BMW Vision Neue Klasse Sedan Previews BMW’s Return to Simpler Designs

You can’t throw a roundel without hitting someone who has an opinion on BMW’s recent designs. Big visual leaps like giant grilles, split headlights, and the entire XM have taken the automaker far from the clean and unfussy lines of its past. But if you dare to see what’s next, debuting today is the BMW Vision Neue Klasse, an electric sedan concept that previews how the brand’s next generation of vehicles will look and function.

With flat surfaces and big windows, short overhangs, and an angular trunk, it’s another huge departure from BMW’s current crop of cars. The split grille front end—can you even call them kidneys anymore?—and the Hofmeister kink stand as the only obvious links between the present and the future. It’s not retro, but it’s also not a blob. It’s also not exactly the next 3 Series, though you can bet it’ll have some strong similarities. Whether you love it or hate it, and I’ll be damned if there’s anyone standing in the middle, the sedan represents a major turning point for BMW.

“There are a lot of fans who maybe worry about where BMW is going. We also want to promise them that, although we change a lot of things, we don’t change them just because it’s time for a change. We change them because we see what people want in the future,” BMW's lead designer Domagoj Dukec told me. “We have to somehow move on and to offer other things. That’s what the silhouette and the exterior should express. Some things will become maybe more BMW than some recent products.”

Previewed by the i Vision Dee unveiled at CES 2023 and the i Vision Circular from Munich 2021—you can see the clear evolution in the photo below—the Vision Neue Klasse’s approach isn’t unprecedented. Set your time machine to, say, 1968, walk into a BMW showroom, and you’ll find yourself face-to-face with the 2002, whose headlights were integrated into horizontal grilles. The key difference is that the 2002’s front end featured separate kidney grilles. Uncoincidentally, the 02-Series cars were part of the original Neue Klasse family of cars.

The tall windows echo the 02-Series and let more light into the cabin, while flat surfaces and sharp angles signal the beginning of a new design era at BMW. It’s the de-Bangle-ization of the design studio, and the idea is to reduce visual fuss to focus on what’s essential. This also explains why there’s no chrome, though the European Union’s looming ban on chrome plating may have played a role as well.

“People see the car and even if they don’t like BMW they say that somehow it’s easy to understand. It’s just a nice car,” he explained, citing the clean, simple lines of the E30-generation 3 Series as an example.