Bruno Sacco

Bruno Sacco (12 November 1933 – 19 September 2024) was an Italian-German automobile designer and chief engineer, who served as the head of styling at the Daimler-Benz AG, the German manufacturer of Mercedes-Benz automobiles and trucks, from 1975 to 1999. Since Bruno Sacco was hired as a Mercedes-Benz stylist in 1958, his career and contributions to their vehicles' industrial design spanned more than four decades.

Biography The Mercedes-Benz C111, with its gullwing doors ajar. This Wankel engined concept car was one of Sacco's projects prior to his ascension to chief stylist at Daimler-Benz.

According to Sacco himself, he was first inspired towards car design as an eighteen-year-old, after seeing a Raymond Loewy-styled 1950 Studebaker Commander Regal as he cycled through the streets of Tarvisio in 1951. Afterwards, he could not get the car out of his head, and "knew [his] life had been decided."

After studying mechanical engineering at the Polytechnic University of Turin, he first sought work at the renowned Ghia and Pininfarina carrozzerie (coachbuilders), but moved to Germany when his efforts proved unsuccessful. and although he intended to stay only briefly, his marriage to Berlinerin Annemarie Ibe in 1959, and the birth of their daughter Marina the following year, made him reconsider his future. For the next quarter century, until he retired in 1999, he was responsible for the design of every Mercedes road car, bus, and truck. Among his numerous works are the C111 concept car, three successive generations of the SClass luxury saloons, (the W126, W140, and W220), the R129 SL convertible, the C-Class W202 compact executive car, the W124 and W210 versions of the E-Class sedan, the CLK and SLK sports cars, the M-Class luxury sport utility vehicle, and second generation CClass W203. as well as his very last design, the R230 SL convertible (in 1997).

Sacco's favourite design, because of its significance to the company's history, is the Mercedes-Benz 190 introduced in 1982, while he confessed dissatisfaction with the 1991 W140 S-Class, of which he considered the 'greenhouse' (upper body) to be "four inches [10 cm] too tall". In his retirement he had given up his old red SLK convertible in favour of a dark blue Mercedes-Benz 560SEC (C126).

Sacco died on 19 September 2024, at the age of 90, in Sindelfingen, a suburb of Stuttgart, where he had lived.

Design themes Bruno Sacco. Vertical affinity is the requirement for cars not to be rendered stylistically obsolete by their successors, ensuring greater timelessness of design. and the Raymond Loewy Foundation's (1997). He was shortlisted as one of the 25 Car Designers of the Century in 1999, and was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in 2006 and the European Automotive Hall of Fame in 2007.

In his homeland, he was awarded the Grand Official Order of Merit of the Republic in 1991, and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Udine in 2002.

Books