Anyone who has attended the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in recent years will have noticed that major automotive players have been making inroads into consumer technology. Autonomous driving, AI-powered voice assistants and loads of high-definition touchscreen displays have been deployed to capture column inches and take over TikTok feeds.
This year was no different, as BMW chose the platform to introduce the latest generation of its iconic iDrive infotainment system, which, unsurprisingly, now spans a downright terrifying amount of screen real estate.
The panoramic iDrive offering, which will appear in the upcoming BMW Neue Klasse 17.9 -inch central touchscreen and, to top it all off, a separate head-up display that covers the entire width of the windscreen.
As is now the case with most infotainment systems, the central touchscreen is customizable, in the sense that drivers can pin their most used apps and important information to the home screen. Judging from the images and video released by BMW, there are at least three tiles available to continuously display information.
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Additionally, the epic panoramic vision head-up display (HUD) offers space for up to six fully customizable widgets, while the three directly in front of the driver are reserved for important vehicle information such as speed and remaining battery charge.
We’ve already reached twelve information points, and that’s before we even consider the third and final head-up display that will be projected onto the windshield in front of the driver and will show huge, animated turn-by-turn directions when BMW’s navigation is in use .
Some of the examples BMW mentions when it comes to the tiles that can be pinned to its panoramic view HUD include a weather app and a compass. Now call me old fashioned, but can’t you just look out the window to see what the weather is doing and when’s the last time you used a compass while driving? It’s 2025, not 1925.
Finally, there’s no word yet on how BMW’s flashy panoramic display and slightly angled central touchscreen will work with systems like Apple CarPlay and Android Auto – two systems that most of the driving public are perfectly happy with.
An industry problem
Merely bashing BMW would be wrong, as Hyundai Mobis also revealed it has created the world’s first full-windscreen holographic display, which beams a plethora of information across the entire width of a windscreen.
According to the Korean automotive supplier, the system uses a specialized film embedded with a holographic optical element (HOE), which uses the “principle of light diffraction to project images and videos directly into the viewer’s eyes.” Participation What?
Using a Kia EV9 as a test bench at this year’s CES, it’s easy to see that this kind of technology will appear in some of the Hyundai Motor Group’s more premium products in the coming years.
Harman also debuted its home theater-quality Ready Display, featuring Quantum Dot and Blue Mini LED-based local dimming technology. That’s high-end TV specs, whittled down to something that fits in a family SUV and will probably rarely be fully appreciated.
After all, when was the last time you watched an entire Hollywood blockbuster while waiting for your EV to charge?
A killer interior design
Meanwhile, Mercedes-Benz is set to launch its all-new CLA model to the world soon, promising a ‘user-friendly MBUX Superscreen’ that, at least in the early concept cars, will take up the full width of the vehicle takes. the cockpit.
It’s not that I’m necessarily anti-touch screens in vehicles; After all, I write for a tech site. However, devoting so much space to it, as Mercedes-Benz and BMW have chosen, leaves little to no room for individual actions with an interesting physical design.
Look back a few years and car interiors all looked very different: it was easy to distinguish between the quirky interior stylings of a Citroen and the more expensive paintwork of, say, an Audi.
But the over-reliance on the digital space means that without interior designers pushing for more unique physical elements, modern vehicle interiors look eerily similar, especially when turned off.
Consider the fact that many manufacturers have turned to Epic Games, which offers its Unreal Engine to produce a large part of the interface, and even the digital domain is becoming homogeneous.
I’ve noticed that the interface that visualizes an operationally advanced driver assistance system (ADAS), for example, is much the same in many modern cars. The small digital representations of trucks, cars and motorcycles that the remote cameras pick up look largely identical whether you’re in a Tesla or a Volvo EX90.
Of course, the idea of good design is something very personal, but there is also the tricky issue of user experience. Brands (ahem, Volkswagen) have burned their fingers in the past and unleashed bouji, sparse interiors that may look like an LA A-lister’s apartment but prove to be a nightmare to use and live with.
Plastering a vehicle’s interior with screens and annoying haptic buttons usually comes at the expense of easy-to-find physical switches that, when you’re in the thick of driving (a brain-taxing task), are essential for distraction-free and safe driving.
Designing for the future
Right now, it feels like car companies are designing vehicle cockpits for a time when high levels of autonomous driving are both legal and commonplace.
I’m not just talking about SAE Level 3, which allows drivers to ‘enjoy’ driving without being under some fairly strict parameters (highways, speeds under 50 km/h etc.), but about Level 4 and 5, where the vehicle performs the majority of the tasks. heavy lifting.
We are still far from this technology becoming a reality, and from an even bigger leap for legislators to create a proper legal framework for its widespread adoption. So it begs the question: why are manufacturers now choosing to offer so much potentially distracting information?
As if to protect themselves from a potential flood of accusations of driver distraction, most modern manufacturers are also working with artificial intelligence and large language models to enable drivers and occupants to communicate with their vehicles via natural voice cues, eliminating the need for is to poke around a touchscreen. or look for buttons.
Making a vehicle predict when you’re cold with an advanced suite of biosensor technology is a very expensive and complicated way of admitting that burying the climate controller in a series of annoying submenus was probably a bad idea.
Listen, I understand that the interiors of space-age vehicles are essentially what technological advancements look like, and I’m not suggesting we go back to the days of walnut wood finishes and cigarette lighters (although wood interiors are still cool, IMHO).
But designing vehicles – which will soon hit the market – with NASA control room levels of interactive displays seems counterintuitive.
Until the day comes when I can actually sit back and enjoy what’s radiating from those screens, I want to be able to drive a vehicle – not drive a Falcon 9.