When you first sit down the 530i doesn't have the wow factor of the Mercedes E-Class or Volvo S90. The point is, there are few cabins on the market that feel as space age. Then, when cars gained an extra thousand or so features, we realized BMW had it right. When iDrive debuted, we all said you'd be better off with a touch screen. It does things that you can easily do with iDrive. Gesture control isn't all that useful yet. It's mind-boggling, and I truly have no idea how it works. No, not a top down 360-degree view that you've seen before, but a simulation of what it would look like if you were standing next to the car. You can also use gesture control to move a camera around a virtual 360-degree view of the car. 000009 of a second, and is less precise, but you do feel like a wizard. When you want the music to get louder, you can twirl your finger in the air to turn it up rather than reaching for the volume knob. The next front, BMW insists, is gesture control. It's the result of BMW perfecting iDrive over these past 16 years.
#BMW IDRIVE REVIEW COST SOFTWARE#
Everything in the 530i worked exactly as I would expect, with menus that were easy to navigate and software that was designed for drivers, not IT professionals. It really is a marvel to make the 10 million functions a car is expected to do easy to access, but BMW's done it. And vehicle settings are always buried far from the light of day. Inputting an address usually requires so many clicks and menus that you might as well be playing a piano. Some have no tuning knob, so changing the radio station is an exercise in frustration. Usually, the conclusion is that the owner would drive straight back to the dealer and demand a refund, because every car I've had so far has managed to make one of these tasks monumentally irritating.
I try to simulate what an owner would experience when they first purchase the car.
Change the lighting, locking and system settings to my liking. Add the presets to the satellite radio, plug in my home address.
Pair my phone with the car and import contacts. When a new test car arrives each week, I sit down and I run through the same couple of tasks. This is where I really fell for the 530i.