I was driving down the road on a pleasant Saturday afternoon when someone pulled out of a driveway ahead of me. I slowed to let them in. New BMW. And the first thing I noticed wasn't the paint or the stance or anything about how it moved — it was the grille. That enormous twin grille BMW has been putting on everything lately. Like teeth waiting to devour the road.
Ugh.
Not for me. Ugly and aggressive. I wouldn't consider buying that car.
* The BMW kidney grille isn't new. It goes back to the 1930s — twin openings on the nose of the BMW 303, functional at first, pulling air through the radiator, and over the decades it became the face of the brand.
Generations of BMWs wore some version of those kidneys, and for most of that history they were proportionate, even handsome. They told you what you were looking at without shouting. Lately the shout got louder. Much louder. Whether you love the new scale or hate it, those grilles are a design statement — and for a lot of people, including me that afternoon, the statement landed before anything else about the car had a chance to speak.
But then I caught myself.
Dumb.
I had judged an entire machine with my eyes — something I suspect we all do more often than we'd like to admit. I wrote off thousands of engineering hours, massive technology, suspension and safety and performance refined over a century of building cars, because I didn't like the way the jewel sparkled.
The package on the outside told my brain the whole thing was a no. The inside never got a vote.
We do this with audio gear too. A box we don't like. A front panel that feels wrong. A speaker shape that doesn't match the room we picture living in. Fair enough — we're human, and we live with these things in our homes. Appearance matters. It always has.
I get it. That's one of the reasons we spend a good deal of time, resources, and thought on how our products look. First impressions are real. Living with something every day is real.
But at the end of the day, if we can see past the grille, there may be gold inside.
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