Choosing the fitting coloration on your automobile could be a difficult, even an emotional proposition. And what you choose if you’re on the supplier could not really feel proper afterward. But what when you may select a distinct coloration each time you get into your automobile, whether or not somber grey, moody black, or sporty pink?
BMW is demonstrating simply that risk at this 12 months’s Consumer Electronics Show within the type of a know-how dubbed “E Ink.” Wrapped across the futuristic i Vision Dee idea automobile, it may possibly immediately shift amongst practically three dozen totally different colours, and even allow a motorist to select one coloration for the roof, one other for the hood, whereas choosing nonetheless extra hues on totally different elements of the automobile’s physique.
“Color is not just color. It is emotional,” stated Stella Clarke, the BMW engineer main the event of the E Ink course of as she launched “the world’s first color-changing car.”
From Kindle to automobile
The fundamental know-how is just not all that new, although it’s by no means been used for automobile purposes earlier than. Millions of oldsters have skilled E Ink in gadgets like Amazon’s Kindle reader. Also often known as “electronic ink” or “electronic paper,” it makes use of microcapsules barely as thick as a human hair containing varied shades of ink. Each has a distinct electrical cost so when particular currents are utilized to the microcapsules, particular colours rise to the floor.

As with gadgets just like the Kindle, BMW initially confirmed off E Ink able to flip-flopping between black and white with the iX Flow idea automobile unveiled on the 2022 Consumer Electronics Show. It’s spent the final 12 months working to discover a method to make use of the extra complicated model of E Ink on a automobile. And it’s making its debut on i Vision Dee.
“She” is a showcase of applied sciences, together with totally autonomous driving, digital actuality shows and an AI-powered, wisecracking voice assistant formally often known as the Digital Emotional Experience — or Dee, for brief.
And together with Clarke, Dee helped narrate the debut of the colorized E Ink system throughout a BMW keynote at CES 2023.
An automotive chameleon
The colours can change all however instantaneously, because the idea sedan dizzyingly displayed. All instructed, the present model of E Ink can deal with about 32 totally different colours and the wrap BMW used for the i Vision Dee was divided into 240 totally different segments.
Even the automobile’s aerodynamic hubcaps used the E Ink materials, spinning out totally different colours like a high-tech roulette wheel.

Who’s on first?
Whether BMW can really declare to have launched the world’s first color-changing automobile may very well be open to debate. A day earlier than its keynote presentation, Volkswagen confirmed off a prototype of its new ID.7 battery-electric automobile at CES, and it used a high-tech camouflage to disguise a number of the sedan’s remaining design particulars.
That camo was truly a 40-layer electroluminescent paint that allowed the automaker to individually gentle up 22 totally different areas across the physique in numerous colours and patterns.
But the ID.7 system is unlikely to achieve manufacturing, if for no different cause than it consumes a major quantity of vitality to function — not one thing that will make sense on an EV since it might cut back vary.
Production challenges

As Kindle house owners know, E Ink “is very, very low energy,” Clarke instructed TheDetroitBureau.com throughout a background briefing on the know-how late final 12 months. “It needs energy only to change color,” she added, and the brand new hue stays even if you energy the automobile down.
That doesn’t imply that you just’ll be capable to go to your nearest BMW showroom and order a automobile wrapped in E Ink anytime quickly. While E Ink is broadly utilized in readers and different gadgets, it’s nonetheless in an early growth stage for automobile utility, identical to the opposite applied sciences discovered on the i Vision Dee.
A brand new model must be developed that might easily cowl a automobile. Right now, the fabric is a problem to work with when becoming it over the creases and curves of a contemporary automobile. And it might must be sturdier than in the present day’s E Ink materials. Get a ding or scratch and also you’d have to interchange a whole panel.
And the know-how received’t come low-cost, although BMW officers declined to place a price ticket on a automobile lined in E Ink.
Still, Clarke stated “it’s very possible” a manufacturing model ultimately may very well be supplied, one thing that would offer you the chance “to express yourself by changing the color of your car.”
Source: www.thedetroitbureau.com