ah - black wood trim - the same trim I have on order - DAMN! Maybe the strip of trim fix looked bad with the wood trims b/c the grains won't match up.

 

Thats probably the case, anyone knows about how the brusher aluminium will look? Trim fix or not?

 

The filler plate in this image looks fine. It is much better looking than the goofy thing that they had in the 550 sport that I test drove. For $80,000 plus USD BMW should NOT put in cheap filler plates until they use up the old stock ! I am a loyal BMW Enthusuaist, but the design decisions associated with the interior of LCI are beneath BMW's past standards of excellence. Maybe they should hire some designers from Audi to fix the LCI's interior changes. Notice that I said changes because they are certainly not improvements.

The car had a black wood trim, not Ebony black trim. The wood trim looked beautiful.

 

Motor Werks in Barrington. This is a great dealership with a superb service department. Ask for Chris Roehm, pronounced Reem, and tell him that you are a friend of Paul Harding.

 

If the door design is an improvement, and that is a big "if", then it is important that the changed door design use the same vocabulary as the front dash which by and large was left untouched. The cabin needs to have cohesion of design. It could have had cohesion, but it does not.

When I see design sloppiness I always think of Japanese cars, even Lexus, not German cars. Any manufactured German product is generally incredibly well designed, engineered, and manufactured. I buy German hand tools made by Festool for the same reasons. They are somewhat more expensive, but they are light years better than anything else available in the US.

 

My interior will be all black so the lack of transition between the door and dash will be much less pronounced.

 

Can you drive it in there?

 

Well, I had the keys.

 

pharding, I agree with you that the LCI interior changes are hideous.

I sat in the 530 LCI and 550 LCI at the NY Auto Show and hated both of their shifter designs, how the driver's door handle became a "hole" while the 3 other doors have proper handles, and the entire redesign of the door panels - how they went from a edgy design that matched the edgy dash to a curvy design that doesn't match the dash shapes anymore. Its almost as if BMW moved the location of wood trim on the doors to emulate the design of the e39 and e46 - but that'd be a step back and there's also a gap between the wood on the doors and wood on the dash!

 

I agree that the relationship between the wood on the new doors is totally unrelated to the wood on the dash. The gap between the dash and the doors is unbelievably bad and ill conceived. I am amazed at how bad it is. The e60 design was wonderful until they did this. A lot of US companies are farming out professionally services to India. Maybe BMW decided that German engineers and car designers are too expensive and they wanted to try farming out design work to India. Or maybe the door design got worked out at Oktoberfest. Or maybe the new BMW Delivery Center is costing so much money that they had to cut corners on the design budgets for the cars.

Generally BMW does things consistently very well. Maybe Chris Bangle was too busy with other projects to review the e60 LCI. Whomever was in charge of the refresh design should be fired. Technically the refresh is well done. The exterior of the car is well done. The interior of the car was just trashed. What they did was careless and sloppy. The previous doors were so much better. Hopefully that horrible shifter plate patch will go away and they will use the design in the photo in this thread. Maybe BMW has been so successful with the new designs that they just take us enthusiasts for granted and slop the stuff together.

One final possibility is that they may have decided to follow the example of Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors and they put the accountants in charge of final design decisions.