BMW's most ambitious concept car is its vision of the future

If you want some idea of the crazy technology BMW is working towards, just take a look at its new Vision Next 100 concept car. Unveiled this morning as part of BMW's centenary celebration, the Next 100 includes a load of gadgetry you'd expect from a car of the future. There's autonomous driving, of course, but it also sports something BMW calls "Alive Geometry," which describes helpful information seamlessly flowing from the dashboard to the connected windshield.

The Next 100 features two distinct driving modes. Boost mode gives you full control over the driving experience (assisted by all of that helpful Alive Geometry data). Ease Mode, on the other hand, retracts the steering wheel and moves the seats around for autonomous driving. BMW has also developed an AI-like gadget called the "Companion," an orb that will communicate information to pedestrians when the car is in self-driving mode. It can glow green to let people know when it's safe to walk in front of the car, for example.

As cool as it sounds, everything about the Vision Next 100 is basically BMW dreaming big. It's a far bigger leap than the concept car it showed off at CES, which was basically a souped up i8. BMW will be showing off a model of the concept at its Centenary Event in Munich today, and it'll bring that model all over the world over the next year. But the fanciful tech BMW describes only exists in renders at the moment.