BMWBLOG was fortunate enough to get a bit of an inside scoop with Adrian van Hooydonk at CES this year. In an interview with the BMW Group Head of Design, we went over the new BMW i Vision Dee, the future of physical buttons, coachbuilt projects and much more. We start the interview going over the recently-revealed BMW i Vision Dee which is largely modeled after the future of BMW design.
“[Dee is] preparing the road for our customers starting in the year 2025,” Van Hooydonk told us. The chief designer says that focuses include electric mobility, sustainability/circularity, and a digital aspect (elsewhere described as “digitalization”). With CES representing technology, the talk today is, of course, primarily on digitalization. But there were also other important comments on design, styling, and sustainability.
One of the biggest debates currently raging in the automotive world involves physical switches. How many should there be, what should they do, and more. Van Hooydonk is aware of some of the automotive world’s gripes and isn’t concerned. Reducing switches isn’t a problem, thanks to vast improvements to AI and voice commands. Plus, Van Hooydonk says that they will further increase the human component – making driving a BMW a more emotional and involving experience.
Misguided claims that switch removal is a direct result of cost-cutting aren’t quite accurate, either. R&D costs make it a near zero-sum game, and it’s also another component of BMW’s desire to increase the recyclability of their cars (which the BMW i3 did great with about a decade ago). Regarding AI, van Hooydonk shared the following nugget: “It is not about how big is your display, or how many megabytes or pixels or, you know, how much programming was necessary to make the car clever. It is really about how can you really make it a companion, something that people trust and that they can work with in a very seamless way.” While the i Vision Dee contains a lot of technology that won’t see production anytime soon, he also insists that it is “full of ideas that we are actually quite serious about.”
One of those ideas…
