BMW’s new UI puts widgets on the windshield

BMW is totally revamping its in-car user interface, starting with the Neue Klasse sedan later this year and ultimately spreading to all models, the company announced at CES 2025. Some of it looks and feels familiar, but the big change is a widget-based system that lets users customize the layout — including on the car’s windshield.

There isn’t an actual display on the windshield, though. Instead, there are screens embedded in the dashboard that reflect up onto a slightly treated portion of the glass. It’s a supercharged version of an idea that we’ve seen in other cars, presented with distinct BMW flare.

“We felt when we looked at all the digital possibilities, that people are only using a fraction of what a vehicle can theoretically do inside,” BMW CTO Frank Weber told TechCrunch in an interview at the show.

Weber said BMW wanted to expand what drivers could do with an in-car UI, but that the design team also didn’t want to overwhelm drivers with screens like so many of the company’s peers. That’s why they turned to the windshield idea, which he said is a technology that’s been kicking around internally at BMW for about a decade.

(The distinction between “another screen” and “information reflected on the windshield” may seem like splitting hairs to most people. But Weber said that putting that part of the UI at a bit of a remove — up above the dashboard, in the line of sight to the road ahead — keeps with the company’s longstanding focus on creating the “ultimate driving experience.”)

BMW’s new Panoramic iDrive UI. Image: BMW.

BMW has technically shown Panoramic iDrive to media before, notably at an event in April. But this time around, BMW revealed the final production-intent version, Head of BMW Group Design Adrian Van Hooydonk told TechCrunch.

BMW didn’t do away with all displays. There’s still a central touch screen display on the dashboard where drivers and passengers will find climate and other common settings, a 3D map, and a carousel of customizable widgets. And there’s an optional head-up display in front of the driver that floats above the panoramic UI.

The shift to this new UI — officially called Panoramic iDrive — also means the death of BMW’s love-it-or-hate-it, knob-based iDrive system. Now more than 20 years old, Weber claimed most drivers hardly use the iDrive knob outside of scrolling through things like long contact lists or zooming in and out of maps. In China, he said, drivers don’t use it at all.

The removal of the iDrive knob, plus the focus on the central display and windshield, means BMW drivers will control the Panoramic iDrive UI through a combination of haptic steering wheel buttons and voice control. The latter will involve a new BMW digital assistant that is powered by a white label LLM.

“We want to have more information right in front of you, where you are driving, to support the idea of of hands on the wheel, eyes on the road,” Weber said. “And the outcome was, yes, there will be fewer physical buttons.”

The new UI will include third-party app support, and unlike some competitors, BMW is not moving away from Apple CarPlay support.

“We control everything because what we want to have is an interface that is deeply connected to the functions of the car,” Van Hooydonk said. “Of course, we will also offer things like Apple Car Play and so on, and in China and other systems, and they will be integrated as far as possible. But you cannot completely control all the car functions. We want to keep that to ourselves as well as the the customer data.”