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You still can’t use your phone while driving, but all new BMW drivers will have an A-pillar to A-pillar BMW Panoramic iDrive Head-Up Display in their new car from the end of 2025.
Unveiled at CES2025, the new technology uses a black printed surface in the lower section of the windscreen to display a projected HUD with information visible to all occupants. If that’s not enough, you can go one step further and choose an optional BMW 3D Head-Up Display (pictured below) that sits above the BMW Panoramic Vision and displays navigation and automated driving information in your direct field of view.
BMW Panoramic Vision, the optional BMW 3D Head-Up Display, the central display and the multifunction steering wheel are all controlled and configured through the new BMW Operating System X.
BMW Operating System X will debut before the end of the year and use the same Android Open Source Project (AOSP) software with even greater update and upgrade capacity for future and backward compatibility. Still, the question begs of whether these new software systems will work with Apple CarPlay, and whether or not BMW will even offer phone mirroring full stop. Manufacturers would prefer you subscribe to connected services, and in the case of BMW, that means taking advantage of the BMW ConnectedDrive Store which currently offers more than 60 apps worldwide for BMW Operating System 9.
“The overall concept of the new BMW Panoramic iDrive with Operating System X has been enabled by a large technological leap forward,” said Stephan Durach Senior Vice President of Connected Company BMW Group. “It offers intuitive operation, emotionally engaging experiences and specific personalisation.”
Despite the overwhelming amount of information displayed in front of you, the steering wheel might be the most striking addition to the interior of these first series-produced Neue Klasse vehicles.
It looks like it was bolted down in the wrong direction, but it does serve a function alongside BMW Panoramic Vision and the optional BMW 3D Head-Up Display. When you receive a phone call, it will first bring up a graphic on the BMW Panoramic Vision. Simultaneously, a symbol on the relevant steering wheel button that was not previously visible is illuminated in green, indicating the option of taking the call by pressing the button or rejecting it with a swipe on the right-hand side of the steering wheel.
Gone are the days of simply pressing a button on the steering wheel to answer a phone call. “Technology and customer preferences are changing more quickly than ever. The design of digital experiences and sound is playing an ever more important role,” said Adrian van Hooydonk, Senior Vice President of BMW Group Design. “The new BMW Panoramic iDrive not only makes our vehicles smarter and more user-friendly, it also enables much more extensive personalisation, which turns every new BMW into a car that is very much the user’s own.”
When it all becomes too much to handle, BMW Intelligent Personal Assistant “Hey BMW” will assist with voice commands now enhanced through the integration of Large Language Models (LLM). The assistant can now provide nuanced answers to natural language questions, and the brand gives this example: “Take me to a charging station which is close to a food store,” which sounds helpful, but also utterly impractical.
BMW Panoramic Vision, the optional BMW 3D Head-Up Display, the central display and the multifunction steering wheel can all seem very overwhelming. However, this is BMW we’re talking about, and they’ve used data-driven learnings taken from a fleet of more than 22 million connected BMW vehicles to make these decisions.
In the case of the new BMW Panoramic Drive, this also included numerous studies conducted in the BMW Group’s usability labs, in which around 3,000 customers were involved.
Like this technology or not, the new BMW Panoramic iDrive will be integrated into all new BMW models – across all vehicle segments and with all drive system technologies – from the end of 2025.
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