Gaze Into BMW’s Crystal Ball, Drink In The Copper-Coloured Body, Nap To Your Destination.
I’m almost 72 percent sure that if you had given someone (even one of the brightest minds of the time) in 1916, the founding year of Bayerische Motoren Werke AG (BMW), the task of predicting where the company will be in a hundred year’s time, he’d have a tough job getting it roughly accurate.
In 2016, just yesterday, BMW at their Centenary event in Munich, showed the world a concept vehicle that’s a pretty good indication of where they see themselves going. If not for the next 100 years, at least for the next 20 or 30.
My guess is that whichever team within BMW was handed a project that's as important-sounding as this one had just as hard a time with envisioning the long term future of not only the company, but of the automobile in general, as that character in 1916. One hundred years is an unprecedented amount of time in this industry. So much can change, and indeed has.
The imagination can run wild, and still at least some of it would be spot on about how things could work in the year 2116. But the group in charge of the BMW Vision Next 100 concept car had limitations. And within those confines, they have done a fine job.
The Vision Next 100 is an amalgam of a lot of the technologies that we know are in development today, but turned up to 11.
Much of the body itself consists of a proprietary fabric-like material that can mould themselves to fit different practical or aerodynamic needs. You’ve noticed the colour, too, I imagine.
The real tech lies inside the Vision Next 100, where the driver’s reactions and attention are monitored and analysed by the in-car ‘Companion’, typically in autonomous mode, which allows the car to act just like it would if you were in manual control. As an example, when the car is driving itself, it could slow down at a crosswalk and let a pedestrian know it was safe to proceed just like you would, via its front end glowing green, based on where the driver is placing his or her attention.
Two driving modes were highlighted during the unveil: Ease and Boost. The former mode is fully autonomous with an optional manual override. When selected, the interior reorganises to a more lounge-like layout.
Boost mode, however, is an expression of how owners enjoy their cars through driving in future where most cars operate independent (mostly) of human input. Boost focuses on the driving experience, altering the H-point for a more involving experience, the centre console adjusts around the driver, cornering apex is augmented onto the head-up display, etc.
The cabin also employs something that BMW calls Alive Geometry that is made up of almost 800 moving triangles set into the instrument panel as well as certain portions of the side panels to passively communicate to the driver and/or occupants. BMW believes that, one day, the reliance on many separate displays will disappear entirely, replaced with a more enveloping experience where entire windscreens are augmented to display information.
The car itself has no powertrain specifications or details of any sort to speak of, with viewers left to guess just what will power the world in the post-fossil fuel age. BMW has stuck to what it knows, and the Concept has stuck to a showcase of automation, intelligence, mobility and advancements in exterior and interior materials.
Head of BMW Group Design, Adrian van Hooydonk, said: “If, as a designer, you are able to imagine something, there’s a good chance it could one day become reality. So our objective with the BMW VISION NEXT 100 was to develop a future scenario that people would engage with. Technology is going to make significant advances, opening up fantastic new possibilities that will allow us to offer the driver even more assistance for an even more intense driving experience.
“My personal view is that technology should be as intuitive as possible to operate and experience so that future interactions between human, machine and surroundings become seamless. The BMW VISION NEXT 100 shows how we intend to shape this future.”
What becomes evident from BMW’s Vision Next 100 concept is that the the company is quite certain of its investments into the future of motoring and where the car, as a whole, evolves to. If their bet turns out to be true, the driver will be of less and less importance, leaving space for owners to become esteemed guests that the car caters to individually.
That’s an intriguing future, albeit one that’s a philosophical departure from a company whose tagline reads “Sheer Driving Pleasure”.
