Feel the cars. FFM: IAA 1/2 Mercedes Benz

Frankfurt as a city always occurred to me as half big, half nice, half interesting, not far, not close, good museums, big airport, the Städel, the Schirn––sure––a tough Bahnhofsviertel which is the hippest area now (Oskar M. is opening his deli and club there), and––the IAA! The automobile show. Where I had never been. My old pal Mark Gläser staged the Mercedes show for the second (or fifth) time and I thought I should see it as long as cars still exist. Cars as we know them. But now as always: I was proven arrogant and wrong: cars will always exist as we know them. They just get… bigger. And shinier. (I missed the Tesla/ I’m such an idiot/ Mark as anybody else tells me the Tesla is the future of the automobile. {That’s the electric car from Palo Alto, initiated by the founder of PayPal: Elon Musk.}) People (90% men, 78% German men/ women of any citizenship either look like men or super super female/ like a male projection) are really interested. It’s not like the Art Basel where people meet and talk and get drunk and represent and do a little shopping. Here, they get into these cars, they touch them with their butts and whatever and they pet over the steering wheels, and they feel the cars. People who you would not immediately talk to about feelings. And they make constantly pictures with their phones. Now this is strange: even though you experience a very macho and straddle-legged and rude behaviour while walking the corridors––everybody stops if you make a picture. It’s this weird inversion of politeness. The message is not only superficial. It goes deep as well. Whatever all these claims and all these lines on the walls try to communicate everything is about cars. Not about people. Just cars.

“Design needs the Sublime”
Gorden Wagener, Vice President Design Daimler AG

Bullshit. On the wall. And underneath more bullshit:

Sensual purity as an expression of modern luxury, this is the focus of the Mercedes Benz designers’ work. The design philosophy of Mercedes-Benz is to create clean shapes and surfaces that stage high tech while exuding a strong emotional appeal. The bipolarity of intelligence and emotion (Wolfgang Pauli /CG Jung?? Complementary poles physics and soul?), rooted in the Mercedes-Benz brand philosophy, is taken up in vehicle development and accentuated in different ways. Each vehicle thus has a distinctive character, but is always recognisable as a Mercedes-Benz.

This is the serious competition for fuenfnullzwei.de/60pages at the IAA:


Intelligent drive?

And what is this skateboard about on the roof of the new Smart?

Tomorrow: BMW, Audi, Lancia…