Press Release
Mercedes-Benz design today
Brand creation is a core factor within the Mercedes-Benz design philosophy. Every child today can recognize a Mercedes-Benz. But deter-mining how the car’s design shapes the brand calls for expert strategic far-sightedness. Mercedes-Benz sees the design invested in its products as a way of introducing concepts. Design is not an equipment feature, but an integral part of the car’s personality. It expresses the character of the vehicle by creating an identity out of the interplay between technology and form, tradition and future. And since design must be long-lasting, it avoids short-lived fads. In this way, design lends sustainable strength to the brand-specific knowledge about Mercedes-Benz – and the unique tradition of the brand that stretches back over one hundred years. Thanks to continuity over many decades, Mercedes-Benz design has been able to sharpen its focus on the innovation values of cars bearing the three-pointed star, as well as on their future orientation. In addition to technical and design functions, the customer also recognizes the symbolic power of a Mercedes-Benz. In this way what forms in the public consciousness is a subjective image of the brand that provides the basis of a distinctive brand identity.
“Ugliness doesn’t sell well,” is a comment attributed to Raymond Loewy from the 1950s. The French-born North American industrial designer was well aware of the interaction between product, customer and brand identity. He was convinced that people revealed a lot about their personality through their choice of car. After all, few products are as public as a car.
More than ever, people nowadays see car travel as an experience. They live more intense and self-aware lives than ever before. They take enjoyment in life’s pleasures – and in beautiful cars in particular. The fact they enjoy exhibiting their Mercedes-Benz in public as an expression of their personal lifestyle speaks eloquently for the brand’s high prestige value. And design is the chief factor responsible for the passion that awakens desirability.
Design watershed in the present
Beginning in the 1980s Mercedes-Benz design adhered to a strict logic initiated by Bruno Sacco. Today it has reached a degree of maturity unique among brand competitors. No other automotive brand walks the tightrope between innovation and brand tradition with such sure-footedness, expertise and ambition. Proof of this can be found in a growing clientele that understands and respects Mercedes-Benz design.
The Mercedes-Benz brand has undergone historic changes over the course of its development: for over a decade it has no longer just stood for vehicles from the upper segment. The product drive launched in the first half of the 1990s led to successful new concepts that tapped entirely new target groups. The number of new models called for fresh forms of expression that shared a common goal, namely that every model series and every product should possess all values that customers associate with a Mercedes-Benz. The most basic rule of Bruno Sacco’s Mercedes-Benz design philosophy therefore acquired a particular relevance: “A Mercedes-Benz will always look like a Mercedes-Benz.”
The watershed was reached in March 1993. The focus of the Mercedes-Benz stand at the Geneva Motor Show was not a new production model packed with technical innovations, but for the first time a design study. The public admired the coupe study with its four oval headlamps, muscular sculpted wheel arches and highly dynamic radiator grille harmoniously integrated into the engine hood. And when the E-Class with the “four-eyed face” from the W 210 series went into production two years later one thing was clear: It was not just the new sedan that was to be seen in a new light, but the entire Mercedes-Benz brand. The slogan went: “See Mercedes with new eyes!” From now on the focus was no longer just on the value of a Mercedes-Benz product, but on its importance to the Mercedes-Benz brand. In the development of the E-Class with its elliptical headlamps, Bruno Sacco recognized a unique opportunity to link together technical and formal innovation. This new design factor was successfully replicated, for example, in successive model series, including the 208 (CLK-Class), 220 (S-Class) and 215 (CL-Class). From this point on Mercedes-Benz approached the competition war in the automotive market as a competition between brands.
What preceded brand competition in the 1990s was a two-decade-long battle between manufacturers to create the best car image. This in turn derived from the competitive struggle to achieve best product quality. Nowadays the spotlight focuses more on emotionally charged differentiation criteria such as brand image or design criteria. The external appearance of a product is a crucial factor in people’s decision to buy.
More than ever before, today’s brilliant design ideas arise out of changed technological requirements. Knowledge gained from the wind tunnel, for example, calls for concrete formal solutions. On the other hand, innovative forms call for innovative technical solutions, such as the use of new materials. One goal pursued by Mercedes-Benz, for example, is to use painted metal rather than paneling in order to make a not insignificant contribution to a car’s environmental compatibility. As a result today’s design decision processes are always taken in collaboration with other development departments. Aesthetic authority, however, is non-negotiable.
