BMW’s bid to save the car
Small yet spacious, powerful yet clean, sustainable yet luxurious – BMW’s Concept Vision Circular is an attempt to save a species under threat: the car.
The correct term, if Rolls-Royce is to be believed, is ‘post-opulence’ – a new, low-key approach to luxury. Expensive still, sure, and beautiful, both to be around and to use. But this millennial definition of luxury prefers to go without the greed-is-good excess of the ’80s.
Post-opulence guided the creation of the new Rolls-Royce Ghost, and if describing a 5.6-metre-long V12 saloon as anything other than opulent feels like a stretch, Group stablemate BMW has, in the Vision Circular concept, created a more literal and thought-provoking post-opulence automobile.
THE CAR’S EXISTENTIAL CRISIS
Why has BMW done this? To add concept-car weight to its sustainability agenda (the Neue Klasse cars, due from 2025, are being engineered with the concept front of mind) but also to help save the very thing BMW exists to create – to show that even in a digital-first, urban-centric and meat-free future, there’s still a place for what BMW design boss Domagoj Dukec calls ‘mankind’s greatest achievement’: the car.
Future regulation looks challenging enough, but what if driving an M5 may soon see you pelted with fruit and filthy looks? It’s one reason supercar makers are going hybrid. Haters are less inclined to hate if your McLaren Artura glides through town and out of sight (and earshot) on silent electric power.
‘Cars get a lot of criticism. In Europe, big cities want to ban them,’ says Dukec. ‘But the car is the ultimate freedom machine. Even somebody who lives 100 per cent ecologically would, I think, admit that your own private space is nicer than being pressed in [to public transport] with 100 other people. We want to show that, by taking responsibility, the car can have a future. This isn’t about teaching people that their lives have to change; that they must give something up. It’s our responsibility to create something more enjoyable, more pleasurable than before, but that it is almost completely sustainable. Then society and government can say, “Okay, you don’t take anything away – there are no negatives. And yet what you’re offering gives something back.” That was the idea of this car.’
BIG CAR LUXURY IS SO PASSÉ
The motor car’s unlikely saviour, then, is an i3-esque electric city car just four metres long, but that’s intended to look and feel as luxurious as a 7-series.
‘This car does a lot of things the i3 did already, but of course now we can do them much better,’ claims Dukec, acknowledging the long shadow of BMW’s slow-selling but long-lived small car. ‘This is more luxurious, and challenges a lot of luxury-car norms. In the future the 7-series may not be able to show its status with length, and electric power will mean you don’t need a long bonnet. And yet in a much smaller car the space will be the same. You can do this with a purpose-built architecture. We want to show that luxury is not just a question of size. You see this in the luxury industry now. Hermes charges the same price for small bags and big bags. It is not a question of size but of materials and craftsmanship.’
Turn a corner 20 years from now (Dukec and his team took their minds to 2040 for this one), clock this BMW parked at the kerb and you’ll be struck first by the materials and finishes. ⊲
Our unlikely saviour is an i3-esque city car as luxurious as a 7-series
Instead of paint over virgin aluminium, the car dazzles with a light-gold anodised treatment to its skin of secondary-use aluminium. At the rear, the steel is heat-treated to a contrasting blue-ish purple. The wheels (open at the centre for cooling, solid nearer the rims for low drag) look complex but are monomaterial, to facilitate easy recycling.
Such thinking is evident up at the front, where a digital ‘face’ makes it clear the car’s a BMW while also stripping away clutter (no chrome, no insets, no vents).
Dukec: ‘We wanted to reduce while adding functionality. This car has 80 per cent fewer parts but it offers more. Look at the iPhone. The hardware is more minimalist than any other phone. The exterior has just two materials, glass and aluminium. And yet it stands out – it’s desirable. But of course this alone is not enough; you then have to fill it with fresh digital content. Here we have a design that rethinks the BMW face and reduces it by bringing together the headlamps and kidney grilles.’
On the Vision Circular, badging is engraved or lasered (nibbling away at that part count), and a digital face opens up possibilities. ‘You replace chrome with light, and through animation you can become more useful, communicating the state of the charge. It’s no longer just an empty icon.’
Spending time here won’t be the automotive equivalent of living o -grid in wattle-walled sacrifice
A SHAG PILE, WOOD AND GOLD FUTURE
If you’re in any doubt that Dukec’s vision of future mobility is more crystals and shag-pile carpets than hemp and hairshirts, the Vision Circular’s interior is proof. As per the brief, the space is optimised both for re-use and to be re-used, with reclaimed materials, quick-release fasteners for many of the key sub-assemblies, single-material design, no adhesives, 3D printing to reduce waste, and an almost Lotus-like fixation on simplification. But spending time here won’t be the automotive equivalent of living off-grid in wattle-walled sacrifice.
The roof is glass, with the windscreen header pulled back to create a light, airy space. Lounge-style seats in the car’s signature light gold bring the luxe, as does the crystal-bodied futuristic take on iDrive (the windscreen itself forms the HUD and primary display). You’ll also find wood from certified sources (the steering wheel is pressed from a wood powder, so it’s warm to the touch), ankle-deep carpets of recycled plastic and posh hotel-style lamps that are, in fact, iX iDrive controllers given a second life.
BMW’s yet to confirm its small-car future beyond the i3 (Munich’s mulling an i1 and iX1 crossover). Whatever form it takes, it won’t be dull.