BMW says its presence at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show is “… dedicated to the digital customer experience.” For the automaker, this means new infotainment experiences that expand its in-car gaming offerings.
In-car gaming at BMW made its debut with the recently designed 5 Series and a feature called the AirConsole gaming platform. With the platform, owners can access games through the car’s infotainment screen and play them via Bluetooth, using their mobile devices as controllers. BMW announced Monday its adding more third-party games for the platform that owners can access through BMW’s ConnectedDrive Store. Split-screen gaming has been added as well, and all of this will be available on models running BMW’s Operating System 9.
And I bet you’ve already guessed the catch: yep, it’s all through a damn subscription. You can only access all of this if you pay for BMW’s Digital Premium subscription. Digital Premium bundles BMW’s native nav system along with entertainment and apps through the aforementioned Connected Drive Store. Let me reiterate that in case you didn’t catch it: you have to subscribe to their digital platform to access a digital store where you can pay for more apps. Wild. Initially, the Digital premium comes with a 90-day trial, after which you have to pay monthly or annually for it.
Other in-car tech news from BMW include the addition of streaming video on the front infotainment screen for models equipped with Operating Systems 8.5 and 9, augmented reality glasses that can be used in conjunction with the nav system to highlight more road hazards and info (I thought this was what a head-up display was for but whatever), an AI voice assistant that uses speech processing for more human-like responses in a conversational manner and remote controlled and autonomous valet parking.
While this all looks cool on paper, I’d really like to know if anyone is actually interested in using any of this, especially in-car gaming. Where is BMW getting this assumption that people actually want to pay for and use this stuff? The people who would be interested in using gaming — like kids and actual gamers — will probably be underwhelmed by it to the point of not using it at all.
The AI stuff is creepy because who wants to have a full-on convo with an assistant that you really just want to execute your command? If you find a need to actually want to talk to your car in such a way, you should probably seek help. And the remote-controlled and autonomous valet parking sounds like a legal nightmare and another rarely used feature. It’s a parlour trick pretending to be a feature. Looks like the future isn’t turning out as cool as we all thought it would be.
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