Vehicle screens go super-sized at CES as tech catches up
REUTERS, LAS VEGAS, Jan 9 - Take a glance at the vehicle displays shown at CES and you could be forgiven for thinking you are at the movies.
“This is not science fiction!” announced the head of Byton, an electric vehicle startup, onstage earlier this week at the global technology conference in Las Vegas.
CEO and Chairman Carsten Breitfeld was referring to the jaw-dropping, 48-inch (1.22 m) screen inside the Chinese-funded company's M-Byte car.
Byton's vehicle will not be built until later this year. But its super-sized display - supplied by China's BOE Technology Group - is proving an undeniable trend in the automotive world, fueled by the rise of more connected cars.
“The screens are the window to the digital world,” said Gorden Wagener, chief design officer for Daimler AG, MercedesBenz's parent. “Screens are the new horsepower.”
The 2019 Mercedes EQC crossover features two 10.25-inch displays behind a glass surface forming a free-standing screen.
It is not just futuristic electric and luxury vehicles that are upping the size ante. Fiat Chrysler's 2019 RAM 1500 truck boasts a 12-inch vertical display in its dashboard.
Besides the centre console, instrument clusters, which house driving controls, and rear-seat entertainment displays are both growing in size. Automakers like Audi that combine the centre console and instrument cluster often refer to a “cockpit,” necessitating a wide, sweeping screen, like Byton's, and more consolidated computing power.
Carmakers are adding a rear view mirror display to project images from a rear-facing camera, while “heads-up displays” - where projected images float on the windshield to impart valuable information to the driver - are an exploding market.
“We're living in a display-centered world,” said Brian Rhodes, Connected Car Research Lead at IHS Markit. “I don't think it's coincidental we have a lot of screens in vehicles that look just like tablets. That's clearly the trend.”
The average size globally of a vehicle's centre display in 2018 was 7.7 inches, according to IHS Markit, and it is projected to grow to 8.4 inches by 2024.
Heads-up displays are the fastest-growing display segment, Rhodes said. There are currently about 6.3 million cars in the world that have these displays, but that figure is expected to balloon to 14.1 million by 2024, he said.
Clunky user experience?
Tesla Inc was the first to wow drivers and send rival automakers scrambling when it came out in 2012 with a 17-inch LCD display for the Model S. Apple Inc and Alphabet Inc's Google subsequently introduced CarPlay and Android Auto, which allow streaming music, maps and other apps to be accessed through the car's centre display.
That, more than Tesla's influence, is the primary reason automakers have embraced larger screens, Rhodes said. But Apple and Google's debut inside the car's main display ushered in fraught soul-searching by automakers, who have been loath to cede such valuable real estate to tech rivals, yet anxious to give consumers the iPhone experience they crave.