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Karim Habib Leaves BMW for Mercedes

After the departure (celebrated by some, mourned by others) of the famous/infamous Chris Bangle, at the time BMW’s chief designer, time has come for yet another one of the company’s employees to jump ship.

If, at the time of his resignation, Bangle said he would quit the automotive industry all together (not true, as we have seen), Karim Habib, the man behind the new BMW’s 7 Series and the CS concept, will not only leave the company, but he will join rival Mercedes, autocar.co.uk reported.

Habib will become the chief of Mercedes Benz’s advanced design studio, outside of Stuttgart. There, working under the manufacturer’s new design boss, Gorden Wagener, the Canadian born designer will be in charge with the F series cars.

The F series, the most recent of them being the F700 and F600, are an experimental range of concepts which will be used by Mercedes Benz as the starting platform for the company’s future design themes.

But don’t look too hard on the streets to find a Habib designed Mercedes. The work he will be doing for his new firm will not be seen on the roads for some time now. Not because of any faults, by due to the fact that the studio is drawing up concepts which may enter production not as the next generation Mercedes, but the one after that, some ten years into the future.

Mercedes made the move and took Karim Habib from BMW’s hands as part of their policy of rejuvenating their design ranks, as a result of Peter Pfeiffer’s, former Mercedes design boss, withdrawal.

As for BMW… Well, some say Bangle’s leaving was only the beginning. Habib was expected to follow a similar career path within BMW as Adrian Von Hooydonk’s, but he chose to walk away from the company that hired him right out of college. And other might do so as well.
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About the author: Daniel Patrascu
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Daniel loves writing (or so he claims), and he uses this skill to offer readers a "behind the scenes" look at the automotive industry. He also enjoys talking about space exploration and robots, because in his view the only way forward for humanity is away from this planet, in metal bodies.
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