BMW Wants To Top Up Your Champagne Glass… From The Bottom

We feel your pain. You’re sitting in the back of your BMW 7 Series (or more likely your Rolls-Royce) and your champagne flute needs topping up.

But as smooth as one of these luxury sedans can drive, it’s still a moving vehicle on less than perfect roads, and the glass is tall and narrow. So getting more in the glass than on the deep-pile carpeting can be tricky.

Fortunately, the German automaker is working on a solution. It’s reportedly filed a patent for a beverage dispenser that would fill upwards from the bottom, instead of having to pour over the top.

As AutoGuide points out, it’d be sort of like the Bottoms Up draft beer system (detailed in the video below) used in stadiums and arenas across the country and around the world. You push the glass into the socket and press a button, and the beverage fills from underneath. No muss, no fuss – and all the better for a moving vehicle.

The system (at least theoretically) draws from two reservoirs, so you could choose between two different drinks, or potentially even mix the two into one. Perfect for on-the-go Mimosas (champagne and orange juice), Bellinis (with peach juice), or Kir Royale (with crème de cassis).

There’s no telling if or where BMW might implement the system. But it’d more likely feature in the back of a 7-Series sedan and X7 – or a Rolls-Royce Phantom, Ghost and Cullinan – than in, say, a 3-Series or X1 (much less a Mini). One way or another, it looks like the Bavarians have done it again, finding an elegant engineering solution to yet another first-world problem.