Automotive OLEDs: introduction and industry news - Page 3

Audi unveiled its 2025 Q7 and SQ7 SUVs, with the latter offering the company's 2nd-gen OLED taillights. It is not clear whether these will be standard or optional.

Audi did not detail much about these OLED taillights - but these are likely to be similar to the ones used in the new Q6 e-tron, which uses a total of 360 individual OLED panels built into 6 different lighting panels (each made from 60 OLED panels, or segments as Audi calls them).

The European New Car Assessment Program (NCAP), an independent (and voluntary) automotive safety body is set to introduce new rules in January 2026 that will require vehicles to go back to physical controls rather than touchscreens in order to achieve the NCEP five-star safety rating.

NCAP says that car makers are overusing touchscreens, to the point where almost all key controls of the cars (such as HVAC, wipers, hazard lights and more) are now done via the touchscreen rather than by physical knobs, dials, and buttons. Drivers are reportedly complaining that this is annoying - but also dangerous as it diverts your attention from driving into looking to the screen, to go over menus and choices.

In July 2023, Audi unveiled the upcoming 2024 Audi Q6 e-tron, with its second-gen OLED taillight technology. The new taillight lighting system use a total of 360 individual OLED panels built into 6 different lighting panels (each made from 60 OLED panels, or segments as Audi calls them), and is able to show warnings and signals to other drivers. Audi now released a nice video showing the new OLED taillight modules in action:

Audi will ship the cars with 8 pre-configured digital light signatures, and customers will be able to add their personal light signatures using the myAudi app. The OLEDs are likely produced by OLEDWorks, like all of Audi's recent OLED panels.

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LG Display announced that its automotive OLED displays (both its flexible P-OLED panels and its rigid ATO panels) received TÜV Rheinland’s ‘Product Carbon Footprint’ certification, a milestone marking compliance with emissions standards across the product’s lifecycle. LGD's automotive OLEDs are highly efficient, and both utilize the company's tandem OLED structure.

LGD says that it recently introduced a new film to its automotive OLEDs, developed in-house, "Light Control Film Integration Technology" that enabled it to reduce its automotive OLEDs carbon emissions by up to 18% compared to its previous OLEDs.  This method also has the added benefit of effectively streamlining the manufacturing process, further reducing product weight, and improving power efficiency compared to conventional panels that use external films.

Last year we reported that the next Hyundai Motor's Genesis GV80 car will adopt a 27-inch OLED display, produced by LGD. This display will be made from two separate OLED displays behind a single glass.

According to new reports from Korea, Genesis decided to equip the upcoming GV70 with the same display.

TCL CSoT demonstrated several OLED displays at CES 2024. first up we have an automotive 10.1” transparent OLED display, that offers 52% transparency. CSoT says that this is a "Smart Transparent" display, although it's not clear what is meant by that exactly.

The second display is a 14" 2.8K (2880x1800, 240 PPI) inkjet printed hybrid OLED. This is the first time that CSoT has printed a laptop AMOLED display. It uses an IGZO (Oxide-TFT) backplane, and offer a variable refresh rate (30-120Hz) to expand the battery life. This display was first shown last month, when TCL stated it is on track to start mass producing OLEDs using an inkjet printing process in the second half of 2024.

Samsung Display is showing its latest rollable automotive OLED panel, at CES 2024. The company says that this display, still at a prototype-stage, incorporates new technologies that enables it to be 30% thinner compared to SDC's previous rollable OLEDs.

Samsung is showing a wide of automotive OLEDs, including a display that is both rollable and foldable, check out the video above. There's also the round 9.4-inch AMOLED that will be used in the upcoming 2025 Mini Cooper.

US-based OLED lighting developer OLEDWorks seems to be focusing on automotive OLED lighting solutions for the last few years, and the company now announced a separate brand for automotive OLED lighting - Atala.

OLEDWorks explains that the new brand will support a line of automotive qualified OLED lighting products designed specifically for Tier 1 suppliers and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). The name Atala originates from an acronym for advanced technology for automotive lighting applications.

China's EV car producer Nio announced its latest flagship executive electric sedan, the ET9. The car adopts several new technologies, in areas such as self-driving, sensing, first-class airline seats (it has a four-seat configuration) and more. Nio will ship the first ET9 cars in the first quarter of 2025.

According to reports, the ET9 has two AMOLED displays. The main multimedia front-seat display  is a 15.6" AMOLED display. For the passengers, there's a central 14.5" AMOLED display (between the two seats, see image above). We do not have more details on these OLED displays yet.