Electronic vehicles (EVs) are reshaping the in-car experience and the world’s biggest car makers are starting to roll and fold their dashboards, add display technologies to their windscreens and windows, and even skin their cars with displays.
There’s a sort of space race that is happening right now, a dashboard space race, and most of it stems from what Tesla did with display technology in the original Model S which, in turn, has pushed mainstream automakers to get more aggressive on their own implementations of modern touchscreen displays. Tesla launched the Model S back in 2012 and, Elon Musk stans aside, the car was never considered a great design. One thing that did stand out in the original Teslas was the giant touchscreen in the center of the dashboard. Unfortunately, that screen was not designed for automotive use which resulted in an embarrassing recall. Nevertheless, it changed perceptions about what the cockpit of a car could look like and it was bold and bright.
Tesla was not going to make it with an off-the-shelf display. Car displays face unique challenges that are not present in other environments. These challenges include brightness and readability, durability and reliability, safety, user experience, integration with other systems, and regulatory compliance. Car displays must be bright and readable in a wide range of lighting conditions, durable and reliable in harsh environments, and positioned in optimal locations to ensure safety and minimize distraction for drivers. They must also provide an intuitive and user-friendly experience that allows for easy interaction with the system, while being seamlessly integrated with other vehicle systems. Additionally, car displays must comply with a variety of safety and environmental regulations, which can add complexity and cost to the design and manufacturing process. Meeting these challenges requires a high level of coordination, integration, and innovation from automotive engineers and designers. In the end, car makers hand off the problem to external suppliers because there is only so much you can do with in-house expertise. But, that doesn’t stop car makers from identifying a problem, figuring out a best fit solution, and locking down the IP.
The Auto Empires Strike Back
If you’re ever so bored that you feel like going through the US Patent Office’s database and looking up display-related items, you will find a great number of filings by General Motors (GM), and a lot of recent ones that relate to display technologies. Only recently, the company filed a patent for a self-cleaning touchscreen. It uses the presence of a fourth LED that essentially acts as an ultraviolet cleanser of residue on a screen. Self-cleaning technologies are not new, they are used in solar panels. You would also think that self-cleaning touchscreens should be every touchscreen, but it is only in a car, where the dash has to be visible for safety reasons where the tech makes financial sense.
In addition, you can find GM patents on rollable, foldable, and transparent displays. You can find rotatable screen patents, and patents on the microLED technology behind them. Is it any wonder when the the dashboard of newer models of cars are essentially turning into displays and projectors (yup, there’s plenty of patents on heads up displays and AR).
In the big picture scheme of things, even if every car was a potential festival of display technologies, you are talking about 90-100 million target devices, so to speak. That pales in comparison to 1.5 billion smartphones, although you could argue that putting the market opportunity in square footage, 100 million cars could easily surpass 1.5 billion smartphone screens.
Porsche is looking at developing an external display, according to CarBuzz, to help keep first responders informed in the event of an emergency. Porsche’s filing with the German Patent and Trademark Office (DPMA) is for external displays on their cars that would provide vital information to first responders so that as they approach a vehicle that may be severely damaged in a crash they have information on the car that may prove useful to them, and help them to act quickly. It’s as obvious as giving guidance on the best points on the chassis to cut through to release someone trapped inside, or the threat of explosions.
On the other hand, a lot of what we see in terms of innovation is in adapting the interior surfaces of luxury car cabins with integrated displays. After all, Tesla is not a middle class car and it now has competition from the big 3 German automakers, no slouches in aspirational car making themselves. At CES 2023, the BMW concept car, that doubles as a display using E Ink’s Prism 3, caught one of the biggest waves of buzz at the expo. But, what happens in the luxury segment filters down to the mainstream market within 3 years. If you are looking at today’s top of the line 55-inch curved OLED dashboards, you are looking at tomorrow’s curved OLED dashboard in a family sedan.
So, in the short term, it is the luxury consumer that will get the coolest curved, rolled, and flipped displays in their cars, but not for long. Every car’s dashboard can probably end up with the equivalent of at least a 7 inch OLED tablet display and that makes the automotive market twice the size of the tablet market in those terms. However, I go back to my initial assessment that in sheer square footage terms, considering the complexity of the displays and their requirements, automotive displays offer a greater opportunity than smartphone displays. It seems like LG and SDC are both betting on the automotive market to fuel growth segments in displays but they will probably face more competition as the automakers lock down automotive display IP, and reconfigure their supply chains for new technologies. It’s just the beginning of the dashboard space race.
