Geneva Auto Show 2002 Highlights

BMW CS1 concept
by Sam Livingstone

The CS1 concept car from BMW preludes the to the soon to be launched BMW 1 series that shall compete in the lower medium car class of the Golf and Focus. It is also the first European showing of BMW's new 'flame surfacing' design language, previewed last year by the X-coupe in Detroit. This design language shall form the basis for distinguishing the smaller and more sporting BMWs from their larger siblings over the next few years.

The CS1 is, in pure aesthetic terms, probably the most exciting and contentious car of the show. The front lamps extend beyond the typical predatory, single plane, BMW lamp design, to pull the hood, fender and front surfaces together and disguise the exceptionally short front overhang.

The interior with its floating, lightweight surfaces and neoprene and aluminium materials shows an increasingly digestible and yet refreshingly new direction for BMW interior design. But it is the exterior surfacing that makes the boldest statement. Evident most in the car's flanks below a literally sharp shoulder crease, the surfacing is less discontinuous than on the X-coupe, but retains that car's non-linear, lean, fluid, and often concave surfaces.

This surfacing rejects almost all the norms of the thin sheet metal surfaces that cloak the mechanics of modern vehicles. It replicates a soft fabric like delicacy and not the hewn from solid massiveness that other cars exhibit. It is this which is contentious; not just that it is different, but that it rejects the implicit semantics that underpin automotive design. And from a brand previously responsible for being an industry wide reference point for consistent, progressive and elegant 'all of a oneness' design it shocks and seems nonsensical.

The CS1 poses a big question to its audience; will the necessary visual 'soak' of between 12 and 36 months (according to those behind the high walls of BMW Design in Munich), prove sufficient alone for the conservative BMW aspiring public to accept this new design direction? Only time will tell.