It might be blue.
BMW, at its annual general meeting earlier this week, has confirmed that they will be revealing a new concept car before the year is up, that will preview an autonomous electric mode that’s set for launch sometime in 2020 before going into production at the brands’ Dingolfing plant in 2021.
The announcement was made by BMW Group chairman Harald Kruger, who then showed a blue preview shot of the car, bearing a hyper-simplified silhouette. Even then, certain details of the upcoming electric concept car were clear to see, revealing a few salient details.
*See the similarities?
Even if chairman Kruger hadn’t called it a BMW iNext, we’d have made that guess given the unique glasshouse profile, that is inspired by the kidney grille that BMW’s have sported since time immemorial. The iNext concept also features rather boxy, squared-off wheelarches, leading us to believe that we’re looking at an SUV of some kind. The roofline also supports the assumption that it is indeed an SUV.
The iNext will be a lot more than a pretty showcar. This will be BMW’s technology flagship, which will put it in good stead among competitors like the Jaguar I-Pace, Tesla Model X, and Audi e-tron Quattro. It’ll also be competitive insofar as autonomous driving capabilities are concerned, with BMW saying that the iNext will go into production with “level 3.5” self-driving capabilities, bridging the gap between hands-off driving (level 4) and constant-supervision (level 3, like what the Audi A6 offers).
“The iNext project is our building kit for the future. It will benefit the entire company, and all our brands. For the first time, we are combining all key technologies for future mobility in one vehicle. The iNext is fully electric, fully connected, and also offers highly automated driving. Today, we gave our shareholders a very first glimpse of the BMW iNext. Later this year, we will be presenting the BMW iNext as a Vision Vehicle.” — Harald Kruger, Chairman (Board of Management), BMW AG
The BMW iNext is expected to pack an electric range of 500km on a single charge, similar to the iVision Dynamics concept car that BMW presented last year. The company remained cagey on specifics such as power output, battery capacity, recharging capabilities and the like, but as the iNext is expected to be a technological flagship for the company, we expect everything to be as groundbreaking as BMW can manage.
