BMW’s panoramic iDrive will make sure you never miss a single navigation prompt

At a surprise star-studded event this morning, BMW revealed the final form of its long-awaited and long-teased Panoramic iDrive system. It’s a combination of an oddly angled touchscreen, a head-up display that stretches across the windshield, and an LLM-powered AI assistant. The big news? Coming to every future BMW.

Comedians Tim Meadows and Ken Jeong welcomed the assembled audience to a studio designed to look like a giant interior of the company’s upcoming film . They did everything in their power to goad BMW’s Bavarian executives into a series of pranks and pranks that mostly fell like the central touchscreen that now dominates the iDrive experience.

Thankfully, it wasn’t comedy that brought us to Las Vegas this week, and the good news for BMW is that the interface looks good. The software behind the scenes is called BMW Operating System X, and it powers a new iDrive that combines screens and voice commands to create a familiar but far more comprehensive interface than anything we’ve seen in a BMW before.

It all starts with that central touchscreen, but even that is different. Rather than being square or curved like other BMWs, the new panel is a diamond-shaped, slanted polygon whose slanted stance doesn’t really seem to add to the experience, but at least it looks distinctive.

The panel is also slightly angled towards the driver and runs software that is at least familiar to anyone who has used the current iDrive interface. A static bar at the bottom provides quick access to essentials such as heating system controls. On top of that, a stylized, 3D world view ensures you’re always positioned.

Things get more interesting as you move up the board. Along the base of the windshield BMW calls Panoramic Vision. It runs the width of the car, with the left-most section handling the typical duties of a gauge cluster, such as displaying the current speed, active safety controls and even warnings.

The rest of the Panoramic Vision display is customizable, with six widgets you can slide up from the central touchscreen, covering things like outside temperature, ETA navigation and even another widget that shows you turn-by-turn information. It’s a lot we’ve seen on display from BMW before, but now it’s almost ready to debut with the cars arriving later this year.

Given the importance of Panoramic Vision to the overall in-car experience, I asked the man who led the development of it all, Senior Vice President of BMW Affiliated Companies Stephan Dürach, if there are any problems with visibility in bright sunlight.

“This technology is a bit different than a traditional heads-up display…we use black printing underneath. In bright sunlight it even performs a bit better,” he said. “You won’t have any trouble at all.”

If that’s not enough displays for you, there’s another HUD located on the left, above the Panoramic Vision, which gives 3D navigation information to the driver. Yes, between the touchscreen, the Panoramic Vision display and the HUD, you can get three separate feeds of turn-by-turn guidance.

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

BMW is also quickly showing off a new automotive LLM that’s navigation-only, at least for now. Everything was pre-recorded, so it’s anybody’s guess how well this will work in reality, but at least in the demo it quickly found the “best beach” and navigated there. When our mock driver left town, the car even asked whether to automatically engage sport mode, which was a nice touch.

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

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

I asked Durach if he had any parting words for this once revolutionary automotive interface.

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

It’s a tough send off, but you just can’t cry for progress these days.