How E Ink Made the Color-Changing Car Reality

Jan. 25, 2023

BMW may have made the car, but the colors come courtesy of E Ink technology.

Related To:

This video appeared in Electronic Design and has been published here with permission.

Check out more of our CES 2023 coverage.

BMW followed up its presentation of the BMW iX Flow in 2022 with the colorful BMW i Vision Dee. Both were made possible through technology from E Ink, which is available now for integration into products. However, most applications will not be wrapping a car in display technology—yet.

I talked with Timothy O'Malley, Associate Vice President of Operations at E Ink, about the company's Prism 3 multi-color ePaper film that was used to make the BMW i Vision Dee possible. While the car was a proof of concept, the film used in this car and the BMW iX Flow are available now, as are ePaper films designed for applications like e-readers (see figure).

This section of film would be wrapped around a section of the BMW vehicle. The electrical connectors are on the side and the number of them limits the sections of the panel that can be individually controlled.

One of the main differences between the films used in the BMW vehicle and e-readers is pixel size. For e-readers and other applications like price displays in stores, the pixels are very small and regular so that images and text can be rendered clearly. For the vehicle, an entire section is essentially a pixel that can be controlled. As a result, changing its color renders a large, usually irregular swath with the desired color. Part of this can be seen when the checkerboard pattern is displayed on the car.

Links

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.>

You can send press releases for new products for possible coverage on the website. I am also interested in receiving contributed articles for publishing on our website. Use our template and send to me along with a signed release form.

Check out my blog, AltEmbedded on Electronic Design, as well as his latest articles on this site that are listed below.

You can my social media via these links:

I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.