The one, big, unique feature of the Lincoln Nautilus is arguably that dash-spanning screen that sits right underneath the windshield. Turns out, all future BMWs will have something similar. Unveiled at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is the next generation of BMW’s iDrive in-car infotainment system. In addition to a very stylized and slanted main touchscreen, “Operating System X” will get a head-up display that spans the bottom of the windshield.
So while it is a HUD (graphics are reflected off of a black section of the glass) rather than the traditional lit-up-pixels screen that you get in the Lincoln, the effect is similar. This HUD, or “Panoramic Vision” as BMW calls it, houses the traditional instrument readouts, BMW’s virtual assistant thingy that’s characterized by a blue ball with eyes shaped like a kidney grille, and six configurable modules on the passenger side. The traditional touchscreen is more customizable, too, now featuring the ability to upload your own pictures to serve as a wallpaper.
BMW’s personal assistant responds to “Hey BMW” or can be brought up with a button press on the steering wheel. The company says it’s better than ever at understanding natural language prompts and learns your habits over time, making relevant suggestions.
Keen Bimmer fans will remember seeing a simplified version of this system in the Neue Klasse concepts last year but this is much more production-ready.
On top of Pano Vision is a 3D HUD that overlays nav and ADAS info onto the view of the road ahead and works more like what we know HUD to be today.
We’re also getting a glimpse of a new BMW steering wheel where, once again, volume is handled by buttons and track selection is a slider—sorry, Andrew. Steering wheel buttons now feature haptic feedback and can be selectively backlit (in different colors, no less) depending on context. For example, when you get a phone call in your BMW, a new, green phone icon would appear letting you take the call.
Oh, and the steering wheel also features a duplicated bottom spoke serving as a top spoke. There are no buttons here, so it is purely a design thing—I don’t even wanna know how much BMW paid its resident artsy-guy-in-a-turtleneck to come up with this.
The new iDrive will make its production debut in “the first series-produced Neue Klasse model” due out at the end of 2025 before rolling out to all new BMW models thereafter.
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