BMW puts a date on hands-off city driving: 2027, Germany first
BMW Maps will show what the car sees before it drives through a city
BMW announced on Monday that from October 2026 BMW Maps will fold navigation, the car's own perception of its surroundings and the state of its driver assistance into a single 3D view on the central display. It comes to cars running Operating System X only. The line that matters sits lower in the release: from 2027 those cars will do navigation-guided semi-automated driving in cities, initially in Germany.
BMW Maps with Driver Assistance arrives in October on Operating System X
The new view places the car in its own lane, at the correct road level on stacked junctions, and draws the traffic around it from the sensors rather than the map, with the active assistant in the same picture so the driver sees a planned lane change or exit before the car makes it. BMW developed the software in-house on Mapbox navigation data and rendering, and it is restricted to Operating System X: the iX3, the i3, the new 7 Series and the X5, with the next 3 Series and iX4 to follow. It only appears in cars with Highway Assistant or Highway & City Assistant, in selected countries, cities and roads, and BMW says the rollout is phased. Stephan Durach, who runs digital services for the group, calls the link between navigation and assistance an important step toward highly automated driving.
Highway Assistant 2 does 130 km/h hands-off in nine countries today
Highway Assistant 2 is the system the screen is built around. It drives hands-off at up to 130 km/h, from motorway entry to exit when a route is active, and changes lane after the driver confirms with a glance at the mirror. BMW obtained approval under UN Regulation 171, the DCAS rule for hands-off Level 2 systems, in November 2025 as the first German carmaker to do so. At launch the system works in Germany, Austria, Italy, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Liechtenstein, with the UK, Ireland, Spain and Portugal next and more than 20 countries approved in total. By June, BMW customers had covered 200 million hands-free kilometres, most of them on the previous generation in Germany, the United States and Canada.
City Assistant stops at red lights now, and drives city routes from 2027
City driving is where the promise still runs ahead of the product. At the German launch of the iX3, City Assistant stops at a red light and pulls away on green, with further urban functions promised over the air. The 2027 step is different in kind: the car follows the navigation route through a city, semi-automated, in selected cities and initially only in Germany. BMW does not say which cities, whether the driver's hands stay off, or when a second country follows. The 3D map is the part of that plan a customer can buy this autumn; the driving is the part that still has to clear the same UN R171 process, city by city.
Mapbox draws the map while BMW still co-owns HERE
The mapping partner is the quiet detail. BMW has co-owned HERE since it bought the business from Nokia with Audi and Daimler in 2015, yet its navigation has run on Mapbox since Operating System 9 arrived on the X1 and the Mini range in 2023, and the new assistance view uses Mapbox data and rendering too. The release does not say whose high-definition map the assistant itself relies on for the redundant lane detection BMW describes, and it does not need to: HERE supplies the certified layer and Mapbox supplies the picture.
Mercedes stops at 95 km/h, Tesla has six EU approvals, Hyundai waits until 2029
BMW's 2027 date lands in a field that has just rearranged itself. Mercedes sells the only Level 3 system in Europe, Drive Pilot, approved in Germany for up to 95 km/h on the Autobahn at €5,950 on the S-Class and EQS, but it has no hands-off city product. Tesla's FSD Supervised has approvals in six EU member states and is pushing for an EU-wide vote in October, with city driving included from day one. Hyundai said on Saturday that its Nvidia-based Level 2++ cars arrive in the second half of 2028 and its own software a year later. BMW is offering hands-off motorways in nine countries now and hands-off cities in one country in 2027, which is a narrower promise than Tesla's and a more specific one than Hyundai's.
AutoNext Take
Showing the driver what the car intends to do is the cheap half of city automation, and BMW is shipping it first for a reason. Every hands-off system on sale in Europe, BMW's included, runs on a country-by-country approval, and the 3D view is how BMW makes a system that works on some roads and not others legible enough to sell. Twenty countries approved for the motorway assistant, nine live and one city country promised tells you how slow that approval process is, and no screen speeds it up.
The 2027 line is the one to hold BMW to. A Neue Klasse iX3 has to follow a navigation route through a German city with the driver's hands in their lap before the end of 2027, and a second country has to be named by then, or the city assistant remains a traffic-light feature with a nicer map. If BMW delivers that in Munich while Tesla is still counting member states, the screen will have been the right thing to launch first.
Follow us on Google News.
Set AutoNext as your preferred source on Google Discover.
