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His imminent departure doesn't mean Pfeiffer's influence won't be felt for years to come. In fact, quite the contrary. Having led Mercedes design through some of its most challenging times as the brand expanded its reach into sport-utility vehicles and city cars-including the development of the smart brand-Pfeiffer's designs had to help rebuild trust in the storied marque, even as it faced nagging quality problems. His steady hand has been both reassuring and secure, not so much breaking new ground as tilling it in a more modern but evolutionary way. Unlike his counterparts at BMW, Pfeiffer has tried to stay true to Mercedes' heritage, which he calls "conservative and status-oriented." While he acknowledges the importance of emotions being evoked by the design, he knows that for the Mercedes customer, there is more to it: "When a customer stands in front of the car and just looks at it and says 'I like it,' then we as designers have done a good job, but our next step is to take the brain and help the customer study how affordable the car is through perceived quality," he says. The design must lead the purchaser to understand that they've made a wise decision.

Mercedes-Benz design boss Peter Pfeiffer has spent nearly 40 years at the German automaker and has led the design team since 1999.

One of the challenges that Pfeiffer and his team have faced is trying to advance the design language while maintaining respect for the past: "Every new Mercedes has a long lifecycle, so we must have the next one take a more dramatic step forward in terms of design, but without breaking the connection with history." The first vehicle to bear Pfeiffer's full influence was the '05 S-Class, which ushered in a sleeker, more sculptural design. He also points to the '08 C-Class, as well as the CLS- and GLK-Class designs as clear signals of his vision of what Mercedes design should be in the future: "You must have the same design language for all of the cars, but you have to give each car its own character. When you see a Mercedes SUV and a Mercedes sports car, they must have the same design language." A signature Pfeiffer cue: the crease that progresses from the front grille into the hood through to the A-pillar, which he cites as a core piece of future Mercedes vehicle designs. Bodywork will continue to have more of a "sculptural" feel: "not like architecture-it's always surface interplay between bold, taught lines and 'silent' surfaces."

The '05 S-Class was the first vehicle to display Pfeiffer's full influence on the brand. His emphasis was on taught, crisp lines.

To assure the continuity of Mercedes design, Pfeiffer says that when designers join the company, he makes sure that they spend time at the Mercedes museum "to give them a proper feel of what Mercedes is." (In his estimation, the quintessential model is the 1958 300SL.) He explains, "We have to make a Mercedes, and that's a task different from a company like Lexus. We have to make a car that shows the character of our company and not just make a good design for the moment."

When it comes to the future of vehicle design, Pfeiffer expects automakers to spend more time developing distinctive character for each of their brands. He also thinks interior design will take on increased prominence as consumers look for more simple, functional interiors-interiors that are as engaging and intuitive as the interface on the Apple iPhone: "One of the tasks we have as designers is to make vehicle interiors so simple that the driver will not have to read 100 pages of instructions before they can work the electronics in the car; the consumer should just have to sit in it and drive."

SL AMG Roadster: No Simple Refresh

The doors, decklid, rear tail lamps and rear quarter panels of the '09 SL Roadster may be carried over from the previous generation car, but that doesn't mean Mercedes made mere incremental improvements. The front fascia incorporates the new face of Mercedes, complete with furrow-browed headlamps and a more upright grille. "Since the debut of the 300SL in 1958, the SL has been one of the icons of Mercedes, and I wanted this refresh to have the same presence as that car. That's why the grille on this car is more upright, wider and the central star is more in an orientation found on the 300SL," says Peter Pfeiffer, the outgoing head of Mercedes design. Don't call it a "dual clutch" transmission-Mercedes' Multi-Clutch Transmission utilizes a wet clutch for quick acceleration combined with a traditional automatic transmission for improved shifting response The biggest changes in the lineup have been saved for the AMG performance variants and the introduction of the SL63 AMG, powered by the 6.2-liter, 518-hp AMG-only V8, mated to the first application of AMG's multi-clutch transmission. No, this is not a dual-clutch unit, but rather a start-up wet clutch combined with a traditional automatic. "What we have here, in principle, is the back end is an automatic transmission with planetary gear sets, and we don't have a torque converter, we have replaced that with a wet clutch," says Martin Hart, senior manager of powertrain calibration and electronics at AMG. "The advantage is that we have the close coupling and stiffness of a wet clutch, and unlike a dual-clutch, where we would have to do a double shift to go from 4th gear to 2nd gear, our automatic configuration can shift faster because it has four clutches." The '09 SL 63 AMG's menacing face is a harbinger to the power and performance packed under the hood. Development of the MCT took more than three years, with most of that time focused on getting the ZF Sachs-supplied wet clutch to perform at higher revs in a smooth and comfortable manner. This was accomplished by developing a special cooling system that sends oil through interruptions on the six clutch plate surfaces. "We also spent a lot of time developing a new transmission control system to handle the complex computations because this transmission has the highest level of complexity of anything we have done," Hart adds. There are no plans to migrate the MCT to other vehicles in the non-AMG Mercedes lineup, however. The technology will remain exclusive to the AMG team.