At the time, Chapman was a young, innocent American – he laughs – I remember he came into the G-Studio in Turin with sketches and models, a lot of stuff... In front of him was a team of experts who simply asked him: ‘do the line of the windscreen, the one that joins it to the bonnet’. He was astonished, he did not understand, but in reply they said, ‘That is the starting point, if you get that line right everything else follows’. The idea that a single line could determine the whole design of a car left the poor Chapman dumbstruck”. Created at the time of the Munich-based company’s takeover of the Rover Group, the first X5 was intended to meet motorists’ demands for multi-purpose, spacious cars without the limitations of traditional ones or the overbearingness of off-road vehicles. “The ingenious solution was to make people sit up high but keep the heavy components down – Bangle recalls –. So, the weight is all down, the road holding is excellent and comfort is guaranteed. The litmus test came during a test drive. A journalist told me that she had come in and found nothing unusual in the car, but then fell to the ground when she got out, because she had not realised how high she was sitting. She just did not notice it”. 

In the mid-1990s came the real breakthrough. Bangle designed the 7 Series and then the 5 Series, revolutionising their lines. Too much according to the enthusiasts of the time (“It was the first break with tradition and it provoked anger”, the designer recalls) who even signed a petition calling for his dismissal. A request that fortunately fell on deaf ears, since we can still see references to that revolution of twenty years ago. “At that time, we created a new design strategy called ‘bookends’ – Bangle says –. Imagine a bookcase with a lot of volumes, each one stands for a different BMW. On the one hand there is a bookend based on pure surfaces as the Gina and Z4, on the other on pure volume, like the Z9 GT. In the middle there is the 5 Series E60, a car that had to be balanced in terms of innovation, surfaces and volume”. A car with a tragic history. “We had decided to eliminate Davide Arcangeli’s model from the competition – the designer says – but during the night he had modified everything, redoing the shapes with aluminium kitchen foil because it was late and he had no other materials available. When we reviewed the model, we immediately put it back in the race. The model eventually won and became the E60, but the story ended tragically because Davide took ill and died a few days after I informed him that he was the father of a new BMW. Here Bangle is moved by the memory of the design genius who was born in Rimini in 1970 and died prematurely in 2000. “Since then, nobody has wanted to change anything in the car and even today I receive emails that, twenty years later, still define the 5 Series as an avant-garde car”.  

Closing is dedicated to Bangle’s latest car, the REDS, a prototype unveiled at the LA Auto Show in 2017, eight years after the BMW.  Signed together with Pietro Nume, Matteo Mariuzzo, Sara Petrucci, Marco Rosso, Matteo Barale, Atsuhiko Yamada and Swantja Roessner, this small city car strikes the eye for its negative, downward-sloping windscreen, but the real novelty is conceptual. “It completely changes the concept of mobility”, the designer states. “In many countries, and particularly in China, which the REDS is dedicated to, cars are only driven for 10% of their lives. We wanted to give meaning to the remaining 90%”. The idea is to have a space all to yourself, to be with someone, to change your baby’s nappy, to relax, to read (etc.) REDS is a personal space on wheels. It is a space for living that has decided to be a car. In terms of design, Bangle explains, “REDS looks like a normal, naïve car, as if it had been designed by a child. Only after you realise there is something strange about it, with that upside-down windscreen, and that it is much bigger inside than you expect. But above all, as soon as you see it, it makes you happy.