A color-changing car seems like something straight out of James Bond, but BMW today unveiled one at CES 2023. The questionably-named BMW i Vision Dee concept car has 240 E Ink panels that can change between 32 different colors.
Each segment is controlled individually, allowing for a vast variety of patterns to be created at the touch of a button. Last year, BMW debuted the iX Flow, which used similar tech to change between black and white and many shades of gray in between. We gave it a tongue-in-cheek award for “coolest concept that will never happen,” but with BMW rolling out version 2.0 just a year later, perhaps there’s something to this.
At a BMW CES preview in Munich last month, I met Stella Clarke, the Australian engineer behind iX Flow and head of a small team at BMW headquarters responsible for the project.
The team hand-assembles everything, laser-cutting the film to fit an endless number of shapes on the car, each wired up for control and power. The technology is similar to that of an e-reader and only requires electricity when changing from one color to another.
The trickiest part is adapting the film, which doesn’t particularly want to bend, for curved surfaces like the exterior of a car. One of the demos we saw was of a prototype wheel with a dozen or so panels all displaying different colors. Want your ride to display the L.A. Lakers colors of yellow and purple? You can do that at the touch of a button. Or what about Dodger blue? Easy.
The full-color — BMW’s E Ink is still in the prototype stages, but it works and looks terrific (at least in the demonstration preview form that I viewed it in). But Clarke told Inverse that there was nothing technical or engineering-wise that would prevent the concept from going into production, aside from a lot more development work.
The BMW i Vision Dee concept car is meant to show what a combination of hardware and software makes possible in a future automobile. The car has an intelligent, Alexa-like AI and animated “features” with headlights that respond like the eyes in Pixar’s Cars movies.
For consumers, though, having a color-changing car could provide uses beyond just showing off. If you’re having trouble finding your car in a parking lot, for example, the car could blink at you. Or, if the car detects that someone in the vehicle is having a medical emergency, it could flash to attract the attention of first responders.
Vaporware or not, all I know is: I want it.
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