Carmakers start taming their wild designs

The redesigned fourth-generation Mercedes-Benz A-class hatchback that will debut this year will represent a new direction for the carmaker. Mercedes says it plans to ease off the flashiness of its recent designs.

Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche wants to take a step back with his luxury brand's European entry hatchback. Mercedes will drastically reduce overly expressive cues — not just on the A class but in all models as part of an evolution of its design philosophy.

"The previous A-class design had to be edgy and loud for a reason: to attract attention, a concept that has been widely adopted by the competition, so it's time to move on," Zetsche said. "As our head of design, Gorden Wagener, puts it: 'If you like it, take a line off. If you still like it, take another line off.' "

The small car remains striking. Contours help divide the body into light and dark surfaces, building tension and drawing attention to specific styling cues. Sometimes they go so far as to create the illusion that the car is moving even when standing still.

To emphasize their importance, many lines come with colorful names. Mercedes, for example, calls them catwalk lines or balancing lines. At Audi, designers call the shoulder crease in the side of its cars the tornado line.

Lately, lines have proliferated at an alarming rate around the industry.

"If you look around at what others are doing," said Robert Lesnik, Mercedes' head of exterior design, "a lot are chocking their cars full of lines, trying to achieve the sharpest edge in the world with the smallest radius. It looks very aggressive — you don't want to touch it. You're afraid you could almost hurt yourself."

Some vehicles that are defined by their sharp lines include the Infiniti Q30 compact hatchback and the Lexus NX compact SUV. By comparison, Hyundai has chosen more low-key looks in Europe, opting not to adopt the flashier styling of models such as the Sonata.

With the quality, fit and finish of most passenger cars so polished, it's difficult for any automaker to differentiate itself from the masses. Developing a unique design has assumed an even more crucial role when it comes to defining brands in the eyes of consumers. The single biggest reason a customer purchases the A-class hatchback over a competitor model is its aesthetics, according to Mercedes.

Zetsche's brand is not the only one where the pendulum is swinging the other way. BMW is looking to clean up its sheet metal. Both German brands are instead focusing on other design aspects, including the shape of the grille, drawing inspiration from heritage cars such as the SL Panamericana from 1952, or reinterpreting them anew with concepts such as the BMW i Vision Dynamics.

"There is more competition now. The world has changed," said BMW Group design boss Adrian van Hooydonk. "It's a faster pace, so our design needs to change faster as well."

Exterior styling has gone through decades where a car's look has changed dramatically between classic tailfins of the 1950s and '60s to the wedge-shaped styling fashionable in the '70s and the econo-boxes prevalent in the '80s. Ultimately the task was the same — achieving the right proportions for a four-wheel vehicle equipped with a combustion engine under the hood.

Advances in metalworking, such as hydroforming, in which water pressure is used to shape exterior sheet metal, gave designers at premium and volume brands freedom to become more expressive. Even the restrained Germans, guardians of the Bauhaus philosophy that form should follow function, have in recent years succumbed to the urge to overdraw their vehicles — especially those designed for a younger audience such as the Volkswagen T-Roc. Some see it as a way of demonstrating their technical prowess and precision.

"It's a question of philosophy," said Mercedes' Lesnik. "Ultimately the laws of physics are the same no matter the manufacturer — that which they can press into metal, we can do likewise. The question is: Do we want to?"

Van Hooydonk agrees less is more.

"We're going to clean things up," the BMW design chief promised. "We're going to use fewer lines. The lines that we will have will be sharper and more precise."