BMW i Vision Dee is a colour-shifting first look at a ‘Neue Klasse’ 3-Series BMW

The BMW i Vision Dee (Digital Emotional Experience) is a first look at a ‘Neue Klasse’ BMW i3 for 2025 bringing the “next level of human-machine interaction“.

The car industry is in the process of ditching more than 100 years of development and design of cars and their powertrains as they’re forced into delivering electric cars which are more like mobile tech platforms than the cars we know and love. 

There’s lots to love about EVs – not least the performance and lack of local emissions – but ditching a century of ICE knowledge and development to bow down at the alter of electric power isn’t the right way to go. But it’s the way governments are decreeing things must go.

Now, get to see a more radical look at the future of EVs with BMW’s take on what a ‘Neue Klasse’ electric BMW 3-Series will offer with the reveal of the BMW i Vision Dee (Digital Emotional Experience) at CES, complete with a bland and digital interior, colour-shifting bodywork and a design which seems to have taken every BMW design cue we know and love (or hate) and made it as bland and ‘phygital’ (BMW’s own word) as possible.

The colour-shifting exterior (shown below) uses an advanced E Ink tech delivering 32 different colour options across a wide range of panels with headlights, kidney grille and Hofmeister kink all present but in a flat digital form.

Inside, any semblance of an appealing interior is gone, to be replaced by much grey blandness, a steering wheel inspired by the Austin Allegro and all digital information moved to an advanced HUD stretching the whole width of the windscreen, with the volume of information displayed controlled by a five-stage mixed-reality digital slider.

It’s all very clever and very interesting, but it seems the future of cars is not going to be visceral and bonding, but artificial and ‘virtual’.

Just call us Luddites.