Automotive OLEDs: introduction and industry news - Page 30

BMW unveiled their latest top-of-the-range racing-grade road car, the Concept M4 GTS. From what I understand, this car, despite the 'Concept' part in its name, will actually be available in limited-production.

The Concept M4 GTS has some new technologies, one of them being OLED taillights. BMW has been showing several OLED lighting concepts in the past years, collaborating with Astron Fiamm, Philips, LG Chem and OSRAM. I do not know who provides the OLEDs for this new concept.

Audi announced that it will bring a new concept car to the Frankfurt motor show in September - and this concept will feature OLED lighting tail lights. As always, Audi says that OLED provides a thin, efficient and low-heat light source, while achieving a new level of homogeneity while opening new design possibilities.

Audi calls this new design 'Matrix OLED technology". From the prototype photo above, it seems that they will use transparent red OLEDs placed one on top of the other. Then again this may be just a design sketch, we'll have to wait for September to know for sure.

Continental demonstrated a new concept in which the three rear-view mirrors in a car are replaced by cameras and two OLED HDR displays. The so called "Camera Monitor System" improves the cars' safety, efficiency and comfort.

Continental explains that such a system eliminates glare, is better protected against dust and dirt, eliminated exterior mirror damage, gives better vision in poor light and rain, minimizes wind resistance and road noise and eliminates blind spots.

Today we published new versions of our Transparent, Automotive and Flexible OLED market reports. OLED-Info provides comprehensive niche OLED market reports, and our reports cover everything you need to know about the niche market, and can be useful if you want to understand how the OLED industry works and what this technology can provide for your own industry. The reports are now updated to July 2015.

The Flexible OLED Market Report:

• Why flexible displays and lighting panels are so exciting
• What kind of flexible displays are currently on the market
• What the future holds for flexible OLEDs
• How to acquire flexible OLEDs for your products

The report package provides a good introduction to the flexible OLED market - present and future. It details both flexible displays and lighting technologies. Read more here!

Last month China's Everdisplay announced it is developing a 8" AMOLED display for the automotive market, and now the company unveiled first prototypes at the CES Asia trade show.

The 8" display features Full-HD resolution, 2 ms response time and a contrast ratio of over 100,000:1. The display operates in a wide temperature range (-40 to 85 Celsius).

Audi's Head of Electronics Ricky Hudi, says that the upcoming 2017 A8 Saloon car will sport several new technologies - including OLED lighting. Or at least the company is "working on the integration of OLEDs" for the 2017 flagship model.

Audi OLED lighting concept, 2012

Audi has been playing with OLED technologies for a long time. Back in 2012 they unveiled three new OLED lighting designs, and in 2013 they unveiled 3D OLED lighting taillight prototypes (developed with Philips and Merck). In 2012 Audi also installed AMOLED digital rear view "mirrors" in their R18 sports prototype cars. It'll be interesting to see if the upcoming A8 will use one of these designs.

In April 2014 BMW said that the future lighting technology for their automobiles will be OLED, and that BMW expects to start selling cars with OLED lighting within 3 years. The respected Car and Driver publication now says that the 2016 M2 car will be the first one to adopt those OLED tail lights.

I'm actually a bit skeptical on that - it seems too soon for BMW to release OLEDs in a car, and even according to BMW, they estimated it won't happen before 2017. But maybe Car and Driver knows more than they can reveal, it'll sure be a nice surprise to see the first ever OLED lighting car next year.

In January 2015 BMW demonstrated a new concept car, the M4 Concept Iconic Lights that features a new OLED-based tail light (with OLEDs made by OSRAM). The rearlights use yellow and red OLED lighting panels arranged in a 3D structure.

Today BMW released the nice video you see above, showing the Iconc Lights car concept in action. It's great to see the BMW designers so excited about OLED and the possibilities this new technology brings.

Magneti Marelli Automotive Lighting designed a new OLED based automobile rearlight prototype, that uses Philips red and amber OLED lighting panels. The prototype also includes LEDs for the reverse function. When off, the OLED elements appear to be a silvery mirror and are "extremely elegant".

The OLED prototype received the "Red Dot" award for design quality. The "Red Dot Award" for product design was established in 1955 as is one of the most coveted product design awards at an international level.

In  CES 2015, Audi had a nice OLED-based lighting installation at their booth showing the company's logo made from 124 red 70x70 mm OLED panels. Audi finally published a video showing this installation in action:

We do not know who provided the OLEDs for Audi, but it's likely to be Philips, as the two companies have been collaborating on OLED panels for years - in 2012 Audi unveiled three OLED designs, including the rear-mounted "swarm" and in 2013 Audi developed the world's first large-area 3D OLED car rear lighting panels and installed a prototype on an Audi TT. Both of these development was done in collaboration with Philips.