2024 BMW 3 Series M340i

CLINT SIMONE: Today, we're going to do something that we really don't do all that often on the Edmunds channel. We are going to take a look at a concept car. [MUSIC PLAYING] This is the BMW Vision Neue Klasse. And it's going to tell us a lot about BMWs that are not that far into the future. OK. So this is indeed a concept car. But let's park for a second, and talk about what Neue Klasse is. Now, that is BMW's very German word for their next generation of electric vehicle. This is an all new, all-electric architecture, and it is going to underpin a bunch of different models in the future, starting with probably something that looks something like this. Think small sedan. Think something a lot like a 3 series, if I had to guess. Then, they said, after that, they're going to follow it up with an all-electric crossover. But this is 2025. So yes, while this looks very spaceship-y, and a bunch of this won't make production, the core elements of this will, starting with this all-electric architecture. Now, this wouldn't be a BMW video if we didn't talk about the grill for at least a few seconds, but I think this time around it actually is good news. Again, this is a concept, so don't expect a production car to look exactly like this. But I was told that this is a design direction that they are taking. Which means we're probably getting away from giant vertical kidney grilles on a 3 series, and instead it'll look a lot more elongated, more horizontal, just like this. And baked into it, we have these lighting elements, which just look awesome. We have these DRLs on the outside. But then, on the inside, we have these LEDs that pulse. The other thing I want to mention is the logo on the car. That's something we don't always talk about, but this is actually etched into the bodywork. BMW said that they're going to be focusing on using less panels and less elements with their cars. So we could be seeing cars not too far away that actually have the logo etched in. Super fun. What you're looking at is the main event. This is the next generation of BMW iDrive. It's still in concept form right now, but a lot of what you see here is going to be in BMW models as soon as two years from now. This could be iDrive 10 that we're looking at. There's a center touchscreen here, which replaces the dual screen setup that we have with modern BMWs today. And ahead of me is a giant display that takes up the entirety of the front windshield. So I'm looking as a driver. I have all these different pieces of information in front of me on the left, all the way to over there on the passenger side. Here, the center touchscreen, which is very Tesla Model 3-esque, if I might add, you take the apps-- two fingers here-- and you can send it to the display up there. So these are interactive. You have your main information here, which you can easily access as the driver or the passenger. But up there, there's just a world of possibilities. A bunch of different automakers are going to be moving to this setup of taking the entire screen or the entire windshield and putting all the information there. And it's going to be up to everybody to change what information is accessible and why. I need to get out of here now because this is a concept car that's worth multiple millions of dollars, and I don't want to be in here any longer than I have to. [MUSIC PLAYING]