According to former Mercedes-Benz exterior designer Davis Yongwon Lee—who once helped shape the rather flamboyant Maybach 6 concept—the last decade of Mercedes design hasn’t just been “a bit samey.”

It’s been, in his view, the result of a tightly controlled design philosophy under long-time design boss Gorden Wagener that gradually turned creativity into something more… filtered.

The accusation isn’t simply that the cars look a bit safe. It’s that the system itself became safe. Too safe. The kind of safe where sharp ideas go to be gently rounded off before they ever make it to production.

And when that happens for long enough, you don’t just get conservative cars—you get a whole era of them.

Now, Wagener has reportedly stepped down, but as Lee points out, the conveyor belt doesn’t stop just because the conductor has left the station. The cars designed under that regime are still rolling out, still wearing the DNA of that philosophy.

Take the Mercedes-AMG GT 4-Door—a machine that’s part super-saloon, part sci-fi grand tourer, and, depending on your taste, either a bold statement or a carefully managed compromise.

So the question isn’t really “are the cars bad?” It’s whether a decade of tight creative steering has left Mercedes with a design language that now has to learn how to speak for itself again.