Crunchyroll is taking anime somewhere it has never quite gone before: your car dashboard. The streaming giant has partnered with FORVIA’s Appning platform to bring more than 50,000 anime episodes and 25,000 hours of content to selected BMW and MINI vehicles. The rollout begins with BMW Group vehicles and is expected to expand to more than 40 other automotive brands across North America, Europe, Asia and other markets.
Yes, you can apparently sit in your car and watch One Piece. But there is one very important catch: You have to be parked.
The video function automatically becomes unavailable once the vehicle is put into drive. That’s obviously designed around safety, but it has also created an amusing new question for anime fans: are we about to see people deliberately sitting in car parks just to finish an episode?
Actually, the idea makes more sense than it initially sounds. People already consume entertainment while waiting in their cars, during school pickups, lunch breaks, charging stops, before appointments or while waiting for someone who said “I’ll be five minutes.”
Now those five minutes could become an entire episode of Jujutsu Kaisen. And Crunchyroll clearly sees an audience for it. The company says anime has become deeply embedded across generations, with long-term fans continuing to watch well into adulthood while younger audiences increasingly identify with the medium.
The move is also part of a bigger shift in how car manufacturers think about their vehicles. Cars are increasingly becoming entertainment platforms, not simply machines for getting from A to B. Appning already supports more than 300 applications, including services such as YouTube, Spotify and Zoom. Crunchyroll is essentially joining the growing ecosystem of apps competing for attention inside the vehicle.
And the partnership isn’t stopping at BMW and MINI. The companies plan to expand the service across BMW Group vehicles and eventually more than 40 automotive brands, meaning anime could become a fairly normal part of the connected-car experience.
For Crunchyroll, that’s a clever way to put its catalogue in front of fans in yet another part of their daily lives. For anime fans? Well, the parked-car anime binge is officially a thing now. Just don’t start watching Attack on Titan while driving.
