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The 2009 BMW 750Li is a bit like that: It carefully airbrushes away everything that made its predecessor, the E65, one of the most confronting BMWs ever built. The "Bangle Butt"? Psssht! The tank-like proportions? Psssht! The dash that looks like a piece of furniture; the column-mounted shifter; the odd-ball seat controls: Psssht! Psssht! Psssht! All gone. Walk around the new 7 Series, and it's as if the E65 had never existed. (Note: the new 2009 7 Series is pictured at left, the E65 7 Series is pictured below)

The irony is the E65 has been the most successful 7 Series in BMW's history. Despite continual carping from the world's automotive media over the car's uncompromising aesthetic, BMW has sold over 344,000 units worldwide. America liked the E65 a lot -- the U.S. accounted for 35.7% of total sales, more than twice the number of the second most popular market, China. Germany? BMW's home market accounted for just 13% of total sales.

BMW is clearly hoping the new 7 Series will build on that momentum -- and win over buyers put off by the E65's confrontational design and counterintuitive user interfaces.

If that's the case, first impressions suggest BMW is on target with the new 7 Series. Everywhere we went with the car during our drive in and around Dresden, Germany, the locals expressed their approval of the new design. They all knew about the old one; they all agreed this one looked better.

The final signoff of the E65's design happened amid huge turmoil at BMW in early 1999. First, chairman Bernd Pischetsrieder was forced to resign over the alarming losses at Rover Group, the ailing British automaker whose purchase he'd largely engineered. Within hours, product chief Wolfgang Reitzle, Pischetsrieder's logical successor, had blown his chance for the top job with an unbelievably ham-fisted attempt to secure the unquestioning support of the board. He, too, was shown the door. Joachim Millberg, a bureaucrat barely known outside BMW's iconic headquarters building in Munich, was made chairman.

The mercurial Reitzle, long regarded as one of the best car guys in the business, has always insisted privately he only approved the E65's design as an interim measure; that he always intended to go back and fix the 7 Series once Pischetsrieder was gone. "They have given my car sad eyes," was all he'd say on the record, referring to the E65's hooded headlight design. But most critics would argue the E65 needed a lot more than happier headlights.

Maybe Reitzle -- and the rest of the BMW board -- meant for the E65 to be deeply controversial; meant it to be a like-it-or-loathe-it design that no one could mistake for anything else. Why? Because they realized BMW had become one of the world's most successful and profitable automakers using a fairly singular design language and that they had run out of adjectives.

The turning point was the E46 3 Series. While the revisionists among my colleagues later lauded this car as one of the best-looking BMWs ever, that certainly wasn't the chatter around the dinner tables at the car's launch in Spain in 1998. Basically, the media view was the E46 was a ho-hum car to look at, just another cookie-cutter BMW and not enough of a step-change from the previous-generation model. For a company whose reliance on the 3 Series was total -- it still accounts for over half of total BMW sales -- the notion folks might be getting bored with it must have been worrying. Chris Bangle, the relatively new BMW design chief, was at the launch. He certainly heard the chatter.

You don't mess with success, however. Simply ripping up the 3 Series playbook would have been an unacceptable risk. The 7 Series was another issue, however. Here was a model that had always struggled in the shadow of Mercedes' all-conquering S-Class. Even the audacious 1987 launch of the 750i version, powered by the first German V-12 in more than 50 years, had failed to make a dent in the S-Class' blue-chip reputation and the world's best luxury sedan. Unveiling a bold, even shocking, new design language on its most expensive new model wasn't as counter-intuitive a move as it might have seemed: With the 7 Series BMW had nothing to lose.

The E65 7 Series changed the world's view of BMW and set in train the strategy to devolve BMW design away from the cookie-cutter system where each model range looked like a scaled version of the other, a strategy that would also allow BMW to move into new market segments such as SUVs. You can argue the relative merits of the various BMWs designed on Chris Bangle's watch -- some are way better than others -- but there is no doubt each is strikingly different from the other, while retaining a strong BMW design identity.

The E65 may have been a design too far, but you could argue it did precisely the job it was intended to do. The new 7 Series dials back the extremism and dials in some old-school BMW DNA, such as the long dash-to-axle ratio, stronger shoulders on the body side, lower H-point, and the center stack angled toward the driver. There's even an echo of the famed Hofmeister kink stamped into the C-pillar for emphasis. And this time, no one finds it boring.