Story has been updated with live images of the BMW concept car from the 2021 Munich Motor Show floor.
BMW is pushing design boundaries yet again with a bold new concept that imagines the city transport of 2040.
Called the i Vision Circular, the compact four-seat EV reworks BMW’s classic kidney grilles to include the headlights, like on classic BMWs, and suggests the kidneys’ surfaces could be used to display graphics.
The Hofmeister kink also gets an update as a slim digital surface within in an angular monobox body shape that’s finished in light-gold anodized aluminum rather than paint, but the real focus is on sustainability, not design.
Conceived to embrace BMW’s four eco-friendly philosophies of RE:THINK, RE:DUCE, RE:USE and RE:CYCLE, the entire car is made from recyclable materials, and at the end of its life can itself also be fully recycled, and that includes the battery.
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BMW believes the way a car is made is as important as its tailpipe emissions, and wants to achieve climate neutrality throughout a vehicle’s life. It plans to do that not just by replacing combustion engines with electric power, but by focusing on materials and manufacturing. The company wants to achieve a life-cycle vehicle emissions reduction of 40 per cent by 2030.
Metal components will be made from secondary (recycled) aluminum and steel and the solid state battery is manufactured using recycled materials, which can re-used at the end of the car’s life.
The tires are made from certified, sustainable natural rubber and include colored recycled rubber particles that add strength and create a distinctive look. Moreover, BMW says drivers will be able to send unwanted power back to the grid from the car’s battery. That car-to-grid capability is exactly the kind of feature we can expect to find on electric BMWs in coming years, though it might take a while before we see anything with an interior quite like the concept’s.
Screen Break
Dominated by what looks like a giant slab of Kryptonite on the dashboard that uses light effects to show the car’s brain at work, and notable for its lack of visible screens, the cabin ditches a conventional gauge setup for a head-up display at the base of the windshield.
Occupants sit on lavender-colored recycled seats that couldn’t look less BMW M-like if they tried, while the square steering wheel is 3D-printed from bio-based material, in this case, wood powder.
Though the i Vision Circular is a genuine concept, rather than one of those show cars that is going to suddenly appear next year as a production vehicle, we can expect to see many of its sustainability ideas trickling into BMW’s showroom products in the coming years.
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