Opinion: Audi, BMW and Mercedes have revealed the future of their car interiors. Who’s best – and worst?

In the space of one week, we’ve been shown the future of German car interiors. And gone are the days when Audi, BMW and Merc benchmarked each other’s every move down to the click of the volume knob. 

The new Audi Concept C (95% the new TT, we hear), the production-ready BMW ‘Neue Klasse’ iX3 and the fresh Mercedes GLC EV all lunge in different directions towards what each badge insists is interior utopia. All the tech, info, luxury, safety and indeed 'tainment you could wish for!

Mercedes is doubling down on its Hyperscreen era, with a new mega-display which is no longer actually three big screens living under one glass ceiling. Oh no. Now you can have a 39.1-inch sheet of pixels backlit by over 1,000 LEDs. 

Mercedes says the screen knows where you’re looking (at the road, maybe?) and automatically brightens or dims the ginormo-screen accordingly. No word yet if it gets annoyingly hot to the touch like the existing Hyperscreen. Or what the rest of the screen does when you hook up Apple CarPlay or Android Auto...

As Merc bets big on a single screen, BMW has rented a big skip and lobbed in everything you knew about Beemer interiors. iDrive clickwheel? Gone. Slender curved screen atop the dashboard? Sort of still there, but it’s now more of a head-up display-like slither boasting six custom widgets. And the main touchscreen has gone full Tesla. It’s huge, it’s central, it's hexagonal. New frontiers in screen oneupmanship.

There are no physical switches for the heating, or even the driving modes. The steering wheel appears to be impaled on a bridge girder and is festooned with what look ominously like touch-sensitive buttons. It’s all very concept car, but this is the real deal, on sale early next year with its own App Store from just under £60,000.

Something weird is going on here. Mercedes and BMW have revealed showroom-ready school run SUVs containing cabins from the years 2200. Audi, meanwhile, has attempted to steal headlines with a concept car – a sporty two-door drop-top at that. And it’s the first new Audi styled by the hand of a new design boss. So you’d expect something radical, wild and completely out there. 

And it is. Because Audi’s concept car has the interior of a car from ten years ago.

The Concept C has a round steering wheel, the only buttons it carries are metal and go ‘click’ when pressed. Its driver instrumentation screen is no bigger than the one in the old TT. And the main touchscreen? The size of a laptop keyboard, and it folds into the dashboard when you’re not using it. 

There is no gesture control. No 3D holographic projections, as promised in the iX3. The Concept C is poles apart from the five-screen multiplex of the A6 e-tron, with its silly Virtual Door Mirrors and pointless passenger display...

So the Audi isn’t winning any prizes for feeling like a spaceship. It’s not even futuristic. You could pick a mate up in it tomorrow and they wouldn’t comment or coo about the cockpit. Whereas in the BMW or Merc, they’d be swiping and pointing and accidentally telephoning your ex.

Here’s a theory on why this is happening. Audi launched a Chinese clone of itself last year, called ‘AUDI’. Its cars don’t wear the four rings. They’re all big EV barges with wall-to-wall touchscreens and all the character of a supermarket self check-out – and they’ll never see a European road.

BMW and Mercedes still build cars that have to work everywhere. And because the Chinese market is so huge, and so tech-obsessed, screen real-estate and onboard i-assistants come first. The Merc and the BMW look like they'll be novel to inhabit in a traffic jam. But of the three, that new Audi interior is the one I want to drive...