how the big boys play....

Integration. It sounds simple enough, but given the way the world has become these days, the idea has complexity written all over it. Gone are the days when a car had features you could count on all your fingers, when an in-car entertainment system was called a cassette deck (or four-track cartridge player) and when brakes were just brakes and didn’t have three-letter acronym suffixes attached to them.
No, these days, we need integration, because there’s simply more. Modernisation – or, if you prefer, progress – means that a plethora of technology is available in an automobile today, and all those new functions and features has brought about a serious need to redefine the terminology of the genre. After all, even functions have subsets these days.

Associating these and presenting them to the user is the perennial headache. So, what’s a manufacturer to do? Well, grouping them seems a smart enough idea, and giving a specific name to that particular bunching an even better one.
Thus, you’ll find that the likes of auto start/stop, brake energy regeneration, lightweight engineering and electric power steering are now assembled as a family of positives. In the case of BMW, these come under the banner called EfficientDynamics.

While that takes care of the mechanicals, it doesn’t sort out the other stuff, things that don’t fall under the ambit of ED, not directly, even if they happen to share the same body. Solution? Placing all the rest together into a singularity and cleverly calling it ConnectedDrive, which thus puts all the king’s men into two cleanly configured and coexisting sets – a rather novel idea, you think?
EfficientDynamics has been presented in significantly large fashion, even if not all the accomplices in the group have been made present for consumption here in Malaysia, but nevermind that. With that association pretty much nailed, the next step is of course to present ConnectedDrive and make it the next household term.

The best way to do this, of course, is to showcase the host of technologies within that umbrella, which is just what BMW did in a dazzling blitz of presentations at an Innovation Days – ConnectedDrive meets EfficientDynamics event in Munich late last year.
Since there are so many things to talk about (well, it really was a blitz!), we’re going to have to do it over two parts, starting with the communications, infotainment and personalisation aspects first, with the driver assistance stuff – which crosses into ED territory.