#Idrive hand over hand how to
#Idrive hand over hand drivers
#Idrive hand over hand driver
#Idrive hand over hand portable

Nowadays almost every car, truck, or SUV has some kind of big, honking infotainment interface and they all more or less work. Those are just examples of luxury competitors. Cadillac’s CUE and Lincoln’s SYNC 3 are more or less conventional systems with standard-sized screens but serve to show that all competitors offer something like iDrive. Audi’s MMI touch response system achieves basically the same thing as iDrive but with two more conventionally separated screens and has an easier-to-read digital gauge display. We drove one of those and really liked it.

#Idrive hand over hand portable

Then there’s also the screen in the perpetually delayed Byton EV, which has a true pillar-to-shinning-pillar screen that looks like a portable automotive fish tank on the dash. We Hitch a (Virtual) Ride in the Mercedes EQSīMW’s is not exactly pillar-to-pillar, but it’s close. Just a note here to remind you that the MBUX screen in the coming Mercedes-Benz EQS sedan dwarfs the elegantly curved BMW iDrive screen: “…the all-new MBUX Hyperscreen stretches from the left to right A-pillars with three displays under a single 56-inch curved glass surface, (displaying) the latest generation of MBUX with Augmented Reality Navigation,” Mercedes touted in a recent missive to us.

#Idrive hand over hand drivers

This new elegance will be engaging drivers and passengers alike on all future BMWs, starting with the iX and i4 electric vehicles.

#Idrive hand over hand driver

The whole display is almost two and a half feet wide, 12.3 inches of which is the instrument cluster the driver sees through the steering wheel, and a meaty 14.9 inches of which is the infotainment off to the right.

You can set it all up to your liking, displaying whatever you think is most important, then it allows you to swipe right or left to access still more customized screens of data pleasantly laid out.

Just like that time you had to transition from a typewriter to a laptop, then from one laptop to the next, then from whatever operating system had been deemed the best ever for that week to whatever some guy in IT said was the next great thing, the more you know about how it all works, the more likely you are to like it.įirst, the screen: It is lovely, bending like a physics textbook drawing of curved, finite space, wrapping from the driver display with its various speedo and tach configurations, out to the infotainment that takes up the right half. In fact, a lot of it doesn’t seem to make any sense even when reading straight from the directions.

#Idrive hand over hand how to

Does this one follow the trend? Is it better than the previous seven? Yes, mostly, but if you buy a Bimmer, be sure to spend at least an hour or maybe a day or two with your dealer’s iDrive product expert learning how to use it, or at least setting it up to your liking, because it’s not necessarily intuitive right off the bat. In the 20 years since the world first saw an iDrive, there have been eight versions of it, each, supposedly, getting better and easier to use. You can even talk to it, “Hey BMW, play artist Mott the Hoople.” So you route all those controls through a single, central screen that is itself controlled by a big, fat dial, or by touching points on the screen, or even by scrolling a roller on the steering wheel. The problem was, and is, that modern cars have so many functions to control and parameters to set that you couldn’t possibly make enough buttons to manage each one. You know, with lots of switches and things all over the place. “Otherwise, the cabin would start to look like a Gemini spacecraft.” Twenty years ago, designer Chris Bangle introduced the very first BMW iDrive, the human-machine interface that lets you access all of your BMW’s electronic and infotainment features through one handy medium.

The system will appear first on the iX electric crossover, due out in early 2022.

The new iDrive 8 offers more features than you’ll grasp at first, and now includes an interface that stretches from the instrument panel to the center screen.

It’s been 20 years since BMW led the charge into the now ubiquitous world of centrally accessed infotainment systems.