The air quality in vehicles is a critical but often overlooked aspect of automotive engineering. In his DLD Health talk, Nils Hesse, Vice President for Product-Sustainability at BMW Group, describes how the German carmaker is coming up with innovative new ways to make riding in a BMW both more healthy and more pleasant.
Entering a car triggers an immediate, instinctive response: “You either feel safe and comfortable or you don’t”, Hesse notes. This feeling stems from a system of factors including emissions, light, and temperature that occupants sense without being conscious of it, he explains. “You don’t think about it. You either feel right or you don’t feel right.”
Hesse outlines three steps toward healthy interiors. The first is prevention by using non-harmful materials. BMW does not artificially create the famous “new car smell”, Hesse stresses, and instead carefully selects materials to minimize emissions from the start.
The second aspect is transparency: displaying filter performance and air quality to users and protecting occupants from external emissions. Adjustments to filter systems can even be automated, Hesse notes: “We have a camera-based system. For example, if you drive in a tunnel, the car is able to close the flaps so that no bad air from the tunnel is coming inside.”
The third step is prediction and vision. “I think that’s what’s most important”, Hesse says. Today, “we have presets” and the car is not learning. But thanks to AI, that will change, he predicts, so that future cars will use fleet data to personalize the experience, detect pollutant zones, and adapt for allergies, for example – an approach Hesse terms “personal intelligence”.
Watch the video to explore the talk in detail.
