Browse over 9,000 car reviews

Premium buyers want more in-car technology

BMW BMW News Technology Prestige & Luxury Cars Car News
...
The latest generation of BMW models feature wireless Apple CarPlay support, which remains a rarity in the premium segment.
The latest generation of BMW models feature wireless Apple CarPlay support, which remains a rarity in the premium segment.
Stephen Corby
Contributing Journalist
21 Nov 2019
2 min read

Car buyers in the premium segment are now more interested in connectivity, content and screens than almost any other factor when looking for a new vehicle, according to BMW board member Pieter Nota.

“The luxury market is very much about technological leadership and innovation, and that’s not only about things like electrification, it’s about connectivity, and we see that it’s becoming either the number-one or number-two purchase criteria for our buyers,” he said.

“Increasingly, people want to bring their digital lives, their digital systems, into the car with them.

“In China, for example, something like WeChat is hugely important, so we have to have that available in our cars.

“In fact, in China, research shows that 60 per cent of customers say that if another vehicle offers better connectivity, they would switch brands because of that.”

Read More: Technology news here

Mr Nota also notes that the coming generations of young people who have grown up almost permanently attached to their smartphones will increasingly demand a more digitally connected vehicle.

“It’s not just about having big screens in your vehicle, it’s about the content you can have on those screens and what you can offer that’s so important, in terms of things like the best possible integration of music in your vehicle,” he said.

“And it’s also about the way you can operate the car, which is why we’ve introduced our IPA, the Intelligent Personal Assistant, which uses AI tech to anticipate your questions – it learns the usage habits of the customer – and we’re also building up an ecosystem that answers questions about the car itself.”

Being able to offer over-the-air servicing and upgrades, which Tesla has been doing for some time, is another feature that digital-savvy buyers are increasingly demanding.

Stephen Corby
Contributing Journalist
Stephen Corby stumbled into writing about cars after being knocked off the motorcycle he’d been writing about by a mob of angry and malicious kangaroos. Or that’s what he says, anyway. Back in the early 1990s, Stephen was working at The Canberra Times, writing about everything from politics to exciting Canberra night life, but for fun he wrote about motorcycles. After crashing a bike he’d borrowed, he made up a colourful series of excuses, which got the attention of the motoring editor, who went on to encourage him to write about cars instead. The rest, as they say, is his story. Reviewing and occasionally poo-pooing cars has taken him around the world and into such unexpected jobs as editing TopGear Australia magazine and then the very venerable Wheels magazine, albeit briefly. When that mag moved to Melbourne and Stephen refused to leave Sydney he became a freelancer, and has stayed that way ever since, which allows him to contribute, happily, to CarsGuide.
About Author

Comments