CES 2025 Day 3 – Into the Weeds

China increases its presence a bit and BMW pushes back on Apple.

China – Economic Necessity

• Once again at CES, China is everywhere and nowhere at the same time as the vast majority of its technology industry remained absent even though almost all the products on display are made there.
• This has been the status quo for a few years but it is clear that there have been a few changes in the last 12 months.
• The main change is that in segments where China has a strong export business or where it is a leader (and hence expected to have significant exports), then there is more of a presence than there was in 2024.
• The most meaningful of these is automotive and electric transportation which have no military application and where there are many Chinese products on display.
• Chinese companies that make e-bikes, scooters, vehicle chargers, Lidar makers and robots are all once again present in much greater numbers than last year.
• This is a sign of just how important exports have become to bringing about any sort of recovery in the Chinese economy as domestic consumption remains very depressed.
• Consequently, I suspect that these companies have been encouraged to attend unlike in 2024 when almost everyone was discouraged from going to Las Vegas.
• I suspect that we are going to see this continue in 2025 even though the situation in China in terms of technology remains very depressed outside of automotive.

BMW – Juicy Fruit

• BMW didn’t launch any cars this year but debuted a new user experience which is an attractive complication aimed at bringing back some of the digital relevance back to BMW and away from Google and especially, Apple.
• The new experience is called Panoramic iDrive and brings together elements of the digital cockpit that are all supposed to work together to provide an integrated and seamless experience.
• The highlight here is a new panoramic screen which is only a few inches tall but stretches the entire width of the windscreen and has space to display 6 customisable widgets such as map, weather, time, media and so on.
• The other elements are the main infotainment screen, the heads-up display and the steering wheel and BMW has integrated the experience so that they work together.
• BMW has also implemented an LLM-powered assistant in the vehicle for navigation and I suspect that as time passes the scope of this assistant will be widened or another assistant with a much wider mandate will be implemented on top.
• The user’s ability to customise the experience is very limited with colour options and the ability to have a user photo as the background on the infotainment screen and I think that BMW could have done much more here.
• Once again nothing is stopping BMW from making the experience more flexible through a software update in the future.
• BMW is very confident that the new user experience is going to appeal to its customers and this will be a feature on every new BMW model launched from the end of 2025.
• This is a response to both the threat that Apple poses in the vehicle and competition from the legion of new Chinese competitors.
• Users who want to take advantage of the new screen won’t be able to do so using CarPlay and so this will encourage them to keep their smartphones in their pockets rather than switch on CarPlay and banish BMW from the screens in the vehicle.
• This is precisely what BMW needs to do to start regaining its digital relevance in the vehicle, but the proof will be in the testing of how good this new experience is.
• BMW appears to be realising that the biggest threat it faces is not Mercedes or Audi but the smartphone, and if users like the new user experience, this will represent a step in bringing users back to its own user experience.