Aside from being ugly and making no sense at all, the part that gets me about these things is that it wasn't broken.
Seriously, did someone at the top of the organization wake up one day thinking "We are not selling more cars because of our logo"?
Of all the things they could have decided to work on that might actually deliver real value to customers, the logo was deemed to be important?
After owning a number of BMW's we decided we had enough, turned in our last leased car and walked away. They are horribly expensive to maintain and, even if you are willing to do some of it yourself, the parts are just ridiculously expensive.
One of the key decision drivers is that we have a Toyota vehicle with nearly 250K miles on it (400K km). We bought it new and maintained it at about 1/3 of the prescribed maintenance schedule. In other words, oil changes every 10K miles rather than the recommended 3K. The car runs very well, fuel efficiency is still good and it cost us almost nothing to maintain after the warranty ran out. With one of our prior BMW's we had to spend $3K to fix it (I forget what it was) a few months after the warranty expired. I know this is a single data point, and yet, when I talk to long-term (out of warranty) BMW owners it is amazing how often these kinds of sentiments surface.
So, yeah, I don't understand the focus on a logo. A logo isn't going to get my family back into a BMW dealership, ever. You have to question someone's priorities and understanding of their customers when they feel messing with the logo is of actual importance to them at all.