This is how BMW imagines its future

From the outside, "Dee" looks almost as if she came from a comic book, or from the animated film "Cars". But the “vision vehicle” that BMW CEO Oliver Zipse brought to the CES technology fair in Las Vegas is on the stage there as a real prototype. Including an artificially created personality that resides in "Dee's" circuits.

"Please don't call her a car, otherwise she'll be offended," joked Zipse during his presentation. Of course, the car converses fluently with the manager in English, and it also shows its own facial expressions when speaking: two large areas at the front are coated with a special paint that, like a screen, can change its color with pixel accuracy.

But these gimmicks aren't the core of what Zipse and his engineers want to show off with the car. If you sit in the driver's seat of the prototype, you can gradually fade out the reality around the car with a tap of your finger. The windscreen and all other windows of the car then become screens.

At level one, you can still see the surroundings of "Dee" as if you were in a traditional car, but certain elements are projected onto the windscreen via the so-called head-up display. This is standard in modern premium class vehicles. The other levels, controllable via virtual buttons that light up on the fabric-covered dashboard, go much further.

At the end you sit in the car and only see a virtual world on the windows. "Dee" drives through a computer-simulated Las Vegas; it looks like a game. The car of the future, as shown by BMW here, is a pair of VR glasses on wheels. Zipse speaks of a “reinterpretation of the interaction between man and machine”.

Of course, this car will drive itself in the future, which is a prerequisite for the BMW presentation. Like this property, most of the tech ideas from the prototype will only be on the road in the next but one generation of vehicles.

If any. Competitor Mercedes-Benz, on the other hand, is presenting more tangible innovations for automated driving, in-car entertainment and the electrification of the brand at the desert trade fair. Not the big vision.

If you follow the manufacturer's announcements, then the Stuttgart-based company is currently in the lead when it comes to autonomous driving: Mercedes is the only brand in Germany that has approval for an "autobahn pilot", which steers independently in slow-moving traffic at speeds of up to 60 kilometers per hour and also assumes legal responsibility from the driver during this time.

There is no such system from BMW. Zipse sharply rejects the accusation that his company is lagging behind technologically. From his point of view, the main brake is not the technology, but the regulation. "Wherever the regulators allow it, we will bring the corresponding offer onto the market," he said in an interview with journalists before the performance in Las Vegas.

With the new BMW 7 Series, you can drive automated on highways in the USA without having your hands on the steering wheel. "It remains to be seen whether a system that only works on the motorway up to a speed of 60 km/h is useful," he said against the competitor Mercedes.

And he distances himself from Tesla by saying that there will never be “beta versions” from BMW. Tesla's "Full Self-Driving" system is software that is constantly being improved when used by customers - and whose spectacular errors in road traffic have also called supervisory authorities into action.

With the trade fair prototype, however, Zipse wants to clarify a few more fundamental ideas that he and his strategists have for the future of the industry. He expresses one of them as follows: “A car is not an iPhone on wheels.” The manager finds this not only shortened, but wrong.

Accordingly, he does not assume that tech companies like Google will become car manufacturers in the future. Corporations like BMW have always been system integrators, their core task is to assemble a vehicle from many components from suppliers.

"Even today, only about 20 percent of the added value in a car comes from the manufacturer itself. On the digital side, however, this own share is higher," said Zipse. Of course, there are also elements where it would make no sense to develop them yourself.

For example, speech recognition: "Dee" uses the Amazon system for this, which is also behind the language assistant Alexa. Within the seven layers of BMW's own car operating system, this language module is one of many elements.

And in the Zipses strategy, it is one that should make screens in cars superfluous in the future. The next generation of BMW vehicles from 2025, known internally as the "new class", will still be on the road with screens. But according to the company, significantly more content than today is to be projected onto the windshield.

In the "new class" the entire pane becomes a head-up display. "It is not the future of mobility to build the largest possible screens in the car," said Zipse. "We wonder if regulators will still consider it safe to use a display in cars in the future."

After all, it is not allowed to use a smartphone while driving. Anyone who looks down at a screen is just as distracted. And: "The number one cause of accidents is distracted drivers".

However, technology will soon solve this problem in the minds of car managers. If the car drives itself, it doesn't matter what the driver does during this time. In Dee's VR mode, he won't even be able to see the road. "It remains to be seen when the transition to virtual reality will actually take place," said Adrian van Hooydonk, chief designer at BMW.

"We can imagine that in the future you will play games in a parked car and the car itself will become part of the computer game". BMW is already taking this step in the here and now. At the company's test site in Maisach near Munich, you can do laps on a former airfield in a high-powered 1 Series with VR glasses: the driver actually steers the car, but sees a computer game world through which he appears to be moving.

In contrast to “Dee”, however, a person ensures safety in this experiment: an engineer follows the journey on the passenger seat and can intervene at any time using the pedals, just like in a driving school. You can also talk to him - more fluently and original than with "Dee".

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