The history of the automobile dates back over 120 years. Customers today can choose from an enormously diverse range of cars. Virtually any class or brand of vehicle is available in almost every country in the world, and the number of different variants is almost too overwhelming for the individual to grasp. Many of the popular brands today offer a complete product range from compact car to luxury sedan, not to mention derivatives for various market niches. Helping customers get to grips with such diversity is one purpose of brand names. Notwith-standing their economic relationship to a company, every brand represents a certain set of values. The job of design is to convey the technical expertise behind that set of values. It is a task to which Mercedes-Benz design has felt particularly committed since the era of Bruno Sacco.

When designing a new car it is not sufficient simply to serve up bundles of creative solutions in order to make the product appear innovative. What is required is strategic far-sightedness. The time spans in which designers are required to think are considerable and therefore conceal a major risk – the incalculability of social, economic and political changes into which a new product will be released. Taking as an example the lifecycle of the Mercedes-Benz passenger car, Bruno Sacco demonstrated just what degree of far-sightedness was necessary when working against a backdrop of such underlying uncertainty. Sacco worked on that basis of a three- to five-year development phase, an average production period of eight years and a service life of about 20 years. So the design of a Mercedes-Benz not only has to remain up-to-date for 30 years, it also has to remain timeless. Considering that the form of a vehicle will be decided in the second year of this cycle, the importance of design to the success of a new Mercedes-Benz is therefore enormous.

In order to safeguard success in the long term, Bruno Sacco developed a Mercedes-Benz design philosophy during the 1970s. A design family was to be created to which all passenger cars bearing the three-pointed star belonged. The first law of this philosophy was that a Mercedes-Benz should be intuitively recognizable as part of this family by members of the public representing different cultures from all over the world. And should a Mercedes-Benz undergo advanced development in a subsequent model generation, then the identity of the model series was to be safeguarded. Bruno Sacco referred to this as “vertical affinity”. It was the central pillar of the Mercedes-Benz design philosophy and ensured that a predecessor model did not appear outmoded following the presentation of a new model generation. The goal of this strategy was to retain the positive aura of a Mercedes-Benz on the roads for as long as possible.

The second main pillar of the Mercedes-Benz design philosophy was brand identity. This called for traditional design characteristics to be maintained, further developed and featured in all model series simultaneously. In this context the term Sacco used was “horizontal homogeneity”. It found outward expression, for example, in the design of the radiator grille, headlamps and tail lights. Although there were formal differences in detail between sedans, coupes and roadsters, the family likeness was obvious to the casual observer at first glance.