In 2025, the fiercest automotive battles aren’t happening under the hood—they’re happening on the dashboard. As cars evolve into rolling smart devices, the interface in front of the driver has become every bit as important as the engine beneath them. And at BMW’s Designworks studio, that digital battleground is where the future of the brand is being drawn, tapped, and swiped into existence.
The Quiet Power of Interface Design
Car design used to be defined by sheet metal and stance. Now, the first impression often comes from a boot-up animation rather than a sculpted fender. More than ever, a clunky interface can sink an otherwise excellent car.
Matthew Potter, Director of Interaction Design at Designworks, has watched this shift unfold from the inside. He recalls the early days of iDrive—the system that debuted with the 2001 BMW 7 Series—as a turning point.
“Things were a lot simpler back then,” he says. Early screens were basically big buttons in digital form. One dial, one menu, one mission: deliver the ultimate sense of simplicity.
Fast-forward two decades and simplicity is a much more complicated target.
Global Drivers, Global Differences
Potter and his team now wrestle with questions that sound more like tech-market research than car design.
What apps dominate in Germany?
What features do Americans expect to see instantly?
How do Chinese users organize information?
Across markets, the answers diverge dramatically.
“People in the United States really want convenience,” Potter says. “They want more visual, more simplicity. They want more playfulness.” German users? They tend to appreciate dense data, more reading, more structure—digital efficiency over digital delight.
And that’s only part of the equation. Even within a single country, tastes split. Drivers in Texas approach technology differently than those in California. Multiply that by the global footprint of BMW, and it becomes clear why Designworks operates studios in Munich, Shanghai, and Los Angeles.
Adrian van Hooydonk, BMW Group’s design chief, puts it bluntly: “The studios have two tasks.” One is to detect global trends that will matter to all BMW customers. The other is to understand what’s uniquely important locally.
Finding Balance in the Chaos
If there’s a single theme behind modern BMW UI design, it’s balance. Balance between emotion and usability. Between playfulness and precision. Between global coherence and regional flavor.
“You can make a really cool interface,” Potter says. “But if you can’t use it, it’s kind of useless.”
So every element of BMW’s digital cockpit—the icons, the menus, the layout—is shaped by this push and pull. Interior screens may stretch wider than ever, but every pixel is debated, tested, and tuned.
What’s striking is that despite all the input from global markets, BMW’s design DNA still holds firm. Van Hooydonk notes that even when international preferences diverge, nothing ever emerges “counterintuitive to what our brands stand for.”
Instead, the variety of perspectives sharpens the end product.
“We take these things on board from what we learn from China or US customers,” he says, “and they all make our products better.”
The Dashboard as Identity
Whether you’re admiring a new BMW from the lot or watching the startup sequence from the driver’s seat, what you see is more than just software. It’s the visible result of a worldwide design conversation—one that stretches across cultures and continents.
And in the era of the connected car, that conversation is becoming the defining part of the brand.
The future of driving, it turns out, might not be written in horsepower figures or wind-tunnel numbers. It might be written on the screen.
Source: BMW
