CES 2022: BMW iX Flow can change colour

The colour-swapping BMW iX Flow concept stole the show with the ultimate bank robber’s getaway car at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas today, breaking entirely new ground for the car industry.

The brainchild of Australian research engineer Stella Clarke, the 2022 BMW iX Flow can switch between black and white colours at the push of a button.

It can even change into different patterns, from racing stripes to emergency services logos, or can have its two colours pulsing down its panels.

While the BMW iX Flow alternates between millions of pixels of black and white, there are no technical reasons why any two colours can’t be used.

Clad in engorged slabs of the E Ink paper used in Kindle digital book readers, the idea for the BMW iX Flow came about because Clarke was pushing to create a car that changed with a customer’s mood.

The iX Flow has huge implications for everything from drivers simply wanting a change to designers who can use the colour change to deliver the movement they try to put into their shapes.

“Digital experiences won’t just be limited to displays in the future,” said BMW’s director of development Frank Weber insisted.

“There will be more and more melding of the real and virtual. With the BMW iX Flow, we are bringing the car body to life.”

The entire body of the BMW iX is wrapped in custom-cut E Ink electrophoretic paper and it changes colour when an electric current brings out different colour pigments in the paper.

It wasn’t that easy, though, because the E Ink paper is not designed to curve with a body design, so it had to be laser cut in hundreds of flat panels, bent at custom incisions.

The sheets of E Ink are also cut and fitted to allow different shapes, like stripes, to pulse to create a two-tone effect.

BMW then coated the iX Flow in a clear lacquer coat to protect it from the elements.

“This gives the driver the freedom to express different facets of their personality or even their enjoyment of change outwardly, and to redefine this each time they sit in their car,” said Clarke, who was head of the project.

“Similar to fashion or the status ads on social media channels, the vehicle then becomes an expression of different moods and circumstances in daily life.”

The BMW iX Flow came from Clarke’s fertile mind, and she pushed BMW’s board over the edge while she was holed up in COVID-19 quarantine in Katoomba, NSW.

While she had proposed the technology for automotive use months earlier, she computer-generated a demonstration video from a room in her mother’s house while she was locked down, then sent it to basically every decision-maker she knew at BMW.

BMW’s board leapt at it, almost immediately, and allocated three of the new BMW iX EVs to the communications department and more to the R&D team for the project.

“I was so convinced of the technology that I annoyed everybody. Everybody!” Clarke admitted.

“I made a video from Katoomba in quarantine at my parents’ house. I had to, because many people couldn’t imagine what I was talking about, so we had to put it in our heads with a video.”

Clarke, who grew up in Maroubra, obtained a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of New South Wales and the Pennsylvania State University, and completed her PhD in robotics at the Technical University of Munich, in Germany.

Starting with BMW in 2007, the research engineer initially concentrated on interiors, rising up the ranks of the Future User Interaction Concepts department until recently.

“It’s not a display, so it doesn’t light up. Everything that light can offer, like visibility in darkness, you don’t have here,” she said.

“It’s not like light, where there are rules so you don’t just put light everywhere. We see that as an advantage.

“At the moment we are talking with the German authorities to see if it’s okay, and it’s positive from them. The colour change is not in-your-face. It’s subtle.

“It’s a colour change and a colour-changing car has never been done before.

“It can pulse. It can have waves. It can change colour and leave the new colour solid.”

Changing the colour uses very little electrical energy and, once it has changed, it takes even less energy to maintain it.

BMW is still fiddling with the best ways to use E Ink and what else it can be used for.

The entire idea, Clarke admits, is in its infancy, and it could (and likely will) even spread to interior pieces like the dashboard and the centre console, and even the door trims.

“We are about to find out what the use cases are. We are about to find out if something can change colour, then what can it be used for, or for individuals,” she said.

“It’s also very difficult to use. We did the bonnet 20 times in cardboard cut-outs to get it right.”

The E Ink wrapping the iX Flow contains millions of microcapsules of ink, with each the diameter of a human hair.

The capsules change colour after being stimulated by an electrical field, bringing either the white or the black to the surface.

“I have been having fun with it and masquerading it as work. Keep that quiet: the ’Bra girl says she’s having fun at work.

“It’s a very emotional use case, but it displays a lot of functional uses for this technology. If it’s hot, a lighter colour can reflect heat better and uses less power for the climate control. You can use a darker colour in a cold climate to retain heat in the car.”

There is no weight figure on the E Ink cut-outs for the iX, but given the SUV weighs in at 2.4 tonnes, having a few square metres of electrically charged cardboard wrapped around it isn’t going to make much difference to its footprint.

That said, it is a long, long way from being a production-ready idea, as Clarke readily admitted.

“Stuff has to be done before it goes on to a production car,” she said.

“To be honest, we don’t know what we don’t know. So far, it has a lacquer on the top so bubbling with water is not a concern.

“We put them in the chamber at temperatures of up to 70 (degrees Celsius) and down to zero, and it’s okay, but we have to push them even more.

“Temperature and humidity are the concerns and we have to find the limit of high temperature and high humidity, low temperature and low humidity.

“So far it’s quite promising.”

E Ink already has paper technology that works down to -15 degrees for use in cold rooms, and it also has four-colour paper as well, rather than the two BMW is working with.

If BMW is pushing the limits of what the E Ink technology can do, E Ink itself hasn’t even started.

It has no automotive-grade paper yet, with BMW using rolls of standard E Ink paper, and then coating them for protection, but the company has told BMW it would open a research project for automotive paper if they showed there was demand.

“There are no limits to the colour combinations, as far as we know, and E Ink has not had economies of scale in automotive before, so they’ve never researched what’s possible,” Clarke admitted.

“Who knows what can happen when they do?

“It could change design fundamentals, because design is about creating movement but what if we can do that with colour?”