The car’s shape doesn’t give any indication of future BMWs yet. It is a compact sedan that BMW is showing us outside of Munich before the show in Las Vegas. Because the 3-box design is at the core of the brand, say the designers. BMW calls the study “Dee” and that stands for Digital Emotional Experience. The car should be an intelligent companion in the future and BMW is now showing with the study how the interaction between driver and vehicle should work.
Even if the Dee will not go into series production, it is still a foretaste of the coming “New Class” from Munich, which is announced for 2025. According to BMW, the new class and the modules integrated into it should set standards in digitization, electrification and sustainability. One aspect that the new class will inherit from the Dee is the use of the windshield as a display, essentially a very large head-up display. The windscreen offers plenty of space to display various content. However, the driver decides whether he wants reduced content or augmented reality or full access to virtual worlds. There are five different displays to choose from. This is selected via a Shy-Tech sensor system, a kind of touch slider, on the dashboard. And that’s one of the few functions or buttons that the cockpit has to offer. Otherwise, the interior is very reduced, nothing should distract. In the future, the interaction between people and vehicles should function largely via voice control (namely natural language).
The Vision Dee can do something else. Using electrically controlled e-ink technology, the car can take on 32 colors and so-called phygital icons, which can change, shape the face of the car, change their facial expressions and replace analog elements. An electrical field in the foils on the outer skin ensures that correspondingly colored microcapsules collect on the surface. A year ago, BMW was still experimenting with black and white changes, but now you have several colors.
