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BMW has announced that Laurenz Schaffer will be taking over as the president of its Newbury Park, California-based DesignworksUSA studio on December 1. Schaffer will be replacing Verena Kloos who has been running the facility for the past five years. Kloos is moving back to Germany to run Department of Context Design and Advanced Development for the Werks.
The California studio was launched in 1972 by designer Chuck Pelly and purchased by BMW in 1995. Over the years, Designworks has been responsible for products ranging from coffee makers, to HP printers to Embraer business jet interiors and yachts. They've also done some work on cars as well. The current generation Z4 and the original X5 were both born out to the California facility.
Designworks also has two smaller satellite studios in Munich and Singapore. Schaffer has actually been running the Munich studio since 2000 so he knows the people there and how they work.
About a decade ago, pretty much every computer in the world was housed in a boring beige box, and the biggest design question was whether that container would sit vertically or horizontally. That's all changed now, partly due to the influence of Apple and custom PC manufacturers like Thermaltake, a Taiwanese company that specializes in PC cases and cooling devices. Recently, Thermaltake contracted BMW DesignWorksUSA, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the German automaker, to help create a new concept in high-end computing, and the result is wholly different from what's common to the market today. Instead of centering around one large box that all the computer components would sit inside, BMW's Level 10 concept uses a set of smaller containers that would house each individual piece.
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You might think that BMW's designers would be busy enough coming up with new segment-busting crossovers or toning down Chris Bangle's "flame-surfacing" design language, but they've found the time to dabble in naval architecture (to be fair, DesignworksUSA is an independently operated studio acquired by the BMW Group in 1995, but still...). The Munich office of the industrial design firm has been commissioned by Bavaria Yachtbau GmbH to come up with the 46-foot sport yacht you see here. The design compromises some of a speedboat's aquadynamics in favor of more space for the vessel's sun-worshipers, offering a spacious deck, a commodious cabin and more sun bathing space than Club Med. With any motoryacht of this size, propulsion options are left up to the customer, with each example made according to the buyer's specifications, so don't expect to see a marinized pair of the M5's V10 underneath the rear deck. The latest crossover between automotive design and naval architecture, this is BMW's second boat following the Zeydon Z60 sailing yacht.
Much like its Porsche Design counterpart, there isn't really anything BMW DesignWorks won't try to make better, from an espresso machine to a custom interior for a Boeing 787 Dreamliner. So it was only a matter of time before they put pen to paper and created a yacht, this particular example being a 60-foot offshore performance sailboat for the Zeydon boatyard of Belgium. Meant, as with any BMW, to be just almost everything to almost everyone, the yacht, christened "WYSIWYG," is a regatta-oriented sailer as fast as it is luxurious. And no, your eyes don't deceive you: it's blue. Why? Because according to the heads of Zeydon, "it perfectly communicates the characteristics that determine our corporate identity: progressiveness, originality, courage, strict authenticity and infinite emotion." And it's got wooden racing stripes.
