The 1999 BMW Z22 had no instrument cluster, no side mirrors, and no interior mirror. Cameras fed video to screens. A central display replaced the gauges, a head-up display handled speed, and physical buttons were stripped to almost nothing. This was 13 years before the first Tesla Model S rolled off the line.
The Z22 rarely surfaces in arguments about who invented the modern car interior. It should.
BMW Technik GmbH, the small skunkworks outfit BMW set up in 1985 near Munich, built the Z22 as a rolling laboratory. The company credited it with 70 innovations and 61 patents. Carbon fiber body panels, steer-by-wire, brake-by-wire, a fingerprint scanner instead of a key, adaptive headlights that turned with the steering, and a four-cylinder engine with a CVT delivering 39 mpg in a body shorter than a 3 Series but with a 7 Series wheelbase.
That same year at the Frankfurt Motor Show, BMW also revealed the Z9 Gran Turismo concept. The Z9’s dashboard had a starter button, a light switch, and almost nothing else. An 8.8-inch screen paired with a single rotary controller handled hundreds of functions, and BMW called it the Intuitive Interaction Concept. It became iDrive.
Two concepts in one year, both arriving at the same conclusion: stop adding buttons and push everything into software. BMW even borrowed an analogy from Boeing, noting that the 747 cockpit had 965 switches while the 777 cut controls by two-thirds.
The E65 7 Series brought iDrive to production in 2001. It was a disaster of execution. No shortcut buttons around the controller, tasks that used to take one press now required multiple menu dives, and reviewers savaged it.
Tesla’s Model S arrived in June 2012 with a 17-inch touchscreen that ran practically everything. Tesla committed to the idea harder than anyone and built the software ecosystem to support it. That commitment deserves recognition, but the idea of a screen-dominated, button-free cabin was BMW’s a full 13 years earlier. The Z22 just never made it past the prototype stage.
What’s fascinating is how long BMW’s own predictions took to reach its own showrooms. The Z22’s camera mirrors? BMW is just now fitting its first digital rearview mirror on the facelifted 2027 7 Series, 27 years later.
It exists largely because the optional 31.3-inch Theater Screen blocks the driver’s rear view, forcing a camera solution. Other automakers have offered digital rearview mirrors for over a decade. BMW, the company that showed the technology first, waited until a packaging problem made it unavoidable.
The Z22’s non-round steering wheel took 22 years to reach production in the iX. Customers pushed back. BMW started offering a conventional round wheel again for 2025.
Here’s the twist buried in the 2027 7 Series update. The same car that finally adopts the Z22’s camera mirror also kills the rotary iDrive controller, the direct descendant of the Z9’s console knob. After roughly 25 years in the flagship, the physical controller is gone, replaced by a 17.9-inch touchscreen and the Panoramic Vision display from the Neue Klasse lineup.
So tally the Z22’s cabin ideas across nearly three decades. The central screen won. The head-up display survived and evolved. The rotary controller lasted a generation before BMW retired it. The camera mirror just arrived, with a fallback to plain glass for skeptics. The non-round wheel is being quietly walked back.
Predicting where car interiors would go turned out to be the easy part. BMW nailed it in 1999 with a carbon fiber test bed that never saw a dealer lot. Figuring out which of those predictions real buyers would actually accept has taken 27 years and counting, and now the industry is already whispering about bringing physical buttons back, a reversal that would make the Z22’s minimalist cabin look less like prophecy and more like a cautionary tale.
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