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 in one moment okay our turn
so behind me is three vehicles that are part of bmw's vision next so that's the
inex 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 of 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
etched 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 bmw's
laser wire lights here so these use just
these single wafer thin glass filaments
and their 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 tech 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
worked 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 bmw's 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 click just choose your destination
where you want to go for example you want to go home go to work right
okay and then just push pick me up pick me up
so i was assuming i was gonna sit in the front
but uh nope i just chill here this is it this is
cool so check this out this seems to be what is 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 around 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 going to try to throw the car for a bit of a loop by
having an obstacle come out in front of us is that correct yes
okay you can see here in real time these are updating i think it's what what uh 20
times a second we're getting this
real-time readout of the shape of the closed course that we're on here and
then any obstacles so these are actually plants that you can see along the side
here oh she's moving some tires
we better stop yes we have detected the obstacle
so if i were to leap out of the car and jump in front of it right now it would stop
yes but don't do that i cannot allow that yeah yeah yeah
really big problems got it got it got it
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 4
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 and go 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 to house
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 from it so there's two different
ways the car uses this information first is for the the overall mission so like
go to bmw rope 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 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 followed 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 240 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 three 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 going to be showing us some of
the features of what they're calling next level cruise control including the
ability to automatically decelerate for a red light
is that 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 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 it stopping it's not david look
look nice
so once the light goes green it doesn't start moving for us remember this is not
level three level four but it does detect that and makes a little
audible tone hey wake up you gotta start moving now
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 the 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
what is it they call 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 disliked this video you know
where that button is but if you liked it hit 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