Gadgetory

I'm back baby I'm all the way in Munich Germany where we are checking out what BMW is calling next-gen they sponsored our trip out here to show off some of their visions for the future of automotive technology and I am really excited to see what they've got in store so we're inside now where the big star of the show is obviously their vision and next unveiling here now we're gonna get hands-on with these cars in just a moment but we gotta wait our turn and apparently this time slot is reserved for none other than Paris Hilton so I'm gonna sit and patiently wait and then I will get you guys the update one moment okay our turn so behind me is three vehicles that are part of BMWs vision next so that's the I next they actually showed that last year it's more about the sort of relaxed vision of the future where your car drives you and you're kind of sitting in a mobile living experience this is the star of the show today and this is the M next so it's still got a ton of Technology in it because this is their vision for the future but it's technology that's really geared around the manual driving experience so let's take a closer look at it starting from the front you've got this spectacular mix of the old and the new so you've got the classic BMW dual kidney grille except it's not a grille so it's a plug-in hybrid vehicle with an advertised 0 to 60 in 3 seconds and then a 62 mile range but because it gets most of its power from electric they actually don't have an air intake at the front of the vehicle so this is instead edged glass that actually lights up from the side for this really stunning effect that accents the thrilling orange paint job just beautifully another really cool lighting technology is BMWs laser wire lights here so these use just these single wafer thin glass filaments and they're laser lit which really opens up some new possibilities in terms of designing the shape and the style of the lights on the vehicle another check that I've seen before but not that that makes it any less cool is the inclusion of 360 degrees of camera coverage for the vehicle which wait a second where's your rear view and side mirrors nowhere so my first time experiencing that was actually on the BMW i8 wireless demo a couple of years ago at CES it works shockingly well then using screens on the inside of the vehicle rather than mirrors on the outside and you can see that BMW is still committed to exploring this concept it improves aerodynamics and from my experience doesn't degrade the driving experience at all in fact in some ways it was better because I had everything I needed to see right in my cone of vision they've got biometric door opening right here and then this is cool so these covers right here again in thrilling orange are not just for looks these actually improve the aerodynamics of the car along with this air scoop right here that serves a dual function as well cooling the rear brakes then at the back we find more of this mix of high-tech and traditional so they've actually borrowed from the air intakes of the m1 to create this glass rear windshield that obviously you wouldn't be able to see out of but you don't need to because of the 360 degree cameras and again they're using this like filament thin laser lighting to create an utterly unique rear to the car that I think looks absolutely phenomenal if I didn't need to drive kids around right so now it's time for our autonomous level 4 demo right over there is a 7 Series that's one of about 80 cars in BMWs level 3 and level 4 test fleet and there's nobody in it and we're going to use the like the the car hailing feature to get it to come pick us up so what do I do I just play I'm gonna work great ok pick me up so I was assuming I was gonna sit in the front but nope I just chill here this is it this is cool so check this out this seems to be what does this lidar data cool so this is actually the front end of the car that just pulled in behind us and then these right here this is a group of people that's walking on so you can actually see their their steps right now oh but I can I can click start ride okay cool so we can't go out on the road on this one for legal reasons but we can operate the car completely autonomously here in the parking lot and my understanding is that part of the demo is that they're gonna try to throw the car for a bit of a loop by having an obstacle come out in front of us is that correct okay you can see here in real-time these are updating I think it's what what twenty times a second we're getting this real-time readout of the shape of the closed course that were on here and then any obstacles so these are actually plants that you can see along the side here oh she's moving some tyres we better stop yes we have detected in the obstacle so if I were to leap out of the car and jump in front of it right now stop yes but don't do that processing parking look I know everyone else is gonna want like a natural human sounding voice but I'm more into like full robot car now a short drive around a closed parking lot might seem like a pretty underwhelming autonomous driving demo but that's only until you have a look at the underlying tech because none of it was pre scripted so behind me they're doing the the talk for this demo and they cover a few things first and foremost is that they're expecting this kind of level for driving technology to show up in their cars as early as 2021 which last I checked is not a long time from now the other thing was the comparison between how an autonomous vehicle can perceive the world and how a human can in terms of the intake of information so they show a couple of slides and then they take it away after a couple seconds ago okay well how many pedestrians were there how many cars were there and of course you don't know you can't remember those kinds of details but the car does in fact BMW had to build a new data center just how's all the data that they're getting from these cars the ones that are coming are going to be generating up to eight terabytes per hour of data to be sent back and analyzed so that the AI can learn so there's two different ways the car uses this information first is for the the overall mission so like go to BMW rogue for example and that's gonna tell the car things like oh well we're gonna need to change lanes eventually so I can make a left turn but the part that was really fascinating to me was the visualization of the more immediate intent based processing that the car is doing it's taking everything around it in real-time 20 times a second and trying to predict about the next anywhere from five to seven seconds and there's some really cool stuff here everything is color-coded according to whether it's going the speed limit above the speed limit decelerating or stopped so red objects are stopped blue objects are going faster than the speed limit and pretty much everything has these little curves or lines that are coming out of the front so that tells us what the car is expecting that object to do based on a successful identification of the object like whether it's a motorcycle or a truck a car or whatever the case may be now in some cases you might see that the car isn't sure maybe someone pulled into a left turn lane but they didn't signal so you might get two paths this one might go straight or it might go left and the car will approach with caution same thing for this bicycle rider for example who is standing by the side of the road looking like oh maybe they could just keep standing there or maybe they could fall over and follow it into the street now there's still a lot of training work to be done but between their test fleet and the simulations that they run BMW is well on their way to the two hundred and forty million kilometers that they are required by their own internal quality standards to test each model for before being able to release it into the wild now it's time for our second driver assist demo of the day so this is demonstrating level two features and while the car itself doesn't look you know futuristic or abnormal in fact this is a 3-series that you could go to the lot and buy today if you wanted the software is different so we've actually got the developer who's driving our car I feel pretty cool about that and he's gonna be showing us some of the features of what they're calling neck level cruise control including the ability to automatically decelerate for a red light set right without you touching it assuming you did your job assuming you did your job correctly is that why they make you drive it yeah so he asked us for permission to drive fast so I apologize in advance for the camera being a little all over the place because I said yeah I want to have the full experience so unlike the level 4 demo we are actually going out on the road for this one is this something David look look nice so once the light goes green it doesn't start moving for us remember this is not level 3 level 4 but it does detect that and makes a little audible tone hey wake up gotta start meeting up so on our second light it actually wasn't already red as we were approaching it it was yellow but the car started to decelerate anyway so the fundamental difference between this kind of driver assist technology versus autonomous operation is that the car is just taking a formula how fast am I going what status is the light and performing a fixed action it's not actually sensing contextual information about the environment and making a decision that's the key difference so I thought we were done I thought that was the last demo then they brought us into a theater here for a little closing ceremony and a last-minute surprise so this right here is a concept bike that they're calling the vision DC roadster and it borrows some elements that we already saw earlier today like for example the recycled carbon fiber construction now this one's really got my attention for a couple of reasons it's fully electric it's fully connected and BMW promises it is 110 percent what is it they called it pure driving pleasure something along those lines that sounds pretty good to me so thanks for watching guys thanks to BMW for sponsoring our trip out here if you guys dislike to this video you know where that button is but if you liked it like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link below JK almost nothing we showed today is available but hey in the future right vision for later yeah that's the idea