Spannerhead Dot Com

This is a joke, right?

BMW wants to spearhead new automotive technology. Okay.

They want to be at the forefront of the eco-car trend. Fine.

But a self-driving car from the automaker synonymous with driver engagement? You’ve got to be kidding.

Alternate title for this post: Worst idea ever, or simply worst acronym ever? BMW’s ConnectedDrive Connect (CDC) system festoons an unsuspecting, innocent BMW with an array of sensors, cursing the vehicle with a kind of unwanted self-awareness as it navigates its own way through traffic, crosswalks and city centers.

Particularly in BMW’s case, given the erstwhile emphasis of their cars, but overall, I simply fail to see the purpose of the self-driving car. Is it to make us more safe? If so, it’s difficult to perceive how dangling a kind of electronic sword of Damocles between the driver and sudden, high-speed death would make him any safer. That’s asking us to place an awful lot of faith in our digital overlords, so to speak. Is it, as with the PDA or smartphone, to unburden us from one of our daily “chores” and so enable us to relax and/or be more productive? If that’s the goal, then again, you’re asking a lot of the occupant-of-the-car-formerly-known-as-the-driver to place complete and utter faith in the vehicle’s electronic helmsmen to point where he will be able to relax enough to, well, relax and/or focus on other tasks. I, for one, would be a white-knuckle basket case at Autobahn speeds.

Here’s an idea, BMW: How about spending the money otherwise allocated to the CDC program on dealership-based driver’s ed courses? It would save development resources on the cars themselves, make the eventual buyers better, safer drivers and teach them to appreciate the finer points of what makes driving a BMW such a sublime experience More people than you think actually crave the responsibility of driving a car, especially one of yours.

No, not the concept car shown above, gamboling through the forests even as it saves them; the actual production vehicle has been spied testing, draped in camouflage.

The Car and Driver post linked to makes a few perceptive observations based on what’s apparent underneath the camo, among them that the concept’s full-length glass doors will be toned down in favor of more conventional openings, and that the proportions and details certainly look more real-world friendly even as the mule retains many of the concept’s more outré elements, such as active aero and butterfly doors.

Any casual Spannerhead reader will be aware of my skepticism toward the current trendiness of alternative propulsion, but in the case of BMW, if they’re going to do this, as it were, they’re doing it well. By sequestering their hyper-efficient “city car” (the i3) and more ambitious foray into hybrid performance (the i8) in their own separate sub-brand—BMW i—the automaker’s uncompromising performance image remains more untarnished than it would otherwise. Note that I didn’t say completely unsullied; the pillars the brand is established on have definitely taken a hit with all the talk of FWD and V6-powered cars, but keeping the new propulsion technology corralled in its own area is step in the right direction. It liberates us BMW loyalists, frees us to actually express interest in the i8 without being tempted to dismiss the whole endeavor out of hat as an unsupportable selling-out of the BMW legacy. I, for one, am eager to see the finished product.

It’s not a coupe. It just isn’t.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines the word coupe thusly: “A closed two-door automobile.” The picture above certainly shows a two-door non-convertible, but I’m pretty sure there are two more doors on the other side, and if my math is correct, that would make for a total of four. Logic is an unyielding discipline, and if we’re to apply its principles, it would seem to dictate that in spite of its name, the new BMW 6 series Gran Coupe cannot, axiomatically, be a coupe.

And neither can any of the other entrants in the so-called “4-door coupe” market segment, a niche which has exploded since the introduction of the first-generation Mercedes CLS in ’04. In addition to the CLS, the Volkswagen CC, Tesla Model S, Aston Martin Rapide, Porsche Panamera and Audi A7 have all preceded the BMW Gran Coupe, making the Bavarian entry a little late to the party, but no less incorrect in its claims of coupe-ness.

Now, it should be noted that, other than the Panamera, I have absolutely no problem with the cars listed above. They inject a healthy dose of style into a market segment that threatens to be very dull indeed. In a way, it’s understandable—part of the traditional purpose of the sports sedan has always been to allow middle-aged family men to have a little fun on the long way home from work and impress prospective clients with discreet, understated style during the work day. Lately, though, it seems otherwise staid businessmen have decided they want a bit more frosting with their cake—forget all that “sleeper” stuff—hence the exponential growth of the segment. And that’s fine. All the cars (exception noted above), and especially the Rapide and A7, are absolutely stunning, and sparkling performers as well. Even the Gran Coupe actually looks better than its two-door counterpart, what with the 4-door’s more pleasing proportions and assertive front valence. Looks and speed: Win-win.

