Spoiler alert: you might not like the BMW and Peugeot concepts at CES

Anyone would have thought that car designers had overindulged on the eggnog over the festive season as we emerge into the new year and experience their collected ideas for the future of individual mobility.

The cover traditionally comes off these industrial flights of fantasy at the tech-heads’ junket, the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in Las Vegas, and these concepts from BMW and Peugeot are this year’s star attractions.

BMW i Vision Dee

There’s the usual trashing of BMW’s past by its marketing department for the i Vision Dee, a battery-powered saloon that’s widely tipped to provide some clues about a future 3-series. There’s a dreadful video with Arnold Schwarzenegger chatting to a disembodied woman, who counters Arnie’s eulogising of the Munich car maker’s past with comments such as: “All I can see is smoke coming out of an old BMW.”

In fact, the Dee is quite a good-looking thing, reminiscent of the first Neue Klasse of the early 1960s, the thin-pillar, “greenhouse” look with the rear side window sporting a distinctive Hofmeister kink styling trope, which debuted on the 1962 1500 saloon and ran as a BMW signature until the mid-Seventies.

It’s certainly a visual improvement on the current BMW style of huge grilles, threatening fronts and clunky panels.

Rumour has it the Dee (an acronym for Digital Emotional Experience) will provide the inspiration for the replacement of the Chinese-market i3 saloon and will come to the UK as part of BMW’s second-generation Neue Klasse due in 2025.

We understand that this car will have a range of new communication and driver interface technologies including a head-up display that covers the whole windscreen.

Calling the i Vision Dee “an intelligent companion,” Oliver Zipse, BMW’s chief executive, said it is “the future for automotive manufacturers – and also for BMW: the fusion of the virtual experience and genuine driving”.

With headlights that change shape, driver avatars displayed on the windows along with welcoming messages, and body-colour changing e-ink, it’ll be interesting to see what makes it into production – and also how much BMW will charge you for it when you want it activated…

Peugeot Inception

The French firm traditionally used to produce a supercar styling exercise for the biennial Paris show. There was never any intention of producing such flights of fantasy, but as one PR confided: “We do it to show the public that we could do it if we wanted.”

I’m not sure if the electric Inception, which is billed as “heralding a new era”, follows that tradition although perhaps the fact it was launched in America (which Peugeot withdrew from in 1991) gives us a clue. Designed by newly-hired head of design Matthias Hossann, the Inception is more inspiration than production reality for the company, which is launching five new electric vehicles in the next two years and wants an all-electric line-up by 2030.

Low and long (five metres long), the Inception hints at the largest size of the forthcoming STLA electric car platform, which will be unveiled for the entire Stellantis Group in the coming years. It has a 1,000kWh battery which is capable of delivering a 500-mile range and efficiency of almost 5 miles per kWh.

Its 800 volt electrical architecture echoes that of Porsche and Hyundai/Kia and allows fast recharging and more efficient over-run recharging. The power, quoted at 671bhp, is distributed to a twin-motor, four-wheel-drive configuration.

A steer-by-wire system is like that recently introduced by Toyota and paves the way for autonomous driving with a dashboard that builds on Peugeot’s current i-Cockpit layout (think small steering wheel with restricted upward adjustment) and an all-new, fold-away steering wheel called Hypersquare, which also places the new Peugeot right at the heart of the vogue for “yoke” steering. Expect to identify Inception drivers of the future by the bandages on their dislocated thumbs…

Alternatively you could wheel out an early Austin Allegro with its Quartic “square” steering wheel and pretend you’re from the future…