"Changing a car's body color at the push of a button" sounds like science fiction - but a technology that makes it possible has been under development for more than a decade. It is not yet ripe for mass production, but the new BMW iX Flow concept car shows that at least one automaker is trying to implement it.
No wonder: the Bavarians have been experimenting with fantastic paint technologies for a long time. Remember the "light-absorbing" X6, painted with the world's blackest Vantablack paint based on nanotubes?
The new technology is also monochromatic and does not yet allow you to switch from BMW red to yellow or blue. But the conceptual iX Flow, which just debuted at CES, is a good first step toward a free choice of colors for your car.
The body color change on the iX Flow (it can be white, any shade of gray, or with a gradient transition) is achieved by using "electronic ink" E-Ink: the material used in e-book displays like the Amazon Kindle.
BMW covered the iX with a special film no thicker than a human hair (also called "electronic paper"), which contains millions of E-Ink microcapsules. Each capsule is filled with negatively charged particles of white pigment and positively charged particles of black pigment. An electric field then forces the white or black pigments to collect on the surface of the microcapsules.
The huge advantage of this technology over, for example, an LCD display (apart from the freedom of shaping, of course) is its low power consumption and absence of flicker: the electrical impulse is only needed to change the color of the microcapsules, and the formed "picture" requires no power.
Going from dark gray to white may not seem like a very impressive achievement, but even such a simple palette has real applications. BMW emphasizes that changing the color of the car from white to dark depending on the season or time of day will help to warm up and cool down the interior faster and more economically. Reflecting the sun's rays with white paint in summer will make it easier for the air conditioning, while the darker shade, absorbing all the heat of the winter sun, will shorten the warm-up time on cold mornings.
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