BMW‘s iDrive system has surely come a long way since the days in which everybody was complaining about how difficult or counter-intuitive it was to use. Now, it’s one of the best and most advanced such systems on the market.

The 2015 Consumer Electronics Show saw the unveiling of BMW‘s new iDrive system which features a larger touchscreen with gesture controls. What this means is that you no longer have to use a wheel or even touch the screen itself if you need to focus on driving on simply doing something else. The non-contact gesture recognition offers you the chance to simply take your hand and make various gestures in front of the screen, and the system will read, interpret and execute your commands.

The gesture itself needs to be made in between an area limited by the gear lever, steering wheel and iDrive display so that it can be recognized by a 3D sensor mounted in the roof. This sensor will know if you’re pointing with one or two fingers or if the thumb and index finger are being moved towards each other (pinch, zoom in, zoom out, etc).

You can also use a rotating motion to adjust the volume on the radio, raise a finger to accept a call or swipe your hand to decline it.

However, this is not all that BMW have managed to do. They haven’t forgotten about the rear seat occupants and so they also introduced the Touch Command – which is essentially a tablet which connects to the car’s infotainment system via Wi-Fi. The tablet itself is kept in a crash proof holder and looks rather sleek and modern inside the cabin.

All this tech should be available on the next generation BMW 7 Series and we can’t wait to try it out for ourselves.

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