BMW's i Vision Dee Concept: The Next i3 Fiasco?
Yesterday I watched BMW's "The Dee Movie" on YouTube featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger. While I quite liked the ad (and Arnie's performance) I immediately thought: didn't they learn anything from the i3 fiasco? The car looks awful and (at least in my opinion) has nothing to do with a BMW. At best it looks like a very bad knock-off of the Polestar 2 design (which I actually like). But you should make up your own mind and definitely also read some of the comments on YouTube - very entertaining :-).
Somehow it seems that BMW lately has a split personality: on one side they recently finally released a really good EV with the iX that also looks like a car. But just when you think they finally "got it" they hit you with something like this?
"I mean, you know, our cars had hearts and soul." [Arnold Scharzenegger in "The Dee Movie"]
The concept car in the movie definitely has neither heart, nor soul (at least from a design perspective). And a German car maker pulling off a "true digital companion" - something that Google, Apple and Amazon have not been able to achieve, seriously?
Let's take my 1 1/2 year old Audi A6: superb hardware, nice touchscreen, a great all-wheel steering delivering a super dynamic driving experience for such a heavy car. But the infotainment: the only thing that works as expected is Apple's CarPlay. The navigation system often cannot find a route where I can find three, the speech recognition is so bad I have stopped using it (interestingly, it was much better in my old A4, how did they pull *this* off?) and I already had to reset the infotainment system often enough that I do not have to look up the procedure anymore (simply press and hold the on/off button for 20 seconds).
My hope is that by the time I order my next car Apple is ready with the next generation of CarPlay which is rumored to take over all of the car's screens and that Audi or BMW are on board. Then I have the best of two worlds: the handling of a sporty German car, but an infotainment that actually works and is intuitive to use.
P.S. I don't know if the color changing thingy in the movie is real or just a "vision", but I am pretty sure that this would be illegal in many if not most parts of the world. Your car's color is typically registered together with your license plate. And at least here in central Europe changing a car's color costs a lot of effort and money, since you have to re-register it with the authorities. Also the police will not be happy if they cannot search for a "green BMW" anymore, because now it might already be yellow...
P.P.S. Why is David Hasselhoff in this movie? Did Arnie loose a bet or...?