So…what makes me take issue with this trend now? Simply put, BMW is the first automaker to blatantly thumb their nose at accepted vehicle vocabulary and explicitly include the word coupe in a 4-door car’s name. It’s one thing if you market your car as a “four-door coupe” in glossy brochure descriptions and press releases; automakers always wax flowery when pitching their wares. But a line is crossed from enthusiasm to arrogance when a manufacturer attempts to actively impose a kind of redefinition by including an accepted term in the name of a car that clearly falls outside the boundaries of that term. Bad form, BMW.

Turns out rumors of a new triple-turbo engine under development for the next BMW M3 may not have been entirely accurate. As it happens, the turbocharger arrangement may be destined instead for their new all-wheel-drive, diesel-powered 550dX. Adding a first-ever-for-a-production-car third turbo to the mix is ambitious enough, but then to fasten the resulting assembly to a diesel engine? And offer the resulting car only with AWD? Isn’t that level of initial complexity just asking for trouble on BMW’s part?

Autoweek elaborates a bit on the details:

The radical new engine, which is rumored to use two traditional exhaust-blown turbochargers in combination with an electrically driven turbocharger to add low-end response, is planned to be offered exclusively with an eight-speed automatic gearbox and four-wheel drive.

Being the ostensibly rational, sensibly German company they are, it’s virtually beyond question BMW have a sound engineering justification for cramming so much mechanism into one car beyond just headline-grabbing “shock value.” That being the case, I’m eager to hear them explain themselves. The piping diagram between the manifolds, intercooler(s) and turbo is going to be rival a map of the London Underground, I’ve no doubt. For this exercise, in the interest of science, I’ll shelve my longstanding bone to pick with BMW’s new engineering direction. I’m genuinely curious to hear the whys and wherefores.

Yep, I’m taking it on. After months of putting it off, I’m finally going to unload both pent-up barrels in the direction of one of Chris Bangle‘s notorious creations: The ’03-’10 BMW 6-series, or E63.

I include this in my Sophomore Slumps series in spite of the 14-year gap between the departure of the original E24 6-series and the arrival of the E63 because in spite of minor refreshes, the first-generation car remained basically the same throughout its ’76-’89 model run. So although the E63 didn’t carry over a single part from the E24 except for the 6-series name, the consistency of the earlier car and their broadly similar target markets means the more recent car is properly the second generation.

The E63 bears the unfortunate distinction of being one of five BMWs closely associated with Chris Bangle’s early-’00s tenure as the automaker’s design director. Whether or not he’s directly responsible for the production car’s shape, it embodies his design philosophy, and he vigorously defended it when it encountered the inevitable criticism. So he owns it. It will be said the derision from the automotive community wasn’t nearly as harsh as was heaped on its immediate predecessor, the breathtakingly ugly E65 7-series, but I suspect most of the comments the E63 received could have been filed in the “damning with faint praise” category; in other words, automotive design pundits were simply relieved it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

But is it a beautiful car? Is it a classic shape, a style icon the way the E24 6-series was? I’ll let you draw your own conclusions, but allow me to note a few observations about the two generations, individually and in contrast to each other:

• The proportions are totally wrong. In contrast to the earlier car, with its near-perfect visual mass distribution in profile, the E63 looks like a blob, a jellybean. There’s no tension in the shape, and certainly nothing to distinguish it from the throngs of egg-shaped Accords and Camrys on the freeway. And isn’t the point of owning a luxury coupe to distinguish yourself from the crowd?
• The nose is a disaster. The trademark BMW kidneys are nothing more than holes punched in a rounded fascia surmounted by chrome milk mustaches, and the blocky, oddly-shaped headlights do nothing to help the cause. The original 6-series featured a beautiful-sculpted, distinctive shark nose.
• The rear is a catastrophe. A prime example of the notorious “Bangle Butt,” the visual-separated trunklid surface fusses up what should be a sleek, clean going-away view.
• The whole car looks cheap. Chunky, geometric, computer-generated—these are the adjectives that apply to the E63’s details. Where the E24’s styling looks hand-drawn (as it was) and is a feast of jewel-like minutia, the second-generation car looks positively cartoon-like—a wholly inappropriate feel for a prestige model.

