BMW's Art Car tour ended in Munich, and five now live on your windscreen
Two million people saw the Art Cars in 18 months, and now the collection scatters again
BMW Welt shut the doors on 31 August, and with them the only exhibition that has ever put all 20 BMW Art Cars in one room. More than 120,000 people walked through it in 34 days, free of charge, and it was the last stop on a world tour that started in March 2025. The cars now go back to being 20 objects in 20 different places.
120,000 visitors saw all 20 Art Cars at BMW Welt in 34 days
The Munich show ran from 29 July to 31 August with free entry, spanning Alexander Calder's 1975 3.0 CSL to Julie Mehretu's 2024 M Hybrid V8. Olafur Eliasson's H2R, the hydrogen prototype encased in frozen water, was on only its fourth public showing since 2007, which is why we told you in July that it was worth the trip. It was the first and so far only time the full collection has been assembled.
The tour ran 60 stops in more than 30 countries since March 2025
BMW puts the total at more than two million visitors across five continents, which makes it the largest exhibition project in the collection's history. The stops mixed art fairs with motorsport: Art Basel Hong Kong, Art Dubai and Auto Shanghai on one side, the 24 Hours of Le Mans, Le Mans Classic, Pebble Beach, the Concorso d'Eleganza Villa d'Este, Retromobile in Paris and the Zoute Grand Prix in Belgium on the other.
Five Art Cars are now widgets on BMW's Panoramic Vision display
BMW has made five of the 20 selectable as widgets in Panoramic iDrive, the system that projects information across the full width of the windscreen from A-pillar to A-pillar. The five are Ken Done's M3 Group A from 1989, Cesar Manrique's 730i from 1990, A.R. Penck's Z1 and Esther Mahlangu's 525i from 1991, and David Hockney's 850 CSi from 1995. A driver picks one and it sits alongside the other configurable readouts.
Panoramic iDrive reaches you only in an iX3, a new X5 or a facelifted 7 Series
BMW says the widgets are available in almost all markets, which is a statement about geography rather than model coverage. Panoramic Vision debuted on the Neue Klasse iX3 and has since spread to the facelifted 7 Series and the new X5, so the Art Cars reach the windscreen of BMW's newest cars and nothing else. Owners of everything older get the BMW Welt App instead, which picks up collection content from 30 September.
Rauschenberg is at the BMW Museum now, Mehretu goes to Cape Town in December
The physical cars are already moving again. Robert Rauschenberg's 635 CSi, Art Car number six, went on display at the BMW Museum in Munich on 3 September. Julie Mehretu's M Hybrid V8 travels to the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town for "Turning Towards the Sun", running from 11 December 2026 to 15 August 2027. The rest return to storage and to individual loans.
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Look at which five BMW digitised and the choice tells you something. They are numbers 8, 10, 11, 12 and 14 of 20, every one of them from a six-year window between 1989 and 1995, and four of the five are road cars. Everything that made this collection famous is missing: Calder's 3.0 CSL that actually raced at Le Mans in 1975, Warhol's M1, Lichtenstein's 320, Jeff Koons's M3 GT2. What BMW has put on the windscreen is the middle of the collection, the stretch where the Art Cars stopped being racing cars and became 7 Series and Z1s. Coherent for a feature that lives inside a road car, and also the least interesting five it could have chosen.
The tour asked two million people to stand in front of the objects. What replaces it asks them to look at a picture of one on a strip of dimmed glass, in a car most of them will never own. The collection is 20 cars and the widget list is five. If it is still five this time next year, this was a screensaver rather than an archive.
