BMW has rolled into CES again with another fancy concept car that can change colour.
Revealed at the world’s biggest tech conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, the BMW i Vision Dee is the automaker’s latest concept car that allows drivers to customise their physical vehicle digitally. It’s a mid-size sedan with an exterior that uses E Ink to quickly switch between or combine 32 colours, and will be available in BMW’s Neue Klasse EV models from 2025.
The BMW i Vision Dee at CES on Wednesday.
Credit: Ethan Miller/Getty Images
BMW has been playing with colour-changing tech for a while now, having unveiled the iX Flow at last year’s CES, a vehicle that can change from black to white using E Ink. The new i Vision Dee is BMW’s first full-colour deployment of E Ink tech on the outside of its cars, and drivers can use up to 32 shades on the body surface, which is divvied up into 240 individually controlled segments — so, you could make a patchwork or checkered car pattern if you felt like it.
Make it all yellow or do a pattern, whatever you like.
Credit: Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images
BMW also revealed its fancy, updated Head-Up Display for the i Vision Dee, which is a high tech, customisable digital, mixed reality panel that sits across the whole windscreen. Drivers can access driving info, communications, AR projection, and “virtual worlds” (we don’t know exactly what this means) on their windscreens. Plus, the car comes with dimmable windows.
Because 2025 is the moment when our cars apparently become Stephen King’s Christine with a (hopefully non-evil) human personality, the i Vision Dee’s headlights and kidney grille also have digital elements embedded in the physical, which means the vehicle is able to make facial expressions and express moods. Plus, the vehicle can project the driver’s avatar on the side window, if you’re into that.
BMW, of course, isn’t the only automaker debuting vehicles at CES — Sony was also Afeelin’ lucky.
