I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: cars today are lacking whimsy. Luckily for us — and the folks who are about to lay down something like $80,000 for the 2027 BMW X5 — the redesigned crossover comes with a healthy dose of the stuff thanks to a wonderfully unique feature I uncovered while killing time with my fellow journalists following the car’s official reveal. If you’re so inclined, you can display five different BMW Art Cars on its dashboard. I’m not sure about you, but that’s just wonderful to me.
This is only possible because of the X5 and iX5’s Panoramic Vision display. It spans the length of the windshield of every vehicle with BMW’s Neue Klasse design language, and there’s plenty of room for important things like a handful of Art Cars if you’re not interested in displaying lamer information like a trip computer, the outside temperature, media info, a compass or widgets for your AI personal assistant, among a slew of other things.
BMW gives you six slots for your Panoramic Vision display widgets. While 18 out of the 19 different widgets available are information-based, that last one very much isn’t, as it’s for the Art Cars.
Full Disclosure: BMW flew me out to Spartanburg, South Carolina, put me up in a very nice hotel and fed me, all so I could check out the new X5 in person.
Art Cars are art in a car
While it would have been nice for BMW to give us a full half-dozen Art Cars to choose from, we’ve got to make do with just five, meaning one slot must remain open for another widget. (The speed readout, odometer and battery charge section directly in front of the driver is always present, too.) In any case, the five Art Cars you do get are quite lovely. Here are the ones you can pick from:
Sure, you can put just one or two up there, but really, all five deserve to be displayed at all times. This is a great list, but I won’t lie to you, I’d have loved to see Andy Warhol’s M1, one of the early 3.0 CSLs, or one of the later race cars on this list. Perhaps more will come in over-the-air updates. We can certainly cross our fingers.
So, if you’re the sort of person who hates technology but was somehow tricked into buying a tech-laden X5, just throw the Art Cars up there and you’ll feel much better. Of course, you could always leave that space blank, but who wants to do that? Plus, you get to look at five bona fide pieces of art, and for how much people have complained about BMW’s styling over the past decade, that’s a win.
