It’s one of the automotive world’s most sacred rituals — about once a decade, BMW reinvents itself with a new design language, and BMW fans hate it. Whether it’s the “flame-sided” multifaceted look and two-layer trunk of the early 2000s or today’s giant, in-your-face two-nostril grille, BMW fans complain about the new look while buying every new car Munich creates.
The ritual, however, is threatened. BMW has previewed its next design language, and something unthinkable is happening. The faithful…shudder… they seem to actually like it.
Classic Shapes for the AI Future
BMW gave a glimpse of its future today at the CES consumer electronics show in Las Vegas. The company took the wraps off a design study it’s calling the i Vision Dee concept. It’s a rolling advertisement for the next generation of design, which BMW calls Neue Klasse.
The i Vision Dee itself is unlikely to reach production — it’s just a sketch of where the company is headed.
BMW may sell more SUVs than sedans these days, but the company’s soul is still its sports sedans. So the concept car is a 2 Series-sized 4-door.
‘“Dee” stands for Digital Emotional Experience,” BMW says. “That is precisely its aim: to create an even stronger bond between people and their cars going forward.”
The company has revealed nothing about the mechanical aspects of the car. Instead, the i Vision Dee is meant to demonstrate technologies and aesthetic ideas.
The Twin-Kidney Grille Becomes a Communication Device
BMW calls the shape “reductive design.” It suggests a return to the simple three-box sedans of the ‘60s and ‘70s, filtered through the digital age. BMW says the look “has been deliberately pared down to focus attention on the digital experience.”
In an era of electric cars, vehicles won’t need functional grilles, which traditionally allow air to flow into the engine compartment. But BMW’s signature design element has always been its twin-kidney grille. The i Vision Dee apes it digitally with a screen. A pair of diagonal slashes on the outside corners take the place of headlights, and creased lines in the hood trace back from the grille corners.
The screens can display nearly endless variations. They give the car an almost human personality.
K.I.T.T. Is Here — The Car Talks To You
The showpiece feature is a sort of Alexa-like digital assistant called Dee. Many of today’s cars can respond to voice commands, adjusting temperature or providing entertainment on request. But Dee talks to you and changes those grille-like screens as it responds. In a promotional video, Dee turns the grille screens into cartoon eyes and winks at a BMW presenter as it greets her.
Dee speaks in natural language, sounding more human than most digital assistants.
BMW’s press release calls the screens a “phygital (fusion of physical and digital) icon,” a word we probably didn’t need.
180 Degrees of Head-Up Display
Inside, the front windows and windshield are transparent screens. They can project driving information, entertainment options, and more directly into the driver’s line of sight as though most of the window space is a giant head-up display.
We hope drivers like it because there are almost no other control surfaces. Drivers can use a “mixed reality slider” on the dashboard to adjust how much of the windshield surface displays information and icons. But the dashboard otherwise lacks buttons and switches. To change songs or temperature, you talk to Dee.
The windows can display screens to those outside the car, too. BMW showed off a mode that displays a driving avatar to surrounding traffic. The uncanny valley is coming to your commute.
Color-Changing Paint
BMW also used the i Vision Dee to show off a technology we think is further from production — color-changing paint. The company has revealed its “E Ink” paint before, but previous versions could only show grayscale colors. The latest version is full-color.
The paint can display up to 32 colors, BMW says. It’s applied in 240 segments, “each of which is controlled individually. This allows an almost infinite variety of patterns to be generated and varied within seconds.”
Some of This Will Be on Sale in 2 Years
It all sounds like science fiction, but BMW says some of it will come to fruition quickly. “The standard-production version of the BMW Head-up-Display extending across the full width of the windscreen will be used in the models of the NEUE KLASSE from 2025 onwards.”
BMW Group design director Adrian van Hooydonk told Wired that the Neue Klasse cars will appear on “a timeline that’s actually quite steep,” with the replacement of the current design language starting in “roughly 2025.”
