MINI to get new design boss from September

By CARSIFU | 6 June 2017


MUNICH: BMW Group has announced that Oliver Heilmer (top pic) will take over as head of MINI Design from Sept 1.

The 42-year-old designer is now president of Designworks, a BMW Group subsidiary with design studios in California, Munich and Shanghai. Heilmer has been part of the BMW Group design team for 17 years and was responsible for interior design for the BMW brand up until 2016.

Heilmer's vacated position at Designworks will be filled by Holger Hampf.

The BMW brand has also seen changes in personnel with Jozef Kaban taking over from Karim Habib as design chief. Karim left BMW to join Infiniti.

BMW said the personnel changes would help the group focus on shorter development cycles, increase digitalisation of design processes, as well as products and mobility experiences. Small, agile project teams will also form part of the new structure.

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In a related development, MINI said its largest model, the Countryman, has achieved the top 5-star rating in the Euro NCAP crash test.

The safety passenger cell of the new MINI Countryman proved to be a solid survival space in the front and side crash test as well as in the so-called lateral pole crash.

The testers analyse the car’s crash behaviour in different impact scenarios in order to assess how stable the passenger cell is, how effective the restraint systems are and what forces are exerted on the occupants. In addition the Euro NCAP testing procedure also took active safety technology and pedestrian protection into account.

The previous model of the Countryman had also been awarded a 5-star rating in the Euro NCAP crash test.

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