Press Release

Bruno Sacco: Shaping the face of the brand

• Mercedes-Benz design under Bruno Sacco
• The Automotive Hall of Fame salutes the great designer
• “A Mercedes-Benz will always look like a Mercedes-Benz.”

Vita Bruno Sacco

Bruno Sacco was born in Udine, Italy, on November 12, 1933. After training in Tarvisio and Udine, he enrolled at the polytechnic high school in Turin, where a study period at Ghia provided him with early experience in the field of body design. He later took on a number of smaller orders for both Ghia and Pininfarina. Bruno Sacco’s career at Daimler-Benz began in 1958. As stylist and designer he was involved in various projects under the supervision of Karl Wilfert, Friedrich Geiger and Béla Barényi, including the Mercedes-Benz 600 and the 230 SL roadster. In addition, he was made project leader for the design of the safety exhibitions of the day as well as the so-called “test labs on wheels”, the C 111-I and C 111-II experimental vehicles. In 1970 Sacco became Head of the Body Design and Dimensional Drawing department at Daimler-Benz. Under his aegis this period saw the development of the ESF (Experimental Safety Vehicle) prototypes and the 123 series.

In 1975 and now bearing the title Senior Engineer, Bruno Sacco took over as successor to Friedrich Geiger as Head of the Styling Department and from then on played a vital part in shaping the overall appearance of Mercedes-Benz passenger cars. The key stages of this gradual formal evolution were the record-breaking C 111-III diesel (1978) and the W 126-series S-Class (1979). In 1978 Sacco was appointed Head of the Styling Department. In 1987 the Board of Management appointed him Director of the Design Department, and in 1993 in his function as Head of Design he became a member of the company’s Board of Directors. In this capacity Bruno Sacco also assumed a mandated role for the design of products for the Commercial Vehicle Division. In March 1999, after 41 years service with Mercedes-Benz design, Bruno Sacco handed over leadership of the department to Peter Pfeiffer.

During the years he worked at Daimler-Benz Bruno Sacco received numerous personal awards:

• 1981: Honorary member of the Academia Mexicana de Diseño
• 1991: Received the title Grande Ufficiale dell’Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana
• 1993: Winner of the Cover Award – Auto & Design, Turin
• 1993: Awarded the Premio Mexico 1994 – Patronato Nacional de las Asociaciones de Diseño AC, Mexico
• 1994: Winner of the Apulia Award for Professional Achievement
• 1996: Voted Best Designer by Car magazine
• 1996: Voted Designers’ Designer by Car magazine
• 1997: Winner of the Lifetime Design Achievement Award, Detroit
• 1997: Presented with the Raymond Loewy Designer Award by the Lucky Strike brand
• 2002: Honorary doctorate from the Udine University, Italy.

Automotive Hall of Fame - A celebration of automotive progress

On October 18, 1939, a group of high-ranking decision-makers representing the automotive industry met in New York to set up an institution to honor automotive achievements. The organization was given the name Automobile Old Timers and was established in part as a memorial to the pioneers of the age of the automobile, but also to honor contemporary personalities connected with the automotive industry. This circle of worthies was later expanded to include all outstanding thinkers who have played a part in the global development of the car. Since then the institution has celebrated all those who have made decisive contributions to the automotive industry.

In 1960 the Automobile Old Timers organization moved to Washington, D.C., then in 1971 to Midland, Michigan, about 55 miles (90 km) north of Detroit, where in 1975 it became a permanent institution open to the public. Soon afterwards the organizers realized that their organization should be close to Detroit, the focal point of the American car industry. So on August 15, 1997, the Automotive Hall of Fame was opened at its present location in Dearborn, Michigan.

The number of personalities currently honored in the Automotive Hall of Fame runs to almost 200. They include Béla Barényi, Karl Benz, Robert Bosch, Ettore Bugatti, Louis Chevrolet, Walter P. Chrysler, André Citroën, Gottlieb Daimler, the brothers John Francis and Horace Elgin Dodge, William Durant, Enzo Ferrari, Henry Ford, Soichiro Honda, Wilhelm Maybach, Armand Peugeot, Ferdinand Porsche and Kiichiro Toyota.

The Automotive Hall of Fame in Dearborn is the world’s largest institution dedicated to celebrating creative achievements in the world of international automotive design. Each year the facility attracts over 30,000 visitors who come to admire its avantgarde architecture and to learn about the personalities featured here, their life work and technological advances in the automotive industry. The Automotive Hall of Fame recognizes achievements in four categories: People who have rendered outstanding general service in the field of human mobility, people who have made a particular contribution on specific themes, industry managers of the year and the industry’s rising stars of the future.

Mercedes-Benz design philosophy

The history of the automobile dates back over 120 years. Customers today can choose from an enormously diverse range of cars. Virtually any class or brand of vehicle is available in almost every country in the world, and the number of different variants is almost too overwhelming for the individual to grasp. Many of the popular brands today offer a complete product range from compact car to luxury sedan, not to mention derivatives for various market niches. Helping customers get to grips with such diversity is one purpose of brand names. Notwith-standing their economic relationship to a company, every brand represents a certain set of values. The job of design is to convey the technical expertise behind that set of values. It is a task to which Mercedes-Benz design has felt particularly committed since the era of Bruno Sacco.

When designing a new car it is not sufficient simply to serve up bundles of creative solutions in order to make the product appear innovative. What is required is strategic far-sightedness. The time spans in which designers are required to think are considerable and therefore conceal a major risk – the incalculability of social, economic and political changes into which a new product will be released. Taking as an example the lifecycle of the Mercedes-Benz passenger car, Bruno Sacco demonstrated just what degree of far-sightedness was necessary when working against a backdrop of such underlying uncertainty. Sacco worked on that basis of a three- to five-year development phase, an average production period of eight years and a service life of about 20 years. So the design of a Mercedes-Benz not only has to remain up-to-date for 30 years, it also has to remain timeless. Considering that the form of a vehicle will be decided in the second year of this cycle, the importance of design to the success of a new Mercedes-Benz is therefore enormous.

In order to safeguard success in the long term, Bruno Sacco developed a Mercedes-Benz design philosophy during the 1970s. A design family was to be created to which all passenger cars bearing the three-pointed star belonged. The first law of this philosophy was that a Mercedes-Benz should be intuitively recognizable as part of this family by members of the public representing different cultures from all over the world. And should a Mercedes-Benz undergo advanced development in a subsequent model generation, then the identity of the model series was to be safeguarded. Bruno Sacco referred to this as “vertical affinity”. It was the central pillar of the Mercedes-Benz design philosophy and ensured that a predecessor model did not appear outmoded following the presentation of a new model generation. The goal of this strategy was to retain the positive aura of a Mercedes-Benz on the roads for as long as possible.

The second main pillar of the Mercedes-Benz design philosophy was brand identity. This called for traditional design characteristics to be maintained, further developed and featured in all model series simultaneously. In this context the term Sacco used was “horizontal homogeneity”. It found outward expression, for example, in the design of the radiator grille, headlamps and tail lights. Although there were formal differences in detail between sedans, coupes and roadsters, the family likeness was obvious to the casual observer at first glance.