Words by Robert Percy
The new BMW 4 Series. Where do we start with this car? It’s one that’s been causing an incredible amount of debate ever since the rumours started swirling around that it would get an almost comically enormous kidney grille. Now that the full look of the car’s been revealed to the world, huge kidney grille and all, a lot of enthusiasts have been absolutely horrified by it. To say that I’ve seen some extreme reactions to the new BMW would be a massive understatement. I get why people aren’t a fan of the new design. It does look somewhat ungainly from the front in some aspects. But is it really that bad? I honestly don’t think it is. I genuinely think that the new BMW 4 Series, as a piece of design, is absolutely OK.
Now, before you crucify me and sacrifice me to the automotive gods, please let me explain why. If you ignore the controversial aspects of that front end and have a look at the rest of the exterior design, it looks… OK. It even looks good in certain aspects. It fits in perfectly well with the design direction BMW is going in right now and compliments its 3 Series sibling really well too. Like every other model in the BMW range, it looks like a sleek and modern piece of automotive design. The interior is just like any other BMW too, an ultra-modern swathe of European design that looks like a nice place to be. That’s something that BMW has always been really great at. Making interiors that just look and feel like lovely places to sit in.
The deeply controversial big-mouthed front end looks, at least to me, a lot better with the Cerium Grey surround that you get if you go for the (currently) top of the range M440i xDrive Coupe. The grey grille surround makes it look more like, well… a grille, instead of the deep dark hole you see on lesser 4 Series models. Also (and this is the most crucial “also” here), the grille looks a hell of a lot better when the front number plate is attached. It feels like, unlike the vast majority of car companies, BMW actually thought about where the front number plate was going to be positioned and properly designed that massive kidney grille so the front number plate would act like a design element that actually breaks up the otherwise massive void of space. Whilst this works fantastically for cars in most markets, we’ll have to wait and see how it’s going to look on US and Japanese-spec cars where the shape of their front numberplates is quite different. Hopefully, it’ll still look OK…
I think the biggest gripe above all I have with complaints about the new BMW 4 Series, however, is how ridiculous the reactions have been. So many enthusiasts have been out all over the internet in droves decrying the death of BMW’s design. As soon as the design was fully revealed and the first pictures of production cars came through I saw journalist after journalist and influencer after influencer reacting violently to the new design. The sheer amount of backlash actually really annoyed me. Whilst a lot of ‘it’s trendy to hate this’ trends really annoy me anyway, this is one that got on my nerves a lot more than others have in recent years and that’s because when you take into account what I’ve said above regarding the design of the new 4 Series, the hate is pretty much baseless. In a lot of ways, it feels like a repeat of when the first cars of the Chris Bangle-era surfaced and people immediately went running for the hills because they didn’t like the creases and proportions of Bangle’s new “flame surfacing” design language. Whilst Bangle’s BMW designs were pretty controversial at the time, now? People are OK with them. Seriously.
Whilst that may be partly because a lot of those early Bangle-designed BMWs are bargains now, there is a genuine point here. People massively overreacted to the new designs at first, but after a while they grew to be OK with them. People don’t like change. I get it. Change can be very scary, especially when it’s change that involves a long-running and beloved car and car maker. But, change is inevitable. It always happens. Car companies will change their design teams every so often and, with those changes, they’ll come up with a new design language to suit where the company is going in the future. That is just how car companies work and how design works in general.
Here’s another thing though that you might not have realised, but I feel it deserves talking about because it is related to what I have to say about the new 4 series. BMW does not build cars for influencers. BMW does not build cars for journalists. BMW doesn’t even really build cars for enthusiasts either, despite what the marketing might tell you. No big car company builds cars for any of those groups really, except for a small pool of performance models designed for those who really like driving. BMW builds these cars for people who just want a nice, solid, comfortable and reliable car to cruise about their day. These people don’t care as much as you do about styling or how well it turns into the apexes. So stop thinking that your opinion as a journalist or an influencer or whatever else you may be is the be-all and end-all and that BMW will definitely listen to what you have to say and immediately change the entire front end of a car they’ve likely spent years designing and developing. Not everything ends up like the live-action Sonic The Hedgehog movie where they delayed the entire film by several months just to re-design Sonic’s face. Stop expecting that it will. Maybe, at some point, a tuning company will develop a new front end with a more aesthetically-pleasing grille, much like Revenant Automotive did for the current-generation Aston Martin Vantage, but that could be a while away if it even ever happens. For now, you’re just going to have to grin and bear it.