‘Often Claus Luthe would say ‘es ist zu schön’ – it’s too pretty’
BMW E39 designer Joji Nagashima on design leaders, aerodynamics and how cars look different out of the studio
Joji Nagashima says there are two types of car designer – car enthusiasts who only want to draw cars, and design enthusiasts who choose cars as their field. ‘I’m the first one,’ he says. ‘I wasn’t interested in designing TV sets.’
Nagashima studied car design in Tokyo, then at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. After design roles at Opel and Renault he joined BMW in 1988 working under the renowned Claus Luthe. ‘He was a typical old-generation German designer,’ Nagashima remembers. ‘He was not a very talkative kind of guy. His comments in sketch reviews were always very short. Often he would say “es ist zu schön” – it’s too pretty. A BMW should not be pretty, but it’s got its own style, and that’s what he was looking for.’ Luthe left in 1990 and after an interim period where interior design chief Hans Braun led the team, Chris Bangle took over. ‘Bangle’s a showbusiness type guy, very good in presentation,’ says Nagashima. ‘He always wanted to try something different – weird, sometimes.’
Nagashima’s E39 design combined BMW’S established look with external influences. ‘I tried to bring in the elegance of Jaguar – that was always in my mind. I wanted the car to be as elegant as an XJ6, then with the sportiness of Alfa Romeo.’
Sketches from several designers went through a process of design review and Nagashima’s was selected for production. ‘There was no scale model phase,’ Nagashima recalls. ‘Scale models are for yourself, to understand what you’re doing. You have to have the real scale to feel certain, and for the department it’s not much cheaper to do scale models.’
Developing the design for production took more than a year. ‘You have to listen to what budget people say, fulfil all the safety regulations around the world otherwise you can’t sell your car. You have to be 100% serious about all these restrictions,’ Nagashima explains. Dozens of small changes were made during the process. ‘In the case of E39 the rear deck was 20mm or so higher on my original design model and I had to lower it to gain rear visibility. But aerodynamics were better on the design model.’
Nagashima’s experience at Opel helped a lot in navigating between aerodynamic performance and satisfying style. ‘The Calibra and those cars were extremely good in the wind tunnel. At Opel I worked together with the engineer in the wind tunnel – he’d scrape the clay model himself in the tunnel sometimes!’ But making an aerodynamically efficient shape look good wasn’t easy, ‘If you look at wind tunnel models they’re always so ugly.’
A lot of effort went into making the shape of the E39’s C-pillar flow elegantly into the rear of the car. But even after all this work Nagashima admits the E39 isn’t perfect, ‘You look at the clay model every day in the studio. You put Dinoc foil on the model and it looks like a finished car. Once the car is on the road and you see it in a real environment, your design always looks different. You think “why did I do that” or “why didn’t I do that”. It’s unavoidable.’
‘I tried to bring in the elegance of Jaguar – that was always in my mind’