BMW experimenting with artificial intelligence to design cars

However, there is always someone who takes care of the process.

BMW has been talking a lot about its design philosophy lately. The Bavarian brand told us that it doesn’t understand companies adopting a specific design language for electric vehicles and also promised that its future designs will be cleaner. (see related links below). The new 5 Series / i5 duo is probably good proof of both claims, but there’s something new on the horizon that BMW is trying to tackle: artificial intelligence.

AI is the technology that simulates human intelligence processes, a system that learns and improves over time. It can be used for much more than just conversations, and BMW admits it has started experiments with designing cars using artificial intelligence. The firm’s head of design, Adrian van Hooydonk, recently said in an interview that AI has already been used in a number of design tasks.

Gallery: BMW i5 2024: On Location

“We are experimenting with the design, for example in the design of the wheels,” says Hooydonk TopGear. “You can set a few parameters, like, you want a five-spoke wheel, it should only weigh this much, it should be a 20-inch rim, and then the computer starts generating ideas for you.”

To us, that sounds both terrifying and promising. Computer-generated ideas aren’t necessarily bad, but of course you need to set boundaries early on. And thankfully, BMW has no intention of letting AI take over the design process.

“Even so, as a person, as a human being, you have to be the art director. You have to choose. You still have to guide the process – it’s not like the computer can completely invent things, but it can combine various parameters into a proposal much faster than a human being,” explains Hooydonk.

Can you trust AI for complete car designs? Not really, as the technology uses images and sketches that are available online and combines them in different ways to generate new designs. And while that sounds like a lot of fun to us, Hooydonk simply says the result looks like something you’ve seen before.