I got to take a look at the new BMW Operating System 9 in some new Mini Countryman and Mini Cooper cars to learn about the new user experience. The most obvious and unique aspect of the Mini brand of BMW OS 9 is the circular screen and interface designed to match the original Mini’s circular center dashboard. Designing and building software for a circular screen certainly is challenging as almost all other touch screen interfaces these days are rectangular.
The video above walks you through a few of the nice features of the MINI’s in-car computer.
In the presentation, we got to see a few things that would not be demo-capable in the showroom models. For example, there’s an augmented reality navigation mode that will show a video of the road in front of you along with overlay indicator graphics showing which lane you need to get into for your next turn. That looks like it will be very useful!
There’s also an app that connects to the car and can replace the key fob so that just having your smartphone nearby will be able to unlock and start the car. Apple Car Play and Android Auto are also integrated with the new BMW OS9 computer so that you can have those phone interfaces in the big circle screen if you want. They’re obviously going to be embedded as rectangles though while the round parts of the screen remain visible for other aspects of the car computer.
Lastly there’s an internal camera available now that can be used to record what’s going on inside the car and you can also access this camera remotely from your smartphone app.
While the trend is to have big touch screens on the dashboard of cars these days, using that type of interface while operating heavy motor vehicles that are responsible for 3000 deaths per day globally is extremely dangerous. The European New Car Assessment Programme (NCAP) aims to require all cars to have physical tactile controls by 2026 or else they’ll recieve lower safety ratings, and that’s a good thing. The new MINI cars have some pretty excellent tacticle hardware controls on the steering wheel. On the right side is a nice scrollwheel along with 6 physical buttons that you can easily access while driving without taking your eyes off of the road or your hands off the wheel. I really like the “star” button which brings up programmable shortcuts that you can choose from in order to easily activate.
There are some excellent hardware buttons on the center console too. Again, not being dependent on a touch screen in a moving vehicle is extremely important, and these BMW MINI cars accomodate that nicely.
One other thing about the new BMW OS9 on new MINI cars is the in-car computer customization features. Some of this is completely unnecessary in terms of functionality, but absolutely a cool thing to have for aesthetics. In the above photo you can see some light patterns being projected on the dashboard. Those are coming from the edges of the circular center computer, and they can be customized with colors of your choice or they can be assigned by the “experience” mode that you may set the car into. There’s also an LED strip of lights in the middle of the dash that will match these colors.
Exterior lights are also customizable. You can set the daytime running lights on the front and rear of the car to show a variety of patterns. None of the choices are particularly obtrusive, so these customization won’t interfere with other drivers. Nicely, the turn signals no longer have arrows pointing the wrong way either.
The voice command interface should be the safest way of interacting with a computer while operating a motor vehicle, and the BMW OS 9 has some great features in that respect. It responds to “Hey Mini” followed by whatever you want to do and this version features a “natural language” model. Theoretically this model is supposed to learn about what you say and how you say it in order to activate the commands you’re looking for. Unfortunately, my first attempts at using it were met with mostly silence and unresponsiveness. So it does seem necessary to still go through the voice commands tips section, reading it while stationary, in order to learn what the voice recognition might understand and what it can do. For example, me saying, “Hey Mini, make it warmer” does nothing… but saying “Hey Mini, set the temperature to 74 degrees” will actually work. “Hey Mini, how much gas do I have left” will actually respond nicely, but “Hey Mini, go to Sirius XM” will yield no response.
Overall, the new BMW OS 9 in car computer system is quite impressive and I think I really like the circular screen for it on the MINI brand of cars despite the non-standard shape and aspect ratio. Well done, BMW!