At a surprisingly high-profile event this morning, BMW showed off the final form of its long-awaited and long-awaited Panoramic iDrive system. It’s a combination of an oddly angular touchscreen, a head-up display covering the windshield, and an LLM-powered AI assistant. The big news? This happens on every future BMW.
Comedians Tim Meadows and Ken Jeong greeted the assembled crowd in a studio designed to resemble an oversized interior from the company’s upcoming film. . They did their best to get BMW’s Bavarian executives to throw a series of jokes and one-liners at them that, for the most part, were as flat as the central touchscreen that now dominates the iDrive experience.
Fortunately, it wasn’t a charade that brought us to Las Vegas this week, and the good news for BMW is that the interface looks good. The software behind the scenes is called BMW Operating System
It all starts with that central touchscreen, but even that is different. Rather than being square or curved like on other BMWs, the new panel is diamond-shaped, a slanted polygon whose hunched stance doesn’t really seem to heighten the experience but at least looks distinctive.
The panel is also tilted slightly towards the driver and runs software at least familiar to anyone who has used the current iDrive interface. A static bar at the bottom allows quick access to the most important elements, such as the heating system controls. Above, a stylized 3D view of the world ensures you’re always located.
Things get more interesting when you climb into the dashboard. At the base of the windshield is what BMW calls Panoramic Vision. It spans the entire width of the car, with the leftmost portion handling typical gauge cluster duties such as displaying the current speed, active safety controls and even warnings.
The rest of the Panoramic Vision display is customizable, with six widgets you can drag from the central touchscreen covering things like outside temperature, navigation ETA and even another widget showing you step-by-step information stage. It’s a lot of stuff we’ve already seen in BMW demos, but now almost ready for prime time with cars shipping at the end of this year.
Given the importance of all-around vision in the overall in-car experience, I asked the person who oversaw the development of all this, Stephan Durach, senior vice president of technical operations at the connected company from BMW, if there were visibility problems in direct sunlight.
“This technology is a little different from a traditional heads-up display… we use black printing on the bottom. In direct sunlight, its performance is even a little better,” he said. “You won’t have any problems.”
If that’s not enough for you, there’s another HUD located on the left, above the surround view, which gives 3D navigation information to the driver. Yes, between the touchscreen, Panoramic Vision display, and HUD, you can get three separate feeds of turn-by-turn directions.
In other words, if you miss a trick in this matter, you have no one to blame but yourself.
BMW also quickly introduced a new in-vehicle LLM that, for now at least, is intended for navigation only. Everything was pre-recorded, so how well it will work in reality is anyone’s guess, but in the demo, at least, he quickly found “the best beach” and headed there. When our fake driver left town, the car even asked if it should automatically activate Sport mode, which was a nice touch.
BMW’s Durach confirmed that Android Auto and Apple CarPlay will still be supported. He also said there will be more fun tricks coming that will allow passengers to become more involved in the experience.
BMW ended the presentation by confirming that Panoramic iDrive will not only be available on the Neue Klasse when it finally hits the market at the end of this year, but will also be the standard interface for all new BMWs launched thereafter. This means that the days of the iDrive rotary controller are now officially numbered.
I asked Durach if he had any parting words for this once-revolutionary vehicle interface.
“We’re looking at all of our data and our usage…you can really see that our rotary controller usage is going down significantly,” he said. “People don’t even touch it.”
It’s a harsh goodbye, but these days you just can’t cry over progress.
