BMW’s Extended View Panoramic iDrive system will ensure you never miss another navigation prompt

At a star-studded event this morning, BMW showed off the final form of its long-awaited panoramic iDrive system. It’s a combination of an oddly angled touchscreen, a head-up display that extends over the windshield, and an LLM-powered AI assistant. The big news? It’s coming to all future BMWs.

Comedians Tim Meadows and Ken Jeong welcomed the gathered crowd into the studio designed to look like a large-scale interior for an upcoming corporate exhibition. . They did their best to goad Bavarian BMW executives with a series of jokes and bits that mostly fell flat like the central touchscreen that now dominates the iDrive experience.

Fortunately, it wasn’t comedy that brought us to Las Vegas this week, and the good news for BMW is that the facade looks good. The software behind the scenes is called BMW Operating System

It all starts with the central touchscreen, but even that is different. Instead of being square or curved as on other BMWs, the new panel is shaped like a rhombus, a slanting polygon whose tilted position doesn’t seem to really heighten the experience but at least looks distinctive.

The board is also slightly tilted toward the driver and runs software that’s at least familiar to anyone using the current iDrive interface. A fixed bar along the bottom provides quick access to the most important things, like the heating system controls. Moreover, the 3D view of the world ensures that you are always there.

Things get more interesting when you move to the top of the dashboard. Running along the base of the windshield is what BMW calls the panoramic view. Spanning the width of the car, the leftmost portion handles typical gauge cluster duties such as displaying the current speed, active safety controls and even warnings.

The rest of the panoramic display is customizable, with six widgets you can pull up from the central touchscreen that cover things like outside temperature, navigation ETA, and even another widget that shows you turn-by-turn information. We’ve seen plenty of it in demos from BMW before, but now it’s almost ready for prime time with cars shipping at the end of this year.

Given the importance of the panoramic view to the overall in-car experience, I asked the man who oversaw the development of it all, Stefan Durach, senior vice president of connected corporate technical operations at BMW, if there were any visibility issues in bright sunlight.

“This technology is a little different from a traditional display. We use black printing on the bottom. In bright sunlight, it performs a little better,” he said. “You won’t have any problems at all.”

If that’s not enough for you, there’s another HUD located to the left, above the panoramic view, which provides 3D navigation information to the driver. Yes, between the touchscreen, panoramic viewscreen, and HUD, you get three separate turn-by-turn directions feeds.

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

BMW also quickly showed off new in-car LLM software, which, for now at least, is for navigation only. It was all pre-recorded, so it’s anyone’s guess how well this actually worked, but in the demo, at least, he quickly found the “best beach” and moved there. When our demonstrator driver left town, the car asked if Sport mode would automatically engage, which was a nice touch.

BMW’s Durach confirmed that Android Auto and Apple CarPlay will still be supported. He also noted that there are more fun tricks to come that will keep passengers more involved in the experience.

BMW ended the presentation by confirming that Panoramic iDrive will not only come to the Neue Klasse when it finally hits the market at the end of this year, but will be the standard interface for all new BMWs launched after that. This means that the days of the iDrive rotary controller are now officially numbered.

I asked Durach if he had any parting words about the once-revolutionary vehicle interface.

“We look at all of our data and our usage…you can really see that our rotary controller usage is going down significantly,” he said. “People don’t even touch it.”

It’s a tough send-off, but these days you can’t cry over the progress you’ve made.