BMW is going to announce a new Art Car this month, but this isn’t it. Instead, the new 5 Series Sedan in the fully electric i5 flavor has been transformed into a metal canvas. The luxury EV has received a colorful makeover for this year’s Art Basel in Switzerland but with a digital twist as the car hasn’t actually been painted by hand. In fact, it hasn’t been painted at all.
Instead, “The Electric AI Canvas” as the i5 has been described has morphed into a canvas on which designs created by artificial intelligence algorithms have been projected. The abstract liveries are the result of combining more than 50,000 photos spanning 900 years of art history. The outcome is a mélange of classical and contemporary art exhibited onto the G60, which is the largest 5 Series ever made, stretching at 5060 millimeters (199.2 inches) long.
To make it happen, Nvidia’s AI architecture StyleGAN was trained by feeding it all those images to generate new abstract animations. The striking outcome has been amplified by surrounding the pair of i5 eDrive40 electric sedans with numerous mirrors. Those who want to check it out should know the cars will be showcased until June 18 at the famous art show in Basel on the river Rhine.
The i5 is not the first colorful BMW we’ve seen this year as the i Vision Dee attended CES in Las Vegas in January with its color-changing E Ink technology. That electric sedan took a different approach as it was the body itself that changed its color, with 32 hues applied to 240 segments of E Ink. It was an evolution of the tech as last year’s iX Flow concept was only able to go from white to black, with shades of gray in between.
As for the new Art Car we mentioned in the beginning, we’ll learn more about it on June 28 when it’ll be announced at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. We’re being told the 20th official BMW Art Car is going to be based on a race car. With the M Hybrid V8 racing at Le Mans in 2024, perhaps it’s going to be based on the flagship endurance racer.
Source: BMW