Design and product drives I and II
Under the programmatic term product drive, Mercedes-Benz evolved during the 1990s from a brand essentially supported by three passenger car series to a manufacturer with a comprehensive product portfolio. In addition to the C-, E- and S-Class, new market segments as being tapped by the A-, ML-, SLK- and CLK-Class models. The company grew and the value world of the Mercedes-Benz brand became ever more complex. Efforts on the part of the Mercedes-Benz design team to keep the brand intact by means of horizontal homogeneity and to keep the diversity of the product range manageable were initially perceived by sections of the public as not entirely logical. Irritations also found there way into reports in the media. Fears were expressed that Mercedes-Benz’s brand values could become overstretched.
The launch of product drive II in 2005 succeeded in resolving the complexity issue by creating a simple and distinctive overall appearance for the brand. It gained a historically significant dimension. The market launches of the B- and R-Class, and of the CLS- and the GL-Class, silenced the critics. Mercedes-Benz designers succeeded in creating a clear visualization of the brand-typical desire for perfection across all model series – most impressively, perhaps, in the sculptured form of the Mercedes-Benz CLS. This unique four-seater successfully combined two distinct personalities within a single elegant automobile: the functionality of a sedan with the charisma of a coupe.
Retrospective: Engineering know-how becomes design
The invention of pneumatic tires, easily deformed steel, complex suspension systems and bigger engines sparked completely new automobile designs in the early part of the twentieth century. The later much-used slogan: “form follows function” was a particularly apt description of the way technology began to exert an influence over design during the motor car’s infant years. Mercedes was a trendsetter even back then. For Bruno Sacco, the cornerstone of Mercedes-Benz design history is the Mercedes 35 hp, the first car to bear the name Mercedes – a masterpiece of technical beauty. “The concept was not only rigorously thought through in technical terms and stylistically unique,” explains Bruno Sacco, “it was also extremely successful. It provided the foundations for a new era of automotive design.” The car designed by Wilhelm Maybach and built as a racing and sports car, which is also regarded as the very first modern automobile, generates fascination through innovation. The pioneering design of the first Mercedes-Benz vehicle features a lightweight, powerful front-mounted engine, a pressed-steel frame, a low center of gravity, a wide track gauge and long wheelbase, a raked steering column and the high-performance honeycomb radiator grille with its distinctive design. This innovative concept served numerous other manufacturers as the basis for new designs of their own.
The greatest challenge facing the development engineers at the world’s oldest automotive manufacturer in the years before the Second World War was to marry technical innovation with aesthetic guidelines. An early example of their creativity was the Lightning Benz of 1909. Its design copied aerodynamic principles and aesthetic calculation. The dominance of the Mercedes-Benz S, SS and SSK models on international race circuits between 1927 and 1932 broadcast Mercedes-Benz product and brand values all over the world. In as far as the victorious racers with their eye-catching design were reminiscent of the successful Mercedes “Grand Prix racing cars” of 1914, these cars became the company’s first ambassadors for continuous brand development. The Mercedes-Benz 500 K and 540 K models of 1935 and 1936 then conveyed this message further still. Full of character, ostentatious in design and with flowing lines, they still pass to day for objects of unsurpassed beauty.
In the years after the Second War the Mercedes-Benz 300 SL gripped the automotive world. Designed as a competition vehicle by the ingenious racing engineer Rudolf Uhlenhaut, the two-seater was transformed by body designer Friedrich Geiger into an automotive masterpiece. The Mercedes-Benz 300 SL featured a space frame, which for structural reasons came up relatively high at the sides. This meant the door hinges had to be moved to the top, and the result was the birth of the gullwing door. It was also the first time a Mercedes-Benz road vehicle did not sport a vertical radiator grille, adopting instead an almost bestial air vent with a three-pointed star at its center. The new front end came to define the design of all subsequent SL sports cars. Between 1954 and 1957 a total of 1,400 300 SL coupes were built. Production of the Mercedes-Benz 300 SL roadster then started up almost immediately. Bruno Sacco was able to experience this at first hand. Having started at Mercedes-Benz in Untertürkheim in 1958, the young designer later described his first impressions: “I was utterly fascinated by the way the body had been put together with such care and artistry.”
