More than a decade on, the iX Flow concept plays with similar ideas. Unveiled at CES in January, the iX Flow can ripple like a cuttlefish as its e-ink skin changes color. I asked van Hooydonk what BMW has learned from the iX Flow and whether we might eventually see electrophoretics as an option alongside traditional paint.
"I certainly hope that we will because it's something that I think excited people all over the world... it's one of those things where if you talk about it, people are going, "Nah, that won't happen," but then... people saw something that wowed them. So it is a cool concept, and we are working closely with the manufacturer, the supplier of that technology, and we are developing it further. That's all I can say for now," he told Ars.
"We say we want to do design that is tech-magic. So we want people to get excited about the technology. And you don't get excited if [a car] just functions; you only get excited if it does things that you don't expect, that go over and beyond. So there could be this kind of surprise and delight," van Hooydonk said, referring to "shy tech," like the kind we saw in the Vision iNext concept.
Future BMWs will pay more attention to the comfort of their occupants, the designer said. "I realized that we could do better in terms of seating comfort, headspace, [and] leg space... We wanted the interior to be much more enveloping and much more comfortable," he said, referring to the new 7 Series.
Is there a future for the kinds of two-door coupes, convertibles, and sports cars that helped BMW make its name?
"Today people want everything—they want it all," van Hooydonk said. "So that then turned into 'OK, an SUV needs to have a sporty character.' And then perhaps we can do an SUV coupe. Sounds strange at first, but now [it's] very normal. Because people don't want to give up on a certain lifestyle when they need four doors. What does it mean for the two-seat or two-door vehicle? That's quite interesting because for the most part, now you see [companies] taking these vehicles out of the market. You see other companies stopping production. I hope that's not a trend that will continue, but perhaps times have changed for good," he said.
"Perhaps people now are no longer prepared to make the type of compromises they were prepared to make several years ago," he said. "Even when you look at a sports car—let's say 20 years ago—there were fantastic cars to drive very fast. But to be honest, to drive them in the city? Not very easy. An incredibly heavy gear shift, clutch, hot inside, but people were prepared to make all these compromises because it was cool. And today, people still want to be cool, but they feel that perhaps those compromises are not cool."
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