It’s easy to spot a designer in a crowd of German car industry execs. Every man in the group wears the same grey Hugo Boss suits and all have short, trimmed and combed hair.
Except for the designer. His hair is usually wild, long, and maybe spiky. Look for brightly coloured socks peeking out from slightly too-short-trousers. The wristwatch is likely a neon Swatch, Bauhaus Braun or vintage chronograph. The suit will stand out in that sea of grey.
To spot a designer then is a simple game of Which One Does Not Belong?
Finding Achim-Dietrich Badstubner was easy. Mercedes’ head of exterior design was the only company man on the launch of the new GLE sporting a ponytail. He wore a tailored suit over a T-shirt which matched his socks. He looked like a man you’d trust to design your car.
“We’re not artists. We’re designers. There’s a big difference,” Badstubner said over lunch. “As a designer, you’re bound in a company. Our job is to be creative within borders. And, to me, that makes it much more interesting: you have to always re-invent the wheel – we’re always making new wheels.”
Badstubner and his design team signed off on the new lineup up GLE SUVs nearly two years ago and have moved on to other projects. But seeing their creation, finally, in the real world, was special.
“It’s like seeing an old friend,” Badstubner said.
The 2016 GLE is a refresh of the popular M-Class. The GLE Coupe however is an all-new car. Mercedes has never built anything like it before. Badstubner walked us through the design process for a new vehicle:
At the first meetings, about four years before production starts, basic questions are asked: where will the car be built, how big will it be, how many people will it carry? The advanced design department – a separate unit to Badstubner’s – works with strategy and marketing people to determine answers. Then, a brief comes down to to the exterior design department.
What was the project brief for the GLE? Badstubner struggles to remember. It was three-and-a-half years ago. “Something for more lifestyle oriented people, stylish, elegant, coupe-ish look, double income. …”
The brief includes a “strategic customer,” the platonic ideal buyer for any new car. Then “we start sketching with a blank piece of paper.”
Everyone in the exterior design department sketches concepts, creating what is effectively a contest among the designers.
Badstubner’s exterior design team consists of 35 people; about 40 per cent are Germans with the rest coming from all over the world. This is important, Badstubner said, because people from different backgrounds will have different ideas about what those strategic customers will want.
“For [the GLE Coupe], there were proposals with a more raked, fastback roof and some with more tailgate. There were endless variations. We landed somewhere in the middle.”
The best sketches get built into 1/4-scale clay models. Of the eight or so scale models, three or four are chosen to be digitally scanned and milled at full size.
Designers then begin to work heavily with the engineering departments to get the shape in production-viable form. In the case of the GLE, it meant lengthening the wheelbase by 30 mm to accommodate a future plug-in hybrid version. Dubbed GLE 500e, it should go on sale in Canada after gas and diesel variants arrive in the the fall.
The hybrid turned out to be great for the design, too. “The longer wheelbase actually made the proportions even better,” Badstubner said. “That long hood gives it the ‘Mercedes look.’ The cab is pushed backward.”
After a series of almost endless tweaks, the design is frozen about two years before production.
Fast forward to the present and this is the first time Badstubner has seen the finished car on the road.
The way cars look depends so much on context, something you can only imagine in a design studio, he said. “Sometimes you get surprised,” he said. “It looks much stronger than I expected. In traffic, yeah, it’s looking really strong in downtown Munich.”
How well did Badstubner and his exterior design team do on Mercedes-Benz’s latest SUV? They’ll find out once consumers begin voting with their wallets, when the GLE and GLE Coupe arrive in Canada in the third quarter of 2015.
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