The E63 6-series was a mess, and its model run lasted far, far too long. It may have had the moves, especially in fire-breathing, 500-hp M6 guise, but it was always a car automotive journalists and car buffs alike seemed to have to talk themselves into liking visually, if they even bothered to attempt praise at all. It was an unworthy torch-bearer of the 6-series legacy, and has thankfully been replaced by a far more aesthetically-pleasing—though not perfect—shape in the 2011+ 6-series, the F13.

Editor’s note: This post is part of an ongoing series highlighting cars whose second generation failed to live up to the promise of the first. Read the other installments here:

• Series 2 Jaguar E-Type
• ’01-’10 Lexus SC430

I absolutely guarantee you that if I had known about any of these cars in the ’80s, a poster of one would have been immediately fixed to my bedroom wall. Forget that white Lamborghini Countach garbage; the customized German and Italian beauties featured on this site are where it’s at.

Or was at. The site is fascinating as a time capsule of ’80s car fashion as much as it is a showcase of the customizers’ talents. Tire and wheel technology being far less advanced than it is today, relatively small-diameter but massively wide tires steamroll underneath grotesquely swollen wide-body conversions. Most colors have a pastel or day-glo quality, and any additional electronics look like they were lifted from a Radio Shack catalog circa 1985.

That said, the highlights of the site’s “collection” are too numerous to list in a concise manner, so I’ll just call out a few. The AMG 300E “Hammer” shown above is noteworthy for the “period” model selected to pose with the car. The Koenig and Gemballa Testarossas arguably improve on the stock car’s lines by getting rid of the side vents’ strakes. The Porsche 930-based Gemballa Avalanche (shown at top) and Mirage are awesome to behold, and the rainbow-pattern on the Buchmann 928 Targa’s seats is a nice touch, as are the location of the stereo controls (!).

As a former BMW E24 6-series owner, I was particularly drawn to the ABC Exclusive E24 convertible. It’s so well done and the car looks so sleek it makes me wonder why BMW didn’t contemplate a factory version.

Left Lane reports today BMW’s performance M division is lobbying its parent company for the green light to develop a bespoke sports car:

According to the head of product development for the M division at BMW, Albert Biermann, speaking with Inside Line, his team is itching to have a crack at building a unique model from the ground up, totally unique from anything in the BMW lineup.

This of course would follow the same suit as the SLS, turned out by AMG, which one can only assume is the fueling factor for why the M folks would like a shot at a one-off car themselves. The only thing holding the project back? Money of course, “We’ve discussed it several times but we’ve never been able to make the business case. Everything we do has to make money.”

Aside from the unfocused and short-lived ’99-’03 Z8, among German automakers, Porsche, Mercedes and Audi have had the high-end halo car performance segment all to themselves for the last 30 years. It’s an open question why BMW hasn’t made a foray into that segment since the classic ’78-’81 M1, especially since they haven’t shied away from other niches like SUVs (X3, X5) and crossovers (X6, 5-series GT). What’s been holding them back? Does BMW feel their existing model lineup projects enough of a performance image to render a flagship model superfluous? Or were they so badly burned by the M1 experience—in spite of the fact that the actual car was quite good—that they swore off the supercar segment indefinitely?

In any case, I can’t think of downside to BMW turning their in-house tuning shop loose to build the supercar of their dreams—unless it ends up looking like the hokey ’08 M1 Homage concept car pictured above. There’s nothing original or attractive about the M1 Homage; it simply takes all the styling cues of the classic car and exaggerates them into oblivion, like a caricature drawing. Part of what made the M1 such a stunner—in spite of the somewhat awkward side proportions necessitated by the long mid-mounted straight-6 engine—was its Germanic restraint, especially in the era when Ferrari and Lamborghini were actively trying to one-up each other in the flamboyance of their supercars’ styling. The original M1 stood apart, not only for its tailored good looks, but also for its ease of use, a quality which prompted James May to call it “the first truly user-friendly supercar.” BMW M is late to the game, and the upper-crust performance car niche is more saturated now than it was then, but if they can distinguish themselves with restraint and understatement design-wise and focus on polishing the dynamics to a high degree, a new M1 has the potential to elevate the brand significantly.

Arguably the biggest car news of the year, BMW last Friday unveiled their 6th-generation 3-series, the 2012 F30. Every previous generation has represented the template, the high-water mark for sports sedans during its reign, so expectations are somewhat lofty for the new arrival.

With the F30, there are dozens of new features and attributes to consider; tonight, though, let’s ignore the mechanical and electronic and focus on curb appeal, or the styling of the new bread-and-butter BMW.

