23/07/2025
#8 The Designer
Chris, 68 years old, Clavesana (Italy)
« A vehicle becomes iconic when it defies
expectations to reflect identity »
“The idea for the Fiat Coupé’s bold yellow launch color––a standard Ferrari fly yellow––signifies the “yellow tube” symbols of good luck we hid inside the original Fiat Coupe model; such yellow tubes were on the first model we won the internal competition with––which happend to be a Panda Next Gen design”.
Chris Bangle says with a smile. As one of the most influential car designers of the past fifty years, Bangle is still proud of the Fiat Coupé — an iconic car that looked futuristic at its debut and, three decades later, remains strikingly fresh. After leaving his mark on Fiat’s Centro Stile with the Coupé, Bangle moved to BMW, where, at just thirty-five, he became head of design. Over the next seventeen years, he led a transformation, creating with his team iconic models like the Z4, 1, 3, 6, and 7 Series, as well as the pioneering X3, X5, and X6 SUVs.
“I will hold three items that represent three phases of my career” he explains.
There is the fuel cap from the Fiat Coupé, symbolizinghis time as a designer on the boards actually drawing the cars and “doing the design”.
A copy of Peter Teuful, the novel he wrote about his impressions as a manager of car design after leaving the corporate world to move with his family to the Italian countryside and launch his own design firm, where he applied his vision to everything from luxury goods and electronics to super yachts;
and Arky Arch Adventures, a cartoon book that brings objects to life with their own personalities that represents his reinterpretation of car design into cartoons. This concept evolved into a possible animated TV series or movie, now bridging him and his team to the latest frontier: using car design-based semantics to shape the future of AI.
