The i Vision Dee grille is a virtual face that tells you how to become your companion: BMW hopes to make the New Class an EV-specific platform
The Bavarian automaker has long had a knack for setting the benchmarks with cars like the 3 Series and X5, but when the vehicles change with the times, BMW’s superfans don’t hold their tongues.
The i Vision Dee grille is a virtual face with its own expressions on top of the virtual voice. This is a BMW that talks back and may even have hot takes of its own. At a recent tech demonstration, the car mentioned to me that I was my father’s E30, and early social media reports about the concept evoked ‘80s talking car show Knight Rider.
“We want to make a bigger statement that is beyond speech recognition,” van Hooydonk says. The entire vehicle will become your companion, that’s what we want to say. The concept shown in Las Vegas this week uses e-ink displays in its headlights, which can be used to convey emotions and when approached by its owner. BMW claims certain moods like joy, astonishment, and approval can be expressed visually.
While BMW won’t directly confirm that this design is intended for production, it’s fairly safe to assume it will influence future cars. BMW’s concepts have a way of turning into reality—see the i8 supercar and i3 city car from the past decade. BMW even calls this “another milestone on the road” to Neue Klasse, BMW’s upcoming EV-specific car platform. BMW defined its image in the 1960s and 70s with a series of sport sedans known as the New Class.
The electric i4 and ICE-powered 4 Series Gran Coupe are the same vehicle but BMW will build the next round of models to be electric.
At a press previews in Germany last year, BMW design boss Domagoj Dukec claimed that the sport sedan is still important to the company.
Dukec said that they want to show their customers that if the world is changing, they will adapt. “Everybody who’s working within my team, from different cultures and different generations, they love the brand and they know their history. They don’t want that to go away.”
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There’s also bad news for drivers who hate screens: the whole windshield is now essentially a display, mixing the functions of a dashboard with an infotainment system and adding in augmented reality features.
“Projection across the entire width of the windscreen allows information to be displayed on the largest possible surface — which only becomes recognizable as a display once it is activated,” BMW said in a statement. The car visualizes how an advanced Head-Up-Display could be used in the future.
But while many of the features previewed on the i Vision Dee certainly won’t be ready for primetime in 2023, they feel like a believable approach to where the increasingly digitally focused automotive industry is going.
BMW says a production version of its new HUD technology will be used in cars due from 2025 onward. It refers to these electric vehicles as the “Niel Klasse”.
Other auto manufactures are working on this area, with Mercedes adding navigation to a live video feed from a forward-facing camera, while both Ford and Audi are also looking at ways to provide driver information onto the road. Revealed in August 2022, Ford’s system is geared toward nighttime driving, where prompts warning of speed limits, upcoming junctions, and icy weather are beamed onto the road.
Advanced in-car assistants are also a hot topic. While some manufacturers would rather drivers use Siri or Google Assistant via a connected smartphone, others are also going their own way. Nomi, a virtual assistant that looks like a person, is housed in a dashboard display and can be used when speaking to the driver.
BMW’s Dee assistant does not have a face, at least not in the US and Europe, but BMW says facial expressions could appear in the Chinese market, where demand for such technology is greater.
The Dee concept itself is, to our eyes at least, wonderfully retro. It works, even though it would have sat awkwardly up against the supposedly bleeding-edge technology showcased in and out. We hope BMW can turn this design into reality by using it in its Neue Klasse cars. From a company criticized for its ungainly iX and challenging i7, the compact concept is a breath of fresh air.
The quintessential BMW elements are the shape that came from boiling down years of BMW design language. “For this car we took it to another level and reduced the amount of elements drastically, because we wanted the digital aspects to take center stage,” van Hooydonk says.