BMW teases slew of new products, new SUV, ultra-luxury electric car

PanARMENIAN.Net - BMW has been going wild around its 100th anniversary celebrations this month, first with its Vision Next 100 concept car — a wild interpretation of what an Ultimate Driving Machine might look like a few decades from now, the Verge says.

But the Vision Next 100 wasn't the only news on BMW's agenda. There are a couple more futuristic concept cars in the works from BMW brands Rolls-Royce and Mini, for one. Then there's a whole host of real, actual stuff that's going to roll out over the coming months.

In a press release, BMW runs through a host of programs it's working on, the Verge says. There are a lot of buzzwords BMW has packed into this thing, first of which is iNEXT. BMW uses iNEXT to refer to a "revolutionary new BMW i model that will raise premium individual mobility to previously unknown levels," featuring some form of autonomous driving capability, an electric powertrain, and a "trailblazing interior design."

BMW is also confirming the release of a drop-top i8, which was teased at CES this year as the i Vision Future Interaction concept. This year, BMW expects to have a total of seven plug-in hybrid or pure electric models across its brands. In the future, a hybrid Mini will be coming.

The company is relaunching its i brand with Project i 2.0, which is shifting its focus from electrification to "an equally ambitious path with respect to automated and fully networked driving." BMW calls out a few features and focus areas in particular that it's working on for its i cars, including HD mapping and sensors, cloud connectivity, and artificial intelligence. In the Vision Next 100 concept, BMW showed a weird little gemstone-shaped thing called the "Companion" that it asserted could learn a driver's habits over time to start making decisions for them, so that's probably closely related to the company's interest in AI.

In the meantime, a refreshed i3 with a bigger battery and better range is expected later this year, the Verge reports.

Beyond electrification and connectivity, there's a BMW X7 coming. Next, there's "a further expansion of the M product range" coming, which is BMW's high-performance brand.