Telling the brand story will be the most important task for car designers in the future as electrification, urbanisation, congestion and developments around self-driving cars will conspire to curtail the driving experience. Thus, the brand story will soon be the only truly differentiating USP. Niels van Roij examines the Mercedes-Benz EQS in this light
Until the turn of the century, Mercedes-Benz design featured precisely chiselled bodies, which told the story of their vault-like build quality. Until then, all new Mercedes models brought stylistic odes to previous cars - as good design houses inside and outside the automotive realm still do to this day. New cars made the family bond visual and thus the model future-proof, according to then Design Chief Bruno Sacco. After the year 2000 the vision at Mercedes-Benz changed radically. With the departure from the ‘horizontal homogeneity and vertical affinity’ philosophy both conceptually as well as aesthetically the brand moved away from longevity. Design at Das Haus was not aimed at timelessness any longer, but rather at simple ephemeral fads.
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