BMW turned 100 years old on 7 March and is celebrating its centenary by focussing on the next 100 years.
One of the questions the company is asking is 'sheer driving pleasure of the future. What will it look like?'
Trying to image how we will live and get around in the future is as challenging as it is fascinating. How will social, economic and living conditions change? And what will be the impact on our mobility? What exciting new possibilities will new technologies bring? And what effect will digitalisation and connectivity have on our automotive requirements?
To mark its centenary year in 2016, the BMW Group is looking further ahead than usual with a series of Vision Vehicles designed to anticipate and respond to people’s future mobility needs. Over the coming years, mobility will become increasingly diverse, say BMW. In the not too distant future, most vehicles will probably be completely self driving, people will get around in robots on wheels. So, given these developments, how will we justify the existence of vehicles by BMW, a brand for whom the individual and Sheer Driving Pleasure are the focus of everything? And
how will BMW’s brand values translate into the future?
In developing the BMW VISION NEXT 100, the main objective was to create not an anonymous vehicle but one that is highly personalised and fully geared to meet the driver’s every need.
For the BMW VISION NEXT 100, the design team specifically took into account all the trends and technological developments that will be most relevant to BMW in the decades ahead. But they also took many of their cues from innova tions and designs of the past.
Adrian van Hooydonk, Head of BMW Group Design: “If, as a designer, you are able to imagine something, there’s a good chance it could one day become reality. So our objective with the BMW VISION NEXT 100 was to develop a future scenario that people would engage with. Technology is going to make significant advances, opening up fantastic new possibilities that will allow us to offer the driver even more assistance for an even more intense driving experience.
“My personal view is that technology should be as intuitive as possible to operate and experience so that future interactions between human, machine and surroundings become seamless. The BMW VISION NEXT 100 shows how we intend to shape this future,” he said.