► The GLC EV brings an entirely new design language
► The reasons behind the change – and the future
► We speak to the Mercedes design boss
Mercedes is reinventing the grille. After years of the EQ series’ smooth, streamlined futurism, Stuttgart has U-turned with a modern take on its traditional, stately front end. First revealed on the GLC at the 2025 Munich motor show, it’s an intricate mesh of 942 lights and a glowing statement that traces its roots to the 1902 Simplex. Love it or hate it, it’s all about brand – literally front and centre.
The day after the GLC’s glitzy reveal at Munich’s Odeonplatz, we’re speaking to Mercedes design boss Gordon Wagener about the switch up. For him, the shift is less about invention and more about rediscovery: ‘The idea was in my head for quite some time,’ he says, leaning back on his chair in a meeting room high above the show. ‘It’s the best-known thing in whole automotive world, that every child knows.’
At the same time, Mercedes suits were also thinking about brand identity – something even more pressing in the age of electric powertrains and touchscreen-dominated interiors. Like BMW, Audi, and the rest, Stuttgart’s solution came from doubling down on the traditional values of the brand: ‘We were thinking, “what was Mercedes like at the end of the last century?” There was a lot about respect, status for somebody who achieved something in life – how they could express that with a Mercedes?’
That reflection led his team to the same retro-modern solutions as Stuttgart’s competitors, and then to the grille itself. The upright, narrow frame of Mercedes’ earlier saloons projected authority and presence, a visual language that later softened into the flatter, wider designs of the 1970s and 80s as well as the AMG models. The new GLC’s grille, Wagener says, restores some of that stately posture: ‘we kept it pretty much like the original, how we did it in the first place. We fine-tuned the proportion.’
But what of the EQ series? Now firmly in the past, Mercedes doesn’t view it as a misstep, but rather a break from tradition to meet an evolving industry – and an evolving customer.
‘The early adopters wanted to show that they were different,’ Markus Schafer, Mercedes CTO explains to us earlier in the day. ‘Now we come into mass market, mass adoption, and if you come now in the volume mass adoption, people don’t want to show off that they have a different power train.’
In 2025 electric cars are no longer required to have blue highlights, nor do they need a special i or e before their name: ‘Customers want to buy the shape, no matter if they have a diesel, a hybrid, a petrol plug-in electric,’ Schafer continues. ‘They want to buy the shape, the design.’
‘Now here, in the next generation, I think the powertrain becomes, let’s say, less important,’ Wagener echoes.
However, there are areas where Wagener admits perhaps the EQ missed the mark. ‘The main competitors, put plastic front ends,’ he says of recent rival designs. ‘What we did with the EQ generation was honestly not so good, because the customer didn’t like black plastic. We thought “oh it’s futuristic, like a display.” It is, but still the customer was missing, let’s say chrome and jewellery brightwork.’
Fast-forward to the GLC and you can see the learning from the EQ’s ‘faceless’ front end in full, gleaming effect. ‘That was the reaction,’ Wagener admits, ‘to put something that valuable on the front of the car… The car looks like a couple of £10,000 more in terms of money.’
The GLC is the beginning of a new styling language but also the beginning of a new strategy designed to add choice without technical compromise. ‘The top hat will be the same, the MB.OS, the intelligence will be the same, but the platform is differentiating,’ Schafer explains to us earlier in the day.
‘Why are we doing this? Because you’re compromising. If you try to squeeze it in one platform, especially if you run longitudinal engines… you’re pushing very much back to space for your battery. And you see this in multi powertrain platforms.’
‘The actual thing happened very fast,’ Wagener says of the spark that set things off. ‘It was a phone call with Ola (Källenius, Mercedes CEO). He was in China, and I was somewhere south of the Grand Canyon. Then we developed the idea very quickly and pushed it through.’ That call has changed the course of Mercedes design for at least a decade.
After this, Mercedes will look to roll out the same design language to its entire range C-size and upwards (the CLA counts as a separate, entry-level entity). It’ll be like a zip of sorts, with facelifts and finally new models gradually bringing ICE and EV looks closer together.
‘This car is launched now, so it’s quite a while into our process,’ Wagener says of Mercedes styling rebirth. ‘So now we’re pretty much on the concepts, let’s say, starting 2030 running into the next decade.’
The new Mercedes look is here to stay, and the design brief is fixed for the long-term. And while the EQ phase was crucial and necessary, the three-pointed star is focusing on its core values. ‘Most important is what we do now, putting emphasis on the brand identity,’ says Wagener. ‘The Mercedes: a luxury car that sticks out of the crowd.’
Curtis Moldrich is CAR magazine’s Digital Editor and has worked for the brand for the past five years. He’s responsible for online strategy, including CAR’s website, social media channels such as X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook, and helps on wider platform strategy as CAR magazine branches out on to Apple News+ and more.
By Curtis Moldrich
CAR's Digital Editor, F1 and sim-racing enthusiast. Partial to clever tech and sports bikes
