The fixed control never moves and because it has a physical form to hold onto, it's easy for your hand to reach for as your driving. If you've ever tried to operate a touchscreen while you're driving – glancing from the road to the screen to the road again – while simultaneously holding your left (and most peoples' weaker) hand dead steady as you jiggle down the road, you'll know how infuriatingly tricky it can be. The iDrive scroll wheel remains the central pillar of how you control your BMW, however, and it's easy to see why. It's a scroll wheel that sits between the front seats of your BMW, a fixed point that's much easier to use (as you bump down the road) than a touchscreen that needs a sniper-like steady hand to navigate efficiently.īut how exactly do you operate iDrive, what features are hidden in its menus, what problems might you encounter and what lies in iDrive's future? Read on for the answers to all those questions.Īt its very simplest level, you operate BMW iDrive using the scroll wheel control on your BMW's centre console, however the introduction of touchscreens and pads, gesture controls and voice commands mean the scroller is just one of many ways to operate the infotainment screen. One feature has consistently remained throughout this development, though – the iDrive control.
#BMW IDRIVE7 SERIES#
Now, the entry-level BMW 1 Series is blessed with an infotainment system that is vastly superior to what we first saw in 2001. This was the first in a series of improvements that have continued in to the current day, helped by the fact that smartphones mean we're all now comfortable with a screen-based interface.
It was a clunky, buggy affair with unintuitive menus that took an age to master, but it was hugely improved when the saloon was facelifted in 2005. It was this question that BMW attempted to answer when it launched its iDrive control and infotainment screen on the BMW 7 Series in 2001. Because an infotainment screen is multifunctional, it can store away an infinite number of features on its hub screens and sub menus – the trouble is, how do you make a maze of menus and submenus easy to navigate? Particularly when you're focussing on the rather important job of driving? Infotainment is the answerīut how do you have space for all the toys while simultaneously making your car feel plush? An infotainment screen is the answer. A dashboard crawling with controls wouldn't leave space for the posh metal, leather and cloth trims that make a modern car such a nice place to sit. Advancements in technology mean modern cars have so many features – sat nav, autonomous driving aids, infotainment, etc etc etc– that to give a button for each would leave your dashboard looking as intimidating as the flight deck on a 747 jumbo jet. Buttons and switches were a badge of honour that showed how far you'd ventured up the range or into the options list. Lowly models had fewer buttons and less features, while flagship cars had a sea of buttons needed to control their vast number of features.
Not too long ago, your car was judged by the number of buttons it had on its dashboard. IDrive is the name given to BMW's infotainment system, but how does it work, how can you control it and what is it capable of? Keep reading to find out.īMW's iDrive infotainment system and control was pioneered in 2001's BMW 7 Series – the company's flagship saloon – since then it has evolved into a completely different animal, one that's fitted to every BMW model from the entry-level BMW 1 Series up to the BMW 8 Series flagship, here's all you need to know about it.
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