BMW’s vision-spanning Panoramic iDrive will make sure you never miss another navigation prompt

At a surprisingly star-studded event this morning, BMW revealed the final form of its long-awaited and highly anticipated Panoramic iDrive system. It’s a combination of an oddly angular touchscreen, a head-up display that wraps around the windshield, and an LLM-powered AI assistant. Big news? It will appear in every future BMW.

Comedians Tim Meadows and Ken Jeong greeted the assembled crowd in a studio designed to look like the vast interior of the company’s upcoming film. . They took pains to provoke BMW’s Bavarian execs into a series of jokes and passages that were, for the most part, as flat as the central touchscreen that now dominates iDrive.

Luckily, it’s not a comedy that brought us to Las Vegas this week, and the good news for BMW is that the interface looks good. The software used behind the scenes is called BMW Operating System X, and it powers the new iDrive, which combines screens and voice commands to create a familiar but far more comprehensive interface than anything we’ve seen from BMW before.

It all starts with the central touchscreen, but even that is different. Rather than being square or curved like other BMWs, the new dash is shaped like a diamond, an angled polygon whose slanted position doesn’t seem to add much to the experience, but at least looks distinctive.

The panel is also slightly angled towards the driver and houses software that will at least be familiar to anyone who has used the current iDrive interface. The static panel at the bottom provides quick access to the most important things, such as heating controls. In addition, the stylized 3D view of the world will allow you to always be in place.

Things get interesting as you move up the dashboard. Running along the base of the windshield is what BMW calls Panoramic Vision. It spans the entire width of the car, with the leftmost portion performing typical instrument panel functions such as displaying current speed, active safety controls and even warnings.

The rest of the Panoramic Vision display is customizable: six widgets you can drag from the central touchscreen cover things like outside temperature, ETA navigation, and even another widget showing turn-by-turn information. It’s a lot of what we’ve seen in BMW demos before, but is now almost ready for prime time when the cars go on sale later this year.

Given the importance of Panoramic Vision to a car’s overall driving experience, I asked the guy overseeing it all, BMW’s senior vice president of technical operations for the connected company Stefan Durach, if there were any visibility issues in bright sunlight.

“This technology is a little different from a traditional head-up display… we use black font at the bottom. It even works a little better in bright sunlight,” he said. “You won’t have any problems at all.”

If the displays aren’t enough for you, there’s another HUD on the left, above the Panoramic Vision, that provides the driver with 3D navigation information. Yes, between the touchscreen, Panoramic Vision display and HUD, you can get three separate streams of turn-by-turn directions.

In other words, if you miss a turn in this thing, you’ll have no one to blame but yourself.

BMW was also quick to show off a new in-car LLM that, at least for now, is navigation-only. It was all pre-recorded, so how well it would work in reality is anyone’s guess, but in the demo at least, he quickly found the “best beach” and headed there. As our pseudo-driver headed out of town, the car even asked whether to automatically engage Sport mode, which was a nice touch.

BMW’s Durach confirmed that Android Auto and Apple CarPlay will continue to be supported. He also shared that there are some more fun stunts to come that will attract passengers to be more involved in the journey.

BMW concluded the presentation by confirming that Panoramic iDrive will not only appear in the Neue Klasse when it finally hits the market later this year, but will also become a standard interface on all new BMWs that come after that. This means the iDrive rotary controller’s days are officially numbered.

I asked Durach if he had any parting words about this once-revolutionary automotive interface.

“We’re looking at all of our data and its usage… you can actually see that the usage of our rotary controller is going down dramatically,” he said. “People don’t even touch it.”

It’s a tough send-off, but you can’t cry about progress these days.