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I am underwhelmed compared to what MB demoed at CES. BMW has a lot of catching up to do.
Voice can be nice for entering destinations and various long form tasks while driving, but there are diminishing returns as you move away from those tasks. I am not interested in having conversations with the BMW personal assistant. I am also less interested in it automatically determining things like climate needs based on AI. That’s a very personal situation and likely influenced by a lot of factors.
Much more interesting would’ve been surfacing the things I need on my drive that are of immediate use. Perhaps noticing how long I tend to drive before taking a break so it can suggests stop points along the way or giving you quick access to a contact you need to call based on your calendar. Actionable things to make the drive nicer.
The majority of this stuff comes off as gimmicky...
Then you have the mess of updates, support life cycles, and etc that are layered onto this. My 5 series from MY2020 got a weakened gimped version of iDrive 7 without support got RSU. The LCI MY2021 got RSU support and now iDrive 8 is out with no path to iDrive 8 for those cars. Makes RSU seem gimmicky and weak too. Also a precedent was set that BMW may roll out iDrive 8 to various cars with limited support for advertised platform features.
BMW is still far behind.
They need to move toward a standard platform that allows them to support iDrive longer and offer upgrades to iDrive versions as long as underlying hardware allows. Similar to Tesla. So users can have a reason to ascribe value to these updates.
Won’t happen though.
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