BMW has changed its famous badge, but you have to look very, very difficult to see what is different – Jalopnik

Don’t worry, it has not made any radical changes. In fact, BMW’s tweaks of his legendary badge are so modest that you have to squeeze to recognize the actual differences. Carscoops Note when BMW revealed his new IX3 at the Munich Motor Show:

We contacted BMW with regard to the new logo on the electric SUV and asked if it would appear on other models. A spokesperson told us: “The badge will debut on the IX3 and will gradually roll out into new or renewed vehicles while being introduced.”

The adjustments are almost hilarious in their low-keyness. A ring of chrome is eliminated, along with the Crisscrossing Chrome lines, the “BMW” letters is streamlined and a blue outer ring has been dropped on EVs. I welcome that last change personally – a BMW is a BMW in my book, regardless of what it contains – but I am not sure if I am losing it chrome. In general, I don’t like it if brands with strong physical world logos try to tune them to print and digital iterations. BMW apparently did this by slightly flattening his iconic roundel for the IX3.

The blue and white quadrants have not gone anywhere. They have always represented the colors of the state of Bavaria and in the course of the decades a distinctive tradition has developed around them that they represent a rotating propeller, an interpretation that has evolved because of the pre-automotive history of BMW as a Rapp Motorwerke, a maker of aircraft engines. The company has tackled this misunderstanding extensively, which thinks that dates from an advertisement from 1929, with the BMW letters that are decorated with rotating propeller magazines, an attempt to promote a collaboration with Pratt & Whitney.

In BMW’s own accountThe company went a bit with the wrong interpretation:

“For a long time, BMW has made little effort to correct the myth that the BMW-Badge is a propeller,” explained Fred Jakobs from BMW Group Classic … Constant repetition has made this statement a self-propagant urban myth.

Nowadays, BMW has decided that the badge actually represents a sort of a propeller, because the company encouraged that reading and not actively discouraging it, allowed to become canonical.

Anyone who examines the updated badge would rightly conclude that BMW did … Not very much, and they would be right. But BMW did it … Not very much when it looks back the badge for, oh, about 108 years. The badge first appeared in 1917 and in the course of more than a century it was actually gradually modernized. Gold letters and rings made way for white, which in turn made way for Chrome. The trend is one of the relentless simplification in Slow Motion, and the new badge is no exception.

For some time, many of the design choices of BMW have been rather polarizing and controversial. The Chris Bangle era remains debated. Flamboyant implementations of the kidney grid have purists in a fight. Some people have a justified nostalgic desire for the more conservative, modest bimmers of the increasingly distant past. But history is progressing. At least with this latest change in the badge, you have to look pretty difficult to find something that you might make angry.