We all know that concept cars are usually made from a formula of 60% marketing shit, 30% technical magic shit and desires and 10% real good ideas that will move a company forward. I’m not saying the BMW and Vision Circular concept necessarily breaks this formula, but I think it’s worth what’s in that 10% and shows an interesting path for BMW’s future car design. I really like this concept. But let’s take care of those 90 puffs required first, just to do it get it out of the way.
First, BMW poses this as a “compact BMW for the year 2040,” so it immediately warns you not to show anything too really, because you know that the farther a vehicle manufacturer says it represents its concept, the less likely it is to be really similar to what will happen that year.
The BMW promotional video put a lot of effort into it shown before the presentation of the car. The movie characteristics some spokesperson I’m unfamiliar with making twists on a kind of nightmare from the Second-Life-meet-William-Wonka design school that BMW PR seems to call “Joytopia”.
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Ooof.
Here, you can see a brief overview at the beginning of this promotional video about the car and its goals:
Okay, I’ll resist the temptation to get my eyes smeared and roll them dizzyingly through all of this and focus on what I think really works well here, which is the car itself.
Basically, it has a general design that I’ve always liked: a compact, space-efficient box (i.e., no hood or long trunk) a kind of design, with wheels in the corners and plenty of space between them. It seems that BMW took its novel and bold i3 EV design and press this FF button into the future, perhaps crushing a bit of Renault Avantime and Twingo and even a bit of Brubaker Box and mixing that.
It is a spacious and luxurious single box sedan, but this box is sleek and interesting and looks nice mix of materials and textures, along with a new hash-based design language that appears in several surfaces included glass, wheels, i at the ornate car lighting design: everything to which I think it has a great effect.
The most important design element of the car, at least when compared to BMW news cars, is this radically different interpretation of BMW’s iconic kidney grille.
The modern the embodiment of BMW’s kidneys is the large porcine nostrils, which are seen in the current formation: nostrils that, to say the least, have been controversial. In the iVision circular, the kidney grids have been widened, something BMW has done before in cars like the amazing 507, and if you let me be a fool, it’s a path I suggested to BMW in 2019.
I think it works. In addition, in an era of electric vehicles that do not require the same volume of air that full grilles could provide, kidney grilles also contain primary lighting, highly stylized here, with decorative diagonals and a couple more hashes. daring. marks on both sides as primary headlights.
Based on the talks I heard from the people at BMW, this general design direction (the wide kidneys with integrated lighting) is something that will really happen in the next BMW designs, and I think it’s a new direction welcome, that solves the very non-trivial. problem of integrating an old iconic design with a new, modern design language that the original design could never have foreseen.
The interior of the circular, too, is interesting, with no pillars The body has suicidal posterior doors that create a cavernous opening, and while I type of cabin thinking seats It looks a bit like second hand shop sofas made with that peculiar shade of mauve gray that seemed to only exist between 1989 and 1994, I have to admit it looks quite comfortable in it.
All instruments and screens are projected onto the windshield, which eliminates the need for physical screens, in keeping with the slim design concept that underlies the car. I’m not sure what to make of the massive chunk of what looks like a cooler pictured on a Nintendo 64, but we can only calculate it down to the ridiculous concept of the car.
Now, a part I considered to be a part of the shit spectrum, though what it doesn’t seem to be is the whole “circular” angle, where the whole car is recyclable and recycled, a completely sustainable loop of materials throughout the life of the car. It seemed like the usual public relations sustainability talk, but when I sincerely suggested it to BMW’s chief engineer, Frank Weber, he emphatically denied that it was just marketing and made it clear that the only way that such a claim could work would be if BMW started the process right now, which he insisted they have.
With that in mind, this concept becomes more impressive and important. BMW seems to take it very seriously and the design and engineering shown in the iVision Circular, with many very intentional parts reduction strategies and reflect a lot on the materials used and reused.
So yes, it’s not free from the usual concept car hyperbole and self-magnifying nonsense, but underneath all that, under the ridiculous name and future future, what we have is an interesting design direction for BMW with a lot care. in the sustainability of producing vehicles in volume.
He is bold, intelligent and exciting.
Just miss this ridiculously ridiculous Joytopia and we’ll be great.