In the space of one week, we’ve been shown the future of German car interiors. And gone are the days when Audi, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz benchmarked each other’s every move down to the click of the volume knob.
The new Audi Concept C (95% the next-gen TT, we hear), the production-ready BMW ‘Neue Klasse’ iX3, and the fresh Mercedes-Benz GLC EV all lunge in different directions toward what each badge insists is interior utopia. All the tech, info, luxury, safety, and entertainment you could wish for!
Merc is doubling down on its Hyperscreen era, with a new mega-display that is no longer actually three big screens living under one glass ceiling. Oh, no. Now you can have a 39.1-inch sheet of pixels backlit by over 1,000 LEDs.
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The carmaker says the screen knows where you’re looking (the road, maybe?) and automatically brightens or dims the ginormo-screen accordingly. No word yet if it gets annoyingly hot to the touch like the existing Hyperscreen. Or what the rest of the screen does when you hook up Apple CarPlay or Android Auto...
As Merc bets big on a single screen, BMW has rented a big skip and lobbed in everything you knew about Bimmer interiors. iDrive clickwheel? Gone. Slender curved screen atop the dashboard? Sort of still there, but it’s now more of a heads-up display-like slither boasting six custom widgets. And the main touchscreen has gone full Tesla. It’s huge, it’s central, it’s hexagonal. New frontiers in screen one-upmanship.
There are no physical switches for the heating or even the driving modes. The steering wheel appears to be impaled on a bridge girder and is festooned with what look ominously like touch-sensitive buttons. It’s all very concept-car. But this is the real deal, on sale early next year with its own App Store.
Something weird is going on here. Mercedes-Benz and BMW have revealed showroom-ready school-run SUVs containing cabins from the year 2200. Audi, meanwhile, has attempted to steal headlines with a concept car—a sporty two-door drop-top at that. And it’s the first new Audi styled by the hand of a new design boss. So you’d expect something radical, wild, and completely out there.
And it is. Because Audi’s concept car has the interior of a car from 10 years ago.
The Concept C has a round steering wheel, and the only buttons it carries are metal and go ‘click’ when pressed. Its driver instrumentation screen is no bigger than the one in the old TT. And the main touchscreen? The size of a laptop keyboard, and it folds into the dashboard when you’re not using it.
There is no gesture control. No 3D holographic projections, as promised in the iX3. The Concept C is poles apart from the five-screen multiplex of the A6 e-tron, with its silly Virtual Door Mirrors and pointless passenger display...
So the Audi isn’t winning any prizes for feeling like a spaceship. It’s not even futuristic. You could pick up a friend in it tomorrow, and they wouldn’t comment or coo about the cockpit. Whereas in the BMW or the Merc, they’d be swiping and pointing and accidentally telephoning your ex.
Here’s a theory on why this is happening: Audi has launched a Chinese clone of itself, called ‘AUDI.’ Its cars don’t wear the four rings. They’re all big EV barges with wall-to-wall touchscreens and all the character of a supermarket self-checkout—and they’ll never see a European road.
BMW and Mercedes-Benz still build cars that have to work everywhere. And because the Chinese market is so huge and so tech-obsessed, screen real estate and onboard i-assistants come first. The Merc and the BMW look like they’ll be novel to inhabit in a traffic jam. But of the three, that new Audi interior is the one I want to drive...
NOTE: This article first appeared on TopGear.com. Minor edits have been made.
