INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
When you spend time with a lot of BMW folks, as I did during a trip to Germany earlier this month, you&ll regularly hear the word
&heritage.& Maybe that no surprise, given that the company is now well over 100 years old
But in a time of rapid transformation that hitting every car manufacturer, engineers and designers have to strike a balance between honoring
that history and looking forward
With the latest version of its BMW OS in-car operating system and its accompanying design language, BMW is breaking with some traditions to
allow it to look into the future while also sticking to its core principles.
If you&ve driven a recent luxury car, then the instrument
cluster in front of you was likely one large screen
But at least in even the most recent BMWs, you&ll still see the standard round gauges that have adorned cars since their invention
That what drivers expect and that what the company gave them, down to the point where it essentially glued a few plastic strips on the large
screen that now makes up the dashboard to give drivers an even more traditional view of their Autobahn speeds.
With BMW OS 7.0, which I
got some hands-on time with in the latest BMW 8-series model that making its official debut today (and where the OS update will also make
its first appearance), the company stops pretending that the screen is a standard set of gauges
Sure, some of the colors remain the same, but users looking for the classic look of a BMW cockpit are in for a surprise.
&We first broke up
the classic round instruments back in 2015 so we could add more digital content to the middle, including advanced driving assistance
systems,& one of BMW designers told me
&And that was the first break [with tradition]
Now in 2018, we looked at the interior and exterior design of our cars — and took all of those forms — and integrated them into the
digital user interface of our cars.&
The overall idea behind the design is to highlight relevant information when it needed but to let it
fade back when it not, allowing the driver to focus on the task at hand (which, at least for the next few years, is mostly driving).
So
when you enter the car, you&ll get the standard BMW welcome screen, which is now integrated with your digital BMW Connected profile in the
When you start driving, the new design comes to life, with all of the critical information you need for driving on the left side of the
dashboard, as well as data about the state of your driving assistance systems
That a set of digital gauges that remains on the screen at all times
On the right side of the screen, though, you&ll see all of the widgets that can be personalized
There are six of those, and they range from G meters for when you&re at a track day to a music player that uses the space to show album
art.
The middle of the screen focuses on navigation
But as the BMW team told me, the idea here isn&t to just copy the map that traditionally on the tablet-like screen in the middle of the
What you&ll see here is a stripped-down map view that only shows you the navigational data you need at any given time.
And because the
digital user interface isn&t meant to be a copy of its analog counterpart from yesteryear, the team also decided that it could play with
That means that as you move from sport to eco mode, for example, the UI primary color changes from red to blue.
The instrument cluster is
only part of the company redesign
It also took a look at what it calls the &Control Display& in the center console
That traditionally where the company has displayed everything from your music player to its built-in GPS maps (and Apple CarPlay, if that
Here, BMW has simplified the menu structure by making it much flatter and also made some tweaks to the overall design
What you&ll see is that it also went for a design language here that still occasionally playful but that does away with many of the 3D
effects, and instead opted for something that more akin to Google Material Design or Microsoft Fluent Design System
This is a subtle change, but the team told me that it very deliberately tried to go with a more modern and flatter look.
This display now
also offers more tools for personalization, with the ability to change the layout to show more widgets, if the driver doesn&t mind a more
cluttered display, for example.
Thanks to its integration with BMW Connect, the company cloud-based toolsand services for saving and syncing
data, managing in-car apps and more, the updated operating system also lays the foundation for the company upcoming e-commerce play
Dieter May, BMW VP for digital products and services, has talked about this quite a bit in the past, and the updated software and fully
digital cockpit is what will enable the company next moves in this direction
Because the new operating system puts a new emphasis on the user digital account, which is encoded in your key fob, the car becomes part of
the overall BMW ecosystem, which includes other mobility services like ReachNow, for example (though you obviously don&t need to have a BMW
Connect account just to drive the car).
Unsurprisingly, the new operating system will launch with a couple of the company more high-end
vehicles like the 8-series car that is launching today, but it will slowly trickle down to other models, as well.
