Remember the BMW car with E Ink panels that was first demoed at CES 2022? It has been an instant hit and the world got to see a display tech that was earlier almost exclusively associated with Kindles getting splashed on a high-end car for the first time ever. Now, as CarScoops stated, the good news here is that the technology will soon make its debut on a production-ready car, and it likely will happen sooner than expected, around 2027 itself.
You have all the benefits you’d expect out of an E Ink display. There is going to be zero power drained as long as the color is static, drawing power only when the color changes. However, it is going to require more power than say an e-reader device considering the sheer scale of the E Ink panel used which covers the entire exterior of the car. Still, it’s just about 20 watts of power consumed each time the exterior color changes.
“It’s powered with electricity, and each little segment needs two contact points and you apply a small voltage between them to change the colors, but when you take the power away the color stays there,” said Dr Clarke, the engineer who is spearheading the E Ink campaign at BMW.
“When the car is off, it stays the same color. It doesn’t need energy to be on! No light can do that. And to change the color of an entire vehicle doesn’t require much energy at all, you only pull about 20 watts, which is about the same as a single light bulb or one LED strip in the door.”
The display maintains its visibility even in direct sunlight, something that we have always known Kindles or for that matter, all other e-readers are capable of. While in e-readers, we would be concerned with the way texts or mages are displayed, for a full-size SUV, that would largely be limited to applying colors in blocks and chunks. The display otherwise is stable so that once a particular shade is selected, that remains intact till a different shade is applied.
Coming to its application, the possibilities are endless. You might opt for a whiter shade on a hot day and then turn back to black when it’s cold. The car can also be made to sport a distinct pattern to help you locate the same in a crowded parking lot. Anyone facing any emergency situation might seek help with a unique pattern and so on. Maybe there is going to be government guidelines issued on this that would govern the choice of colors to be used and so on, more so when there is every scope for scamsters to use the color changing aspect to evade the cops.
Is it going to be expensive? Unfortunately, Dr Clarke didn’t have anything encouraging to share on this.
“The truth is it’s probably not going to be the most price-effective thing in the beginning, so I could imagine it starting off in a selective market and then hopefully broadening out,” she said.
So, what is evident is that there is going to be limited edition versions of the E Ink enabled cars during the initial years before mass market models are launched. No doubt we will have to wait longer for that to happen.
With a keen interest in tech, I make it a point to keep myself updated on the latest developments in technology and gadgets. That includes smartphones or tablet devices but stretches to even AI and self-driven automobiles, the latter being my latest fad. Besides writing, I like watching videos, reading, listening to music, or experimenting with different recipes. The motion picture is another aspect that interests me a lot, and I’ll likely make a film sometime in the future.
