"I'm not here to provoke": How Missoni will redesign BMW and Alpina

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6 mins read

5 October 2025

Max Missoni, the award-winning Polestar design boss who joined BMW late last year, has spent much of the past seven months in his new role learning about the Bavarian company’s unique procedures and “beautiful past” as a way of creating a range of middle - and upper-echelon models on which the future depends beyond 2035.

Having come recently from a smallish, Scandinavia-based start-up with no historical back story at all (and mainstream Volkswagen before that), Missoni is now tasked with making best use of BMW’s powerful heritage to create a future range of premium cars whose launch is still a decade away, well beyond that of the impending Neue Klasse line-up that will soon start rolling out of factories.

However, in order to keep a foothold in the contemporary scene, Missoni is also taking charge of design at Alpina, the formerly semi-detached performance marque that BMW agreed to bring in-house in 2022.

Austrian-born, Royal College of Art-trained Missoni, 45, is now one of a refreshed ‘cabinet’ of design bosses assembled by Munich’s overall design chief, Adrian van Hooydonk.

Missoni takes charge of BMW designs from 3 Series upwards, and Alpina’s model sizes are likely to fall into the same classes. He will work beside Domagoj Dukec at Rolls-Royce, Oliver Heilmer doing mid-size and M cars and Holger Hampf at Mini.

It will be mostly Missoni’s purely-BMW creations, therefore, on which the company’s future reputation will be built. Missoni has no illusions about the vital importance of the brand’s history and reputation.

“Even before I joined,” he says, “I deeply respected the way BMW has been able to reinvent itself at times, never losing the essence of its values. It takes courage to innovate while staying true to your heritage; not many can do it.

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That’s one reason I was so keen to join.” Which begs an instant opening question: should we associate Missoni’s arrival with a rule-busting era of reinvention, a new-era version of Chris Bangle’s controversial tenure?

Not at all, insists the designer. “I hope there will be depth and quality in what I do,” he says, “but I’m here to add value more than to provoke.”

The Alpina part of his job will yield results “soon”, asserts Missoni, although extra details are scarce for now, not least because while the designer and I chat virtually, we have the help of not one but two off-screen ‘minders’, one either side of the Channel.

“The brand now sits within BMW,” says the designer, “so it’s only to be expected that we’ll want to present our first thoughts soon. We’re working on that, and I’m confident we’ll have exciting things to show.”

Missoni doesn’t seem too keen on my suggestion that one reason for Alpina’s acquisition is because in the electrification era the tuning house’s celebrated ‘engineering stuff’, the unique engine sounds and responses that have made its cars distinct from regular BMWs, must be replaced by something else perhaps a new, special look.

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“We always hope to do something special with design,” he says, slightly riled. “Design isn’t compensation for the lack of something else. It should always be excellent. We’ll give the Alpina brand a nice, holistic launch soon, where it’s all explained. You just have to wait a bit longer.”

Turning to the large cars that are his most important remit, Missoni hits his stride. He is well aware of the depth of the big-car competition from other highly competent brands, and he notes a tendency among the traditional rivals, the European firms, to move further into luxury.

“I think that’s right,” he says. “We’re already seeing the democratisation of luxury across many brands through feature content. That’s happening in China, too. But I believe true luxury is becoming more and more a matter of storytelling and an understanding that heritage is something that builds trust over decades. I think we are only seeing the beginning of a renaissance of those values.”

The holy grail, of course, is to produce periodically cars that become icons, and BMW has a rich history of doing exactly that. Knowing what he now does of the company’s history, Missoni reckons he has isolated an important element of the recipe. I wonder if the original Neue Klasse saloon fits the bill, noting my own feelings of relief that BMW has been able to restate so effectively its own design values for the modern era.

“The cars people remember as classics come most often when the two main elements – design and technology – work well together. It’s rare for true classics to come at the very end of a run of incremental designs.

There has to be good reason for things to become iconic. Our job as designers is to be ‘pre-thinkers’, to propose new formats or dimensions and seek the technology to fill the void. If it’s there, we have the circumstances to create an icon.”

There is a strong case for the Neue Klasse cars, at least some of them, to be BMW classics, Missoni feels. “The car brings a big refocus on the essence of the brand,” he says. “At the same time it has an entirely new powertrain. The car’s proportions are very much driven by electrification, but at the same time the design focuses back on what BMW is all about.

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Maybe that’s what gave you your feeling of relief.” When he discusses his role in simplifying BMW’s cars, aimed at dates well beyond 2030, Missoni shows how clearly a senior car designer’s job is as much about philosophy as creativity. “

In the past there was a level of simplicity in cars,” he says. “You didn’t have everything you wanted, but it was easy to nd what you did have. That gave the user a sense of fulfilment. For a while now we’ve been seeing extra complexity. Software allows us to adjust so many functions in a car that we might as well do it, because it will probably improve a user’s personal experience once they know how to do it.

“What I find so interesting is that artificial intelligence is coming to provide a layer between the deep complexity of the internal systems and our need for a minimalistic interface. That AI layer will know what you want because it can predict your behaviour. You won’t have to understand the system, but the system will help you anyway. That’s a very nice way to deliver the simplicity you want, plus the depth of modern options you might enjoy.”

Missoni was brought up in a home stuffed full of modern design thinking: both of his parents were architects. His early interest was in boat design, which he acknowledges is a little odd for a teenager with no access to the sea. It was in a boat magazine he spotted a Pininfarina advertisement featuring a 1989 Ferrari concept called Mythos, and he realised that you could have a career creating modern designs that moved.

Cars were bigger in the lives of most people than boats, and that is still their appeal, he says, even if boating remains his hobby. Missoni was an undergraduate in Linz, then moved to London’s Royal College of Art for postgraduate car design study, working initially at Volkswagen in Wolfsburg where he soon took the lead role in designing the challenging, futuristic and ultra-rare Volkswagen XL1 efficiency concept, revealed in 2015.

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That car, and Missoni’s subsequent well-received Volvo and Polestar designs, credited with capturing expertly the essence of Scandinavian design, won him a reputation as a designer who knew much about minimalism and refinement in modern cars. Those are the words most often used to describe his work.

However, since the Polestar years, which began in 2018, Missoni prefers to talk about purity as an ideal design objective. “I prefer ‘purity’,” he says, “because ‘minimalism’ tends to suggest things being le out or stripped away, and that’s not the case.

When I talk about predictive design for the future, the idea is we will be able to give you what you want when you want it, but you won’t lack anything. That’s minimalist, but in the truest sense of the word, it’s not.” Welcome to the world of the car designer

Steve Cropley

Title: Editor-in-chief

Steve Cropley is the oldest of Autocar’s editorial team, or the most experienced if you want to be polite about it. He joined over 30 years ago, and has driven many cars and interviewed many people in half a century in the business.

Cropley, who regards himself as the magazine’s “long stop”, has seen many changes since Autocar was a print-only affair, but claims that in such a fast moving environment he has little appetite for looking back.

He has been surprised and delighted by the generous reception afforded the My Week In Cars podcast he makes with long suffering colleague Matt Prior, and calls it the most enjoyable part of his working week.