Jay Leno’s Garage Offers An In-Depth Look at a 2022 BMW iX Flow
In one of its recent videos, Jay Leno’s Garage offers an in-depth look at a 2022 BMW iX Flow and its exciting E-Ink feature.
We can always count on Jay Leno’s Garage to showcase some of the most exotic cars in the world. In one of its recent videos, the YouTube channel offers an in-depth look at a 2022 BMW iX Flow, which gets an exciting new E-Ink feature. Furthermore, for this particular episode, Leno is joined by Marcus Bradley, a Vehicle Analyst at BMW EETC.
The E-Ink feature allows users to change the color of the BMW iX Flow. Even though it might seem like a gimmick, this feature has thermal management properties. Customers can switch the body color to white during summers, allowing the car to reflect heat and keep itself cool. Switching back to the darker shade during the winters will help the car retain heat.
Leno shared his thoughts on the iX Flow concept car. “This (iX Flow) is pretty amazing. Some people might think it’s gimmicky, but you know this is what’s fun,” said Leno. He further adds, “I like it when companies take a chance on something that may or may not reach production, you don’t know, but it just kind of gives you an idea. It’s like when I was a kid; you’d go to the Motorama shows, and there always be something in the future that was happening.”
E-Ink feature uses a microfilm with millions of microcapsules which contain a clear fluid with an electrically charged pigment.
The BMW iX Fluid uses a two-ink system to activate using the corresponding electric field. This allows a particular shade of ink to rise to the surface, which includes white, black, and all the other shades of grey. The amount of electricity this feature uses is near neglectful and will not reduce the vehicle’s range.
“The conception of this vehicle is the brainchild of Dr. Stella Clark, and she is a research engineer out of Munich, and she came across E-Ink and envisioned this two-dimensional material used in e-readers and such, on a vehicle on a BMW product and with uh quite a bit of prototyping and uh trial and error they figured out a way to wrap this uh entire vehicle panel by panel, section by section in e-ink,” explains Bradley.
Image Source: Jay Leno’s Garage