| Sunday, March 29, 2009 |
21:16 - The lady doth protest too little, methinks
http://www.automobilemag.com/features/by_design/0904_2009_bmw_z4/index.html
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Robert Cumberford, the resident design guru at Automobile, has weighed in this month on the new BMW Z4, calling it "the most beautiful BMW roadster since the Albrecht Goertz-designed 507":
That this second-edition Z4, with its folding hard top, luxurious interior, and classic long-nose/short-deck proportions, is biased more toward boulevards than racetracks doesn't detract from its charm at all. Such "semisoft" sports cars have enormous appeal, as Jaguar has shown for more than seventy years, from the 1935 SS 90 to today's XK, and indeed as Ferrari demonstrated with the 250GT California and the 365GTS/4 Daytona Spider.
. . .
Quite apart from the hormonal aspect of its design, the new Z4 has been masterfully sculpted by a bold yet delicately refined hand. Surface development conflicts that marred previous BMW Zs have been perfectly resolved. I was entranced by the rear corners, where concave and convex surfaces, flowing lines, and changes of color and materials converge without a single clash.
Really? Not a single clash? Not even this one?
Seriously, is that apologetic little writhing and squirming surface necessary? I fail to see by what stretch the clumsy collision of these two creases is remotely elegant or natural. It looks as though two completely independent design teams, one working from the front and the other from the rear, met at the Promontory Point of the door seam and found only then that they'd brought incompatible gauges of rails—so they left the rail ends wandering into the salt sands, pocketed their golden spikes, and ran for the hills before anyone could find out what a blunder had been made.
I like the front of this car, sure (though the headlights are a bit much, they're better than the late-Bangle things on the 5-series); and Cumberford is justified in his appreciation of the rear, much though it might seem he's still enraptured by that bizarre cloth-skinned Gina concept that he reviewed last November and any concepts it might have bequeathed to this car, such as the neat little ducktail spoiler and the concave surfaces underneath it. But just as Automobile was excoriated by its readers for unequivocally praising the original Z4 Coupe's lines when it was unveiled (saying something like "There can be no debate now", an assertion which was given the lie almost immediately in chastening reader letters by the armload), it seems that they've taken the position of "Laud the new and denigrate the old, even though we loved the old when it was new"—a position that seems increasingly, and distressingly, common.
I'm no automotive exterior designer (though I did always sort of want to be one); but if that rear flank were up to me to finish, I think I could hardly do worse than has been done here. I'd simply abut those two peaks together—forming a sharp cusp between the two sweeping curves, much though the current designers seem to have loathed the very idea—and left it at that. There's no way it would have looked clumsier or less half-assed than this comedy of errors.
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Brian Tiemann
