BMW design boss on the new i3: "I’ve had 30 years preparing for this car"

“The 3 Series,” says Adrian van Hooydonk, “is the essence of BMW. It’s about driving, sportiness and elegance, combined in a relatively compact format. The 5 Series is geared more towards autobahn driving. The 7 Series looks like you could go fast but don’t really need to. The 3 Series is about agility and precision. It’s always moving even when it isn’t.”

It’s also the very definition of a heartland car – for its maker, and for most of us. Van Hooydonk, the BMW Group design director, owns an E21 316, the first generation 3 Series, and a car that somehow looks fresher with every passing year. Especially painted orange, as his example is. That and its early Sixties forbear, the original Neue Klasse, are two lodestars on BMW’s 110-year journey, so it’s no accident they’ve been invoked as the company unveils – after years of conceptual preparation and clever comms – the new i3.

This is the biggest of big deals, as we know, and there is a sense of history being made. Yes, everyone says that, but today it might actually be true. CEO Oliver Zipse receives a two minute standing ovation as he arrives in the arena (usually a basketball venue), a rousing moment that’s reminiscent of the fervour that greeted the late Steve Jobs. A clever strategist and clear thinker, Zipse has helped navigate the company through the perilous pivot to electrification without the shocking fiscal pain the upside down car world has inflicted on virtually every other big legacy name.

Partly, it must be said, because BMW called it right by remaining ‘technology open’; petrol, diesel, plug-in hybrid, BEV and hydrogen fuel cells are all in play for the forseeable. The new iX3 is also a hit, so much so that the plant in Debrecen, Hungary where it’s manufactured is running double shifts to meet demand. This is the EV that nukes any lingering doubts you might have about fitting one into your life.

But it’s also proof that the design strategy is working. Good job, too, because 40 new or revised models are heading rapidly along the product pipeline, X5, refreshed 7 Series and ICE 3 Series among them, all bearing the new NK imprimatur. TopGear.com grabbed 20 minutes with Van Hooydonk, for a debrief, update and a double espresso. It had been a long day.

TopGear.com: Do you feel a sense of relief? The i3 is finally here…

Adrian van Hooydonk: We started communicating the Neue Klasse before the first car was completely finished. And we had the iX3, 3 Series and others all happening in parallel. So the last four years has been very intense because we were basically doing the entire line-up simultaneously. That’s not something that happens very often. Actually, it brought the design and engineering groups and the marketing team very close together.

It was like the BMW i days [that resulted in the original i3 and i8], only bigger because we had more to do. But there was the same spirit of starting something completely new.

Is this a career high for you?

In a way, I’ve had 30 years preparing for this car. And that’s what I told my team. Everything we did before was good preparation. Of course, we’ve done a few generations of 3 Series already so I certainly didn’t have to explain what makes a 3 Series. The previous i cars and the iX were stepping stones, but the world is changing so fast that we felt encouraged to make a bigger leap still.

The research was less about electric mobility. We felt OK on that, we know charging times are going to improve, range is going improve, and we know how to deal with proportion on an electric car. We figured out that the digital thing was the harder thing to integrate into a car made for people that love driving. That became the focus of the programme.

You’ve really pushed the double kidney grille…

The grille on the i3 is actually a glass surface, like a modern electronic device, and when it lights up it comes alive. But what got us to this point was a desire to reduce the number of parts, sustainability and circularity being among our goals. We wanted to simplify things. Some brands are illuminating their logo in various colours, but we decided not to do that.

It’s vertical on X models, and we looked at doing that on the i3. But I felt that the whole brand would have become rather narrow if we had. It would have taken us back to the Seventies, but we’re making far more cars now and selling them to a wider variety of customers. Proportionally, if you want the car to appear low and sporty, the horizontal treatment is better.

Is the new design philosophy across the board? By which I mean, less market-specific.

It’s a global design language. We’re taking two steps rather than one, it’s not evolutionary. But we’re not breaking with our past. It’s modern, but you also need to demonstrate that you know where you’re coming from.

How are you with ‘software-defined’ cars?

Customers don’t really love every software update that they’re forced to make, so this is now the challenge – to get all that stuff right before you deliver to the customer, though you can obviously do some updates.

And how is AI impacting your work?

In design, our work is still the same. There’s software in the background, not the foreground. There’s no software that will tell me what to do, and we still have to be creative. Yes, we use tools, and you can move faster now from a sketch to an animation, build a city context around even a rough sketch. But it’s what you put in that dictates the outcome.

AI won’t change the fact that you need creativity and a good eye. Of course, I see stuff happening out there, and I can see if there’s a good designer behind it.

The Panoramic iDrive has been well received and works beautifully. What did you think of the Ferrari Luce interior?

I have tremendous respect for Jony [Ive] and Marc [Newson], they’re incredible designers. As for the interior we saw, it’s pretty much what I would have expected them to do if they’d done a car at Apple. There’s a mix between soft and hard keys. From what I can tell, you use a hard key and then something happens on the screen. We’ll have to wait to find out more.

I think that’s going to be a trend, and we always wanted to keep a couple of hard keys, like the toggle switches in the Mini, and as BMW does in the centre console of its cars. I’m relieved by this direction, because it confirms our thinking. I’m quite sure that when Ferrari does something, and those guys do something, the industry as a whole will take note.