[Dgjo2022X5MC]

Visited the BMW experience at CES in Las Vegas today.

It is called the BMW Plaza, and the theme was from 0 to the future.

The experience was located outside in a large paved expanse outside the South Plaza.

The primary elements of the plaza were as mentioned in another post:

-augmented reality driving.
-remote valet parking technology.
-a new Amazon powered LLM BMW Assistant (iDrive 9. Not out yet).

There were various new cars there, including the X2 M Sport and X2 Rally.

The former provides a demo of the Amazon LLM assistant, which is a great idea as it will, for example, ingest the entire operating manual and return lay person answers to prompts. That is super smart and worked well. It won’t provide recommendations based on personal driving data, but does return very simple and useful answers to questions. May be slightly backward compatible to some 2023 models. Not super clear on that. The Rally version was cool as hell, and even had center lock wheels. See pic.

I didn’t get to the augmented drive, but saw a video demo. It required driver to wear connected glassss. I spoke with an engineer, and he didn’t seem to think it would make the entire windshield field of vision. More likely a larger portion than what current HUDs deliver. Cost of windshield and an inability to tint full windshield for proper reflectivity and issue. (They ought to check out LG’s new see through OLED TVs. See through panels!).

Before condemning the valet tech, use cases may exist. Not for most, but fleet management and movement, condominium parking (think Miami, NYC, LA), valet parking in metropolitan areas and other uses will likely make sense. Seems to me parking attendants could be centralized and cars moved around from more advantageous locations. The cars moved really slow and it seemed to work.

There was an awesome coffee bar (free), outside bar with a DJ, a selfie from inside an i5, and other cars to look at (pics).

This isn’t a car show, so IMO you need to shift (sorry) focus to the tech and tech fueled inno. Some may come to fruition, some may not. Bits and pieces of these may end up in market. Thats the nature of innovation.

Well, those are my 2 cents.

Hope you find the pics interesting.