The Caring Car modes are even more intrusive. For example, the “Executive” mode closes all the shades, turns on the ventilated seats and adjusts the ambient lighting. One of them is called “Experience Modes,” and the other is called “Caring Car.” Experience Modes offer up three preset modes to set the interior mood. There was no freezing or glitching going on throughout my week of testing it, and I’ll genuinely miss using this infotainment system.Ī couple new modes were introduced for the system.

Swapping through menus and swiping around the screens is a pleasant and stress-free experience. It also displays CarPlay across the full widescreen display, which I prefer since it takes advantage of all the available screen real estate (you cannot split the screen to show CarPlay with an iDrive display such as navigation or radio info).īMW has also managed to optimize its hardware and software to work just as quickly as our super-powerful cell phones do these days. The software loaded up quickly and seamlessly each time we turned the car on after the initial annoying connection process. We’ve had huge functionality issues with BMW’s wireless Apple CarPlay in the past, but experienced none this time around. I like the default tiles with the map, phone status and current media playing, but you can throw the trip, fuel economy and plenty of other data up there, too. The home screen consists of customizable tiles that let you choose what you’d like to display.

Right now, the iDrive 7.0 software is available in the 2 Series Gran Coupe, 3 Series, 5 Series, 7 Series, 8 Series, X3, X4, X5, X6, X7 and Z4. I can’t say that about every infotainment system out there. The combination of a 12.3-inch touchscreen and rotary dial controls that are intuitive and easy to use makes for an enjoyable digital experience.

Well, except for Android phone users (like myself), but that’s going to be fixed soon. BMW’s iDrive 7.0 interface is one of the best infotainment systems out there right now.

Bmw idrive 7 update