- Continental showcased its E Ink Prism display at CES 2025
- Unique application spans the entire dashboard of a car
- Continental says Gen Z EV buyers want to express their personality
This year’s CES 2025 show in Las Vegas has been positively laden with screen technology, be it mammoth head-up displays that fill a vehicle’s windscreen or stretchable screen tech that could one day lead to a more immersive at-home viewing experience.
But Continental, the famous tire-maker but also prolific vehicle technology innovator, showcased an altogether more design-led argument for introducing yet more screens to future vehicles.
Its Customizable Emotional Cockpit with E Ink Prism Display harnesses the power of ePaper and eReader technology but sees it grow to a massive 1.30m-long, four-centimeter (4.2ft x 1.6 inches) tall unit that spans the entire dashboard of a vehicle.
Designed to allow future EV owners to personalize and update their interiors with an array of stark black and white designs, Continental says that its E Ink Prism Display also has additional benefits for electric vehicles in so much as they don’t require back-lighting and constant power.
Power is only required for the brief moment when the screen switches from one image to the next, which could help improve efficiency and lead to improved battery range.
During a demonstration at this year’s CES, the company showed how the selected content remained visible, even when a vehicle is parked, suggesting that it could also introduce the tech to other, outward-facing areas of a vehicle.
Continental says the first generation of its displays, which are more than capable of showing real-time driving information, such as remaining range or current speed, can only deliver imagery in the black and grey colorway, but it says full color variants will be on offer in the near future.
Analysis: a low-tech treat in a high-tech world
Lightweight, thin, durable and highly efficient, ePaper displays offer a uniquely low-tech retort to the current trend of packing automotive cockpits with more high definition touchscreens and head-up displays than your local branch of Best Buy.
Although currently limited to a greyscale output, future full color variants could provide a neat way to switch up a vehicle’s interior at the press of a button.
Granted, the look won’t be for everyone, but I could see it working in something small, bold and funky, like Renault’s recent R5 EV or even Mini’s iconic city car.
The fact it can display images, graphics or text elements permanently with minimal power requirement is also a boon for electric vehicles, where every opportunity to conserve energy is seen as a big plus.
Alas, the likelihood of us seeing it in this form on a production vehicle is slim, as I imagine many manufacturers would view an ePaper display as somewhat of a budget alternative to the current raft of high-definition displays, thus potentially cheapening the brand image.
A shame, because it’s a neat aesthetic that would certainly stand out from the current crowd of often highly sanitized and homogenous car interiors.