Cyber-BMW: The iDrive Digital Experience Revolution Is Brooding for the 2025 Neue Klasse

According to the Germans – who sometimes have a sense of humor that would make the Brits hide under their right-hand-drive beds in shame – the revamped “display and operating concept (…) enables a completely new intuitive interaction paradigm between the driver and vehicle.” (yes, this is still an automotive-focused publication, not an art critics forum).

In short, the computer-powered driver's assistance suite will drop into the Germans’ cars from 2025 in the Neue Klasse lineup, making the boundaries between virtual reality and real reality thinner and harder to identify than ever before. Again, citing the Germans, the new software architecture and correlated hardware will morph their New Class Bimmers into a digital experience space.

Strictly to the point, the iDrive of 2025 will consist of BMW Panoramic Vision, the multifunction steering wheel, the central display, and the BMW 3D HUD (head-up display). True to their driver-biased interior design, BMW’s next-gen iDrive emphasizes touch and voice interactions between the car and the driver.

The Panoramic Vision is – exactly as its name points out – a projection of data across the lower third segment of the windshield (that essentially becomes a monitor). At eye level and directly in front of the driver, the 3D Heads-Up Display provides critical information related to existing driving conditions.

Assisted driving or traffic guidance updates will pop up – in the form of a 3D animation – in the driver’s sight, completing the field of view with the requested data. The driver doesn’t have to shift attention off the road to change the content provided by the iDrive; the touch buttons of the multifunction steering wheel allow a human-machine interaction that obeys the “Eyes on the road, hands on the wheel” principle.

With haptic feedback and multilayer technology, the steering wheel becomes a controller for practically everything the driver needs to see, hear, say, or act while on the move. (Thank you, Formula 1, for making yet another one of your decade-old technologies a reality of the hexadecimal age of motoring).

All in all, the BMWs of 2025 will be as close to a gaming station as possible – central display included (to add to the ‘tablet-with-trunk’-ization of Planet Speed). The big screen on the center of the dash relies on matrix backlight technology to show high-res content in sharp, high-contrasting, and saturated colors. This is one feature we can all appreciate – think of how annoying it is to look at the phone while in direct sunlight.

The QuickSelect model introduced this year will stay in the 2025 variant of the iDrive for the Neue Klasse automobiles from BMW. A software architecture with a high degree of integration with the BMW Operating System (this, too, will have a new release In 2025) and the BMW Cloud connectivity will take the driver’s digital ecosystem to ‘a new dimension of the human-car interaction.’ So buckle up; the Germans are coming with a red pill of conceptualized reality. And there’s no blue pill alternative.