Anyone who has attended the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) over recent years will have spotted that major automotive players have been muscling in on consumer tech turf. Autonomous driving, AI-powered voice assistants and masses of high-definition touchscreen displays have been employed to snare column inches and take over TikTok feeds.
This year was no different, with BMW choosing the platform to introduce the latest generation of its iconic iDrive infotainment system that, unsurprisingly, now involves a frankly terrifying amount of screen real estate.
Due to arrive in the upcoming BMW Neue Klasse X electric SUV, with the system slated to roll out to all new BMW models in the near future, the Panoramic iDrive offering features a 3D head-up display in front of the driver, a mammoth 17.9-inch central touchscreen and, to top it all off, a separate head-up display that spans the entire width of the windshield.
As is the way with most infotainment systems now, the central touchscreen is customizable, in so much as drivers can pin their most-used apps and key information to the home screen. Judging by imagery and video released by BMW, there’s at least three tiles that are available to constantly display information.
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What’s more, the epic Panoramic Vision head-up display (HUD) offers space for up to six fully customizable widgets, while the three directly in front of the driver are reserved for key vehicle information, such as speed and remaining battery charge.
Already, we are up to 12 points of information, and that is before we even consider the third and final head-up display that’s projected onto the windscreen in front of the driver, which will show enormous, animated turn-by-turn directions when BMW’s navigation is in use.
Some of the examples BMW cites when it comes to the tiles that can be pinned to its Panoramic Vision HUD are a weather app and a compass. Now call me old fashioned, but can’t you just look out of the window to see what the weather is doing and when was the last time you used a compass while driving? It’s 2025, not 1925.
Finally, there has been no word on how BMW’s flashy Panoramic Display and slightly angled central touchscreen will interact with the likes of Apple CarPlay and Android Auto – two systems that the majority of the driving public are perfectly happy with.
An industry issue
To only berate BMW would be wrong, because Hyundai Mobis also revealed that it has created the world’s first full-windshield holographic display, which beams a glut of information across the entire width of a windshield.
According to the Korean automotive supplier, its system uses a specialized film that’s embedded with a Holographic Optical Element (HOE), which utilizes the “principle of light diffraction to project images and videos directly to the viewer’s eyes”. Say what?
Using a Kia EV9 as a testbed at this year’s CES, it’s easy to see this sort of technology appearing in some of the Hyundai Motor Group’s more premium products in the coming years.
Harman also debuted its home-theater-quality Ready Display, with Quantum Dot and Blue Mini LED-based local dimming technology. That’s high-end television specification, shrunk down to something that will fit in a family SUV and will likely rarely be fully appreciated.
After all, when was the last time you watched an entire Hollywood blockbuster while waiting for your EV to charge?
Killing interior design
Meanwhile, Mercedes-Benz is set to unleash its all-new CLA model onto the world soon and it comes with the promise of a ‘user-friendly MBUX Superscreen’ that, in the early concept cars at least, takes up the entire width of the cockpit.
It’s not that I’m necessarily anti-touchscreens in vehicles; I write for a tech site, after all. However, dedicating so much space to them, like Mercedes-Benz and BMW have chosen to, leaves little to no room for individual acts of interesting physical design.
Rewind a few years and car interiors all looked vastly different: it was easy to differentiate between the quirky interior flourishes of a Citroen and the more upmarket polish of an Audi, for example.
But the over-reliance on the digital space means that, without interior designers pushing for more unique physical elements, modern vehicle interiors look eerily similar, especially when powered down.
Consider the fact that many manufacturers have turned to Epic Games, which offers its Unreal Engine to produce much of the interface, and even the digital domain is becoming homogeneous.
I’ve noticed the interface that visualizes an operational advanced driver assistance system (ADAS), for example, is practically the same in numerous modern cars. The small digital representations of trucks, cars and motorcycles that the external cameras pick up look largely identical, no matter if you are in a Tesla or a Volvo EX90.
Of course, the notion of good design is a very personal thing, but there’s also the sticky issue of user experience. Brands (ahem, Volkswagen) have had their fingers burnt in the past, unleashing bouji, sparse interiors that might look like an LA A-lister’s apartment but prove nightmarish to use and live with.
Plastering a vehicle’s interior with screens and irritating haptic buttons typically comes at the expense of easy-to-locate physical switches that, when you are in the midst of driving (a cerebrally taxing task), are essential for distraction-free and safe motoring.
Designing for the future
Right now, it feels like automotive companies are designing vehicle cockpits for a time when high levels of autonomous driving are both legal and commonplace.
I’m not simply talking about SAE Level 3, which allows drivers to ‘enjoy’ eyes-off driving under some fairly strict parameters (highways, speeds under 30mph etc), but Level 4 and 5, where the vehicle does the majority of the heavy lifting.
We are still some way from this technology becoming a reality, and an even larger leap from legislators creating a proper legal framework for the widespread adoption. So it begs the question, why are manufacturers choosing to offer so much potentially distracting information now?
As if to protect themselves from a potential torrent of driver distraction accusations, most modern manufacturers are also working with artificial intelligence and large language models to allow drivers and occupants to interact with their vehicles via natural speech prompts, negating the need to prod around a touchscreen or hunt for buttons.
Having a vehicle predict when you are feeling chilly with a cutting-edge suite of bio-sensing technology is a very expensive and complicated way of admitting that burying the climate control adjuster in a series of annoying sub-menus was probably a bad idea.
Listen, I understand that space-age vehicle interiors is, essentially, what technological progress looks like and I’m not suggesting we head back to the days of walnut wood trim and cigarette lighters (although wood interiors are still cool, IMHO).
But designing vehicles – that are slated for imminent release – with NASA control room-levels of interactive displays seems counterintuitive.
Until the day arrives that I can genuinely kick back and enjoy what’s beaming out of those screens, I want to be able to drive a vehicle – not pilot Falcon 9.