BMW Just Created a Concept Car That Comes From the Future

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Posted by Jeff Perez 

                               

                                        

Like Marty McFly in Back to the Future, BMW just created a vehicle that traveled back to the past in order to help shape the future of mobility. Not literally, of course, BMW hasn’t invented time travel. But it has created something that would look right at home in the year 2116.

 

The BMW New Vision 100 Concept (yes, that’s its full name), celebrates 100 years of Bavarian motoring, while giving us a very futuristic ‘vision’ of the next 100 years. Sharing a number of lines with the already advanced i8 hybrid sports car, the concept ups the ante with a full copper-colored exterior, shape-shifting wheel covers, and a space-ship like interior.

Starting from the inside out, the Vision concept uses a dashboard unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. Various arrows replace a typical heads up display, and warn drivers of objects in the road using colors and warnings. BMW coins the term “4D printing” for the technology, which is less based in reality than the car itself.

 

The exterior follows the same geometric theme with the aforementioned shape-shifting wheel covers that move and contort to the vehicle’s driving patterns. Overdone? Definitely, but the flexible covers help control the car—which, of course, is semi-autonomous—to determine the best line of driving or to avoid hazards.

The central control unit—or in human speak, steering wheel—retracts while in Ease mode, and allows for autonomous driving, assisted by all those wacky shapes and signals. In Boost mode, the driver remains firmly in control, and works in unison with those driver assist aids we talked about earlier.

For now, BMW’s Vision of the future truly is just that: a vision. Celebrating the brand’s 100-year anniversary, it seems like the next 100 years could be just as interesting if all things stay on course.