The nose. Probably the most-discussed aspect of the new car’s design are the unprecedented “tear ducts” connecting the headlights with the trademark “kidney” grilles. This element seems to serve two purposes: It draws its inspiration from recent BMW concept cars like their i8 EV, so is forward-looking in that respect, and it also hints at more classic BMW fascia styling, e.g. the ’80s E30, whose kidneys and headlights were embedded in a large rectangular grille. More questionably, it seems to inject a dose of “squinting” anthropomorphism into what was one of the most refreshingly non-human automotive visages in the business. At least the car doesn’t look happy. Goodness knows how that would have gone down.

The rear. Easily the most conservative angle of the car. An amalgam of the previous generation’s refreshed rump and BMW’s new F10 5-series, there’s absolutely nothing groundbreaking about the taillight area. We get a slightly higher trunk line than on the outgoing model, putting a bit more wedge into the profile, and the lights are arranged in BMW’s classic L-shape, nicely framing the car’s athletic tush. Considering recent BMW trunk disasters like the E63 and E65 “Bangle-butts” and the pre-refresh E90’s “clenched” rear end, I think we should all breathe a sigh of relief over the F30’s treatment.

The proportions and other details. My favorite styling attribute to discuss, and an area where BMW has traditionally excelled, the proportions are the car’s most successful design quality. In profile, where the distribution of visual masses is most easily distinguished, there are a couple of noteworthy changes from the previous-generation 3-series. First, the front overhang is more pronounced. The preceding three iterations of BMW’s 3-series—the E36, E46 and E90—featured front wheels that were pushed as far forward as possible, the front overhang becoming little more than a glorified fender holding the lights and grille. This benefited agility by lowering the polar moment of inertia around the car’s center of gravity, but it made for somewhat awkward wheel arch placement in profile. With the F30, the relationship between various areas of sheetmetal on the side of the car is normalized, creating a very harmonious effect.

The second significant deviation from its predecessor’s design resides in the angle of the nose. Pleasingly, it’s more upright, following its bigger brother the F13 6-series by moving in the direction of another classic BMW styling trademark, the sharknose. It’s an aggressive, distinctive nose treatment that subtly highlights the car’s RWD bias by suggesting that the styling doesn’t have to be stretched tight over an engine hanging out in front of the axle line. It gives the overall aspect of the profile a ready, forward lean—the car is set to lunge ahead, to attack the turns. Well done indeed.

The interior. As with the rear end, the interior is nothing more than an evolutionary update of the previous generation’s. The trademark driver-angled, wide center console is present, as are the quad of analog gauges in the cluster. As conservative as it all is, the steering wheel of the M-Sport trim package (shown above) deserves special mention for looking especially bionic, attractive and, well, grasp-able. I feel like I need to sheath my hands in some sort of Tron-like exoskeletal gloves before I wrap my fingers around it. Very cool.

From a design standpoint, then, BMW did exactly what they needed to do to move the car forward, and nothing they didn’t. The F30 is a remarkably well-executed effort. Styling-wise, the BMW 3-series is dead, long live the BMW 3-series.

In anticipation of the Friday reveal of the upcoming BMW F30 3-series, the Bavarian automaker released a series of videos commemorating the history of the 3-series.

I suspect BMW’s intent is to remind the automotive world of the new car’s rich lineage and reinforce the 3-series’ status as the archetypical sports sedan. For many enthusiasts, though, the series of videos may backfire, reminding them instead of additional bloat and complexity of each succeeding generation. And as promising as the F30 looks visually—essentially a 75% version of the very attractive, recently-released F10 5-series—the signs don’t point to a letup in the rate of feature addition or overall convolution. The new 3-series looks like it will be at least as electronically-enveloped as its larger brother the F10, and that’s saying a lot.

The larger question here is: Why does BMW do it? Why does a car company ostensibly focused on the quality of the driving experience, the elemental connection of the driver with the road, insist on cramming so much technology into their cars? It’s not the first time the criticism has been leveled at the automaker, either—the electronic layering of the ’02 E63 7-series and ’04 E60 5-series, just to cite two of several examples, was very poorly received, even if the fundamentals of the cars’ chassis and engines were very well done. Granted, BMW isn’t the only manufacturer to stuff its cars to the gills with the latest doodads and geegaws. But they do tend to receive a proportionally larger amount of criticism for it compared to say, Mercedes or Lexus. So why does BMW feel the heat? Or is that my own skewed perception, being a part of the BMW-specific community as an owner and enthusiast? Your thoughts?