Moments like these don’t arrive every day, and if you ask Adrian van Hooydonk, it’s not every decade either.
“I do think in all my years here at BMW, I’ve never seen a project with more momentum or more impact than this one,” van Hooydonk told Motor1 in an exclusive Design Week interview.
Photo by: BMW
Adrian van Hooydonk (Center) & The BMW Design Team
The imminent launch of BMW’s Neue Klasse EVs demands all this hyperbole. Slated for a 2025 arrival, the Neue Klasse cars have been teased by BMW’s own corporate messaging and online spy shots for more than a year. The camouflaged cars look tantalizing, with angular, funky silhouettes and evocative backlit kidney grilles.
By their dramatically angled rooflines alone, these new cars promise a leap forward in tech and attitude, a ground-up restart for BMW’s EV portfolio, the promise of a new chapter altogether. It’s a landmark moment for the company and a long time coming for van Hooydonk.
“The new design that we are going to show will be 100 percent BMW, maybe 110 percent BMW,” van Hooydonk said. “Because, taking a leaf out of Marcello Gandini’s book… the overall design language is going to be cleaner than what you know from us today, but it is 100 percent recognizable as A BMW.”
Photo by: BMW
BMW Neue Klasse Sedan Prototype
It has to be; Neue Klasse’s importance is evidenced by BMW’s marketing and messaging strategies at present; Never before has a new model line generated such a waterfall of digital Bavarian ink. You’ll find Neue Klasse teasers everywhere from BMW’s social media to this very site.
“So yeah, let’s say this also adds some pressure,” Van Hooydonk said. “We saw at the very early stages of this project that we were basically going to change everything about cars as we know them inside BMW. So from every bit of technology to every bit of design, it’ll be very, very new.”
It’s a critical juncture for the brand, but Van Hooydonk is no stranger to the pressurizes of BMW design. The Dutchman started his journey with BMW back in 1992, following graduation from Delft Polytechnic University with a master’s in industrial design. In the interim, you could say Van Hooydonk’s seen a roundel or two roll off the line.
Photo by: BMW
Photo by: BMW
‘The new design that we are going to show will be 100 percent BMW, maybe 110 percent BMW.”
He currently sits as the BMW Group’s Design Director, earning the mantle after Chris Bangle’s departure from the position in 2009. In this role, Van Hooydonk oversees design work for BMW, Mini, and Rolls-Royce. No pressure.
Many key Bimmers were breathed to life on van Hooydonk’s drafting board, but Neue Klasse offered a design challenge unlike any other. By borrowing the “Neue Klasse” moniker from its own locker, evoking the brand’s infamous sedans like the 1500 and 2002, BMW both faces the future, and pits these “new” Neue Klasse cars against a hallowed, critical chapter in its own history.
Photo by: BMW
The “old” Neue Klasse cars debuted in 1962 and ran for roughly a decade. Sales of these groundbreaking and—at the time—sophisticated sedans arguably saved BMW itself, allowing the firm to turn a profit and to pay back its shareholders for the first time in a decade. Neue Klasse’s success laid groundwork for BMW as we understand it today.
It was a technology and design-driven revolution for the Bavarians. Neue Klasse debuted more than a few cornerstones of 20th-century BMW, including the M10 inline-four, Macpherson strut suspension, and that hallowed design staple, the Hofmeister Kink.
Photo by: BMW
Photo by: BMW
How do you balance all that history and the expectation it demands with an eye to the future? You simply simplify, he said.
“So the effort that we made, or let’s say the exercise that we went through, was ‘How can we bring out the very essence of the BMW brand while using fewer elements, fewer lines, fewer details?’ And I think we will manage that,” van Hooydonk said.
That reduction in complexity, laying lines that are simple and low and angular, has always broadcasted futurism. Earlier in the conversation, van Hooydonk praised Bertone’s Lancia Stratos Zero concept (one of the many great wedge designs). He called the wedge-like Zero a piece of timeless, future-facing design, and argued it’s perhaps the most-beautiful car ever built. (Though BMW’s own E9 coupe and M1 supercar were in the hunt, according to Van Hooydonk).
1970 Bertone Stratos Zero Concept
Upcoming Neue Klasse cars won’t borrow from the Zero’s design explicitly, but will perhaps benefit from a modern take on Bertone’s reductionist philosophy, hewing both more angular and much simpler than recent BMWs.
Van Hooydonk noted that seven generations of BMW 3 Series have already passed since their birth, following the revolutionary Neue Klasse. While some 3 Series designs offered small visual tweaks when a new generation debuted, other generations leapt ahead a great deal.
This forthcoming Neue Klasse, van Hooydonk said, will offer something entirely different.
Photo by: BMW
BMW Neue Klasse Sedan Prototype
“This one will be a big step, and it’ll be such a big step that it almost looks like we jumped one generation. That’s how big the change is going to be,” he said.
While it’s fairly standard to hear designers talk about taking chances, it’s much rarer to see them on the road. BMW, along with Hyundai, are the exceptions to an industry that defaults to malaise, compartmentalizing its risk in low-volume or low-visibility models.
That’s not Van Hooydonk’s BMW; Whatever you think of the 4 Series’s gaping grille, the XM’s challenging bloat, or the 5 Series’s slanted snorty snout, they are brave designs.
Photo by: BMW
‘This one will be a big step, and it’ll be such a big step that it almost looks like we jumped one generation. That’s how big the change is going to be.’
It’s a terrible responsibility, I posited to Van Hooydonk, to be brave in the face of online echo chambers and scathing critic fanboys like myself who have never warmed to the look of the newest M4. Van Hooydonk sees it more like opportunity, deflecting the idea that past scorn would temper any leap forward for BMW design.
“Human nature is such that, if one is confronted with something very new, the first reaction is rarely positive,” he said, meeting my comments about the M4’s grille head-on. “Two years ago, when we launched the 4 Series, we had a lot of [complaints about its grille]… But now that is completely gone. That feedback and the sales of these cars have done really well.”
Photo by: BMW
The M4’s controversial grille
Van Hooydonk was quick to note it wasn’t arrogance speaking. Instead, it was planning, listening, and revision. Each big visual change for the brand faces market research with BMW customers, people who spend their money on BMWs.
By listening to their feedback, he said, BMW has a magic 8-ball’s insight into whether designs will last. Even controversial ones. The process allows van Hooydonk some slack to experiment, for the brand to evolve in dramatic, calculated leaps.
“Now going forward, if we talk about the front end of a BMW in a wider sense, the Neue Klasse will show some interesting new solutions where we are going to replace chrome (accents) with light,” Van Hooydonk said. “I think people will see things that they will undeniably recognize as BMW, even though it’s not like any BMW that they’ve seen before.”
Photo by: BMW
New BMW iX3 Prototype With Neue Klasse Sedan
Though Van Hooydonk’s team is around 700-strong, the Dutchman rides the tip of the spear. Like Bangle before him, van Hooydonk will face the brunt as a figurehead for BMW design, but past criticisms haven’t tempered his ambition for Neue Klasse.
“We may have been around for 110 years, but that’s no guarantee that people will buy our product,” van Hooydonk said. “The only guarantee is that if you want to be a part of the future, you have to shape it for yourself.”
