BMW Built A Screen-First Cabin 13 Years Before The Tesla Model S
by Horatiu Boeriu · BMWBLOGArticle Summary
- The 1999 BMW Z22 dropped the instrument cluster for a central screen and replaced every mirror with a camera.
- BMW's screen-first thinking traces back through the Z9's iDrive precursor, which BMW compared to modern airliner cockpits.
- The 2027 7 Series gets BMW's first digital rearview mirror, 27 years after the Z22, while dropping the rotary iDrive knob.
BMW’s research car put a screen in charge of the cabin and cameras where the mirrors go, 13 years before the Tesla Model S reached its first customers. BMW was thinking about how a car should talk to its driver long before anyone put a tablet on a dashboard. The first 7 Series, the E23 of 1977, gave BMW its first on-board computer, service interval indicator, and Check Control panel, a set of warning lights that flagged system faults.
In 1985, BMW went a step further and set up BMW Technik GmbH a few minutes from its Munich headquarters. It was a small think tank kept deliberately apart from the regular development departments, so its engineers and designers could chase ideas that production programs had no room for. Its first project became the Z1.
Then the screens arrived. The E38 7 Series launched in 1994 as the first European car with factory satellite navigation, which meant a display in the dash, and it was also the first BMW with a built-in TV. Every new function wanted its own button, and the dashboard was running out of space for them.
By 1999, BMW had clearly worked out where that was heading. The Z9 Gran Turismo concept at the Frankfurt show that September had only a starter button and a light switch on its dashboard. Nearly everything else ran through an 8.8-inch central monitor and a single rotary push-button between the seats that could reach several hundred functions. BMW called it the Intuitive Interaction Concept, and it grew into iDrive.
When the Z9 made its North American debut in New York the following spring, BMW explained the thinking by looking to aviation. A Boeing 747 cockpit from 1970 had 965 switches, knobs, and dials plus more than 100 displays, while the 777 had cut the controls by two-thirds and made do with six displays. BMW’s bet was that cars would follow the same path.
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The Z9 was the handsome one. That same year, BMW showed a much stranger research car that pushed the idea further, and its cabin looks more like a current BMW than the Z9’s ever did. It was called the Z22, and it rarely comes up when people argue about who invented the modern car interior.
Z22 – Way Ahead Of Its Time
The Z22 wasn’t a preview of a future model. BMW Technik built it as a rolling test bed, and BMW credited it with 70 innovations and 61 registered patents. That’s a lot of paperwork for a car that was never meant to be sold.
The packaging brief alone was ambitious. The Z22 had the wheelbase of the E38 7 Series in a body roughly as long as an E46 3 Series, which gave it flagship-level cabin space with almost nothing hanging past the axles. The passenger cell and body panels were carbon fiber reinforced plastic, and the finished car weighed less than an E39 528i Touring. Power came from a 100 kW (134 hp) four-cylinder gasoline engine driving the rear wheels through a CVT, and BMW quoted 6.0 liters per 100 km (about 39 mpg).
Then there was the hardware that still sounds futuristic. Steering and braking were by wire, with no mechanical link between the driver’s inputs and the systems doing the work. A fingerprint scanner replaced the key. The headlights turned with the steering. And cameras took over for both the side mirrors and the interior mirror.
A Cabin Built Around One Screen
The interior is where the Z22 went past the Z9. The Z9 still kept analog dials for speed and revs. The Z22 had no conventional instrument cluster at all. Information lived on a large central display, and a head-up display put the essentials in the driver’s line of sight. Physical buttons were cut to the minimum, and the screen was operated through a control unit on the front armrest. Two concepts, one year, and the same conclusion: stop adding buttons and move the functions into software.
That conclusion reached production quickly. The E65 7 Series debuted at the Frankfurt show in September 2001 with the first iDrive, a dashboard screen paired with one rotary knob on the center console that handled climate, audio, navigation, and more. It was also rough. The original controller had no shortcut buttons around it, tasks that took one press in an E38 now took several steps, and the criticism was harsh. All that research into how people interact with machines didn’t stop BMW from getting the first version wrong. It added a menu button and customizable buttons, then spent the next two decades refining the concept.
The Tesla Misconception
It’s common to credit Tesla with the screen-first cabin. The Model S reached its first customers in June 2012 with a 17-inch touchscreen that ran media, navigation, and vehicle settings. It was a bigger leap than anything else in the luxury class at the time, and Tesla deserves credit for committing to the idea harder than anyone and building the software to back it up.
The idea itself wasn’t new, though. BMW had shown a cabin with minimal buttons, a central display, and no traditional gauges 13 years earlier, and it had a screen-based control system in series production more than a decade before the Model S. That’s beside the point though, the main idea is that BMW was not necessarily influenced by Tesla’s approach to the interior, but rather, possibly, by its own research decades earlier.
The Steering Wheel And The Mirror Took Longer
Two Z22 ideas needed far more time. The first is the steering wheel. The concept used a rectangular multifunction wheel, and the polygonal wheel BMW showed for the iNEXT years later looked like a close relative. That design reached production in the iX, built from July 2021. Plenty of owners didn’t warm to it, and for the 2025 model year BMW began offering a round M steering wheel on the iX. It took 22 years to get a non-round wheel from concept to showroom, and customers still pushed back.
The second is the camera mirror, and that’s where the new 7 Series comes in. The G70 LCI (Life Cycle Impulse, BMW’s term for a mid-cycle refresh) gets BMW’s first digital rearview mirror, 27 years after the Z22 did away with glass mirrors entirely. It’s offered as a standalone option or bundled with the 31.3-inch Theater Screen, and that bundle explains why it exists. Once the Theatre Screen is deployed, it blocks the driver’s view out the back window, and a camera mounted below it doesn’t have that problem. BMW will offer the mirror from November 2026, with a retrofit available for cars built before then.
It’s also fair to say that BMW is also late to this one, since other automakers have fitted digital rearview mirrors for more than a decade. The company that showed the idea first waited until a very specific problem, a 31-inch screen hanging behind the front seats, forced the issue.
Same Flagship, Different Verdicts
There’s an irony buried in the 2027 7 Series. The same facelift that finally adopts the Z22’s camera mirror also drops the rotary iDrive controller, the production descendant of the Z9’s console knob and the Z22’s armrest control unit. The flagship moves to the 17.9-inch touchscreen and pillar-to-pillar Panoramic Vision projection from the Neue Klasse models, plus a new 3D head-up display.
Tally it up and the Z22’s cabin ideas have had very different fates. The central screen won outright. The head-up display is still evolving. The controller lasted about 25 years in the 7 Series before BMW retired it. The non-round wheel and the camera mirror are still being negotiated with customers.
Predicting where car interiors were headed turned out to be the easy part, and BMW did it in 1999 with a carbon fiber test bed that never reached a showroom. Working out which of those predictions drivers actually want has taken 27 years, and a mirror that flips back to plain glass suggests BMW still isn’t finished.
There is also an irony in all of this. While some automakers moved early into fully digital cabins, and switchless for most part, there is already a reversing trend to bring back those beloved buttons and switches. Will BMW follow suit? Remains to be seen, but rest assured that inside within BMW there is already a team playing with different concepts to predict the future.
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