As part of BMW Blog’s excellent, in-depth interview with Kai Lander, head of BMW iDesign about BMW’s intriguing Vision Neue Klasse concept sedan, we were treated to a sneak preview of the next-generation iDrive software, including some novel interactions that are worth examining more closely.
The demos below show three notable new interactions. At first glance, each innovation seem clever and intuitive enough to be embraced by users as frequently used tools.
New iDrive input control
First, BMW has removed the primary controller that to some extent defined iDrive since its launch over 20 years ago. The infamous iDrive knob has been deleted in favor of a new touch-sensitive slider on the steering wheel spoke, enabling the driver to swipe up/down or left/right to interact with objects on the center screen. While this demo doesn’t explain in detail how to select which widget you’re controlling, it nonetheless appears convenient, intuitive, and highly flexible. Here’s a peek:
Panoramic Vision with screen-to-screen swipe
Along with the massive center screen, the Neue Klasse iDrive display grows in clever and substantial ways. Expanding on the humble HUD, iDrive Panoramic Vision takes over the bottom few inches of the windscreen with a pillar-to-pillar information display, showing traditional driving and navigation instrumentation, plus serving as a second screen for infotainment widgets used to monitor calls, music, and other secondary information. This seems like a real innovation, and a smart solution for the seemingly endless growth of in-dash screens that have recently begun to take over the entire dashboard. New production models from Mercedes, Ford, Honda, and many others feature pillar-to-pillar screens that inevitably dominate the interiors while not obviously serving an unmet need beyond bragging rights.
While dazzling to demo, a such expansive screen real estate is problematic: The car’s interior becomes simply another glass rectangle, like our phones, monitors, and TVs, thus denying passengers the opportunity to experience a relaxed space away from the information/entertainment firehose. And it potentially commodifies the vehicular brand experience to be just another place to project an Apple, Google, or Android app experience. While of course it seems nice to have expansive screens available when you want them, it seems to me that quite often there is no use for the passengers to be staring at a screen on the dashboard. And drivers should avoid looking down and over at a screen when behind the wheel. No, drivers’ eyes need to stay up and forward. As BMW marketing materials point out, “eyes on the road – hands on the wheel” is the proper mindset.
The huge HUD is not only mechanically simple and potentially useful, it also affords some new user interactions. Here’s a look at the user experience showing how to move widgets from the central display to the windscreen:
HUDs have long addressed this aim but of course their size to this point has remained limited. The novel iDrive solution seems to solve the two problems of the Hyperscreen-type designs. First, it raises the display to higher (thus safer) location. It’s long been known that instruments closer to the windscreen help drivers view both the road and the screen more quickly. Placing essential data there, like current speed and navigation displays, is a smart solution that also frees the dashboard from having to house the traditional cluster behind the streering wheel. Secondly, applying the same display method for the entire base of the windscreen simultaneously creates a huge infotainment surface, visible to driver and passengers, while also not adding a second (large and heavy) piece of glass on the dashboard, and I imagine that when not in use, it will not seem like a wasted screen which is a complaint I’ve heard from owners of recent models that offer tertiary passenger screens, like the Tacan and certain Mercedes EQ models.
BMW promises that Panoramic Vision will launch with the Neue Klasse in 2025, but it seems likely the production version will be smaller and simpler, based on press materials.
User-specific voice commands
Finally,