Toyota has filed a patent utility for color-changing paint, a expertise that might let house owners or dealerships rapidly change the colours of automobiles.
As Toyota notes within the utility—which was revealed by the USA Patent and Trademark Workplace (USPTO) on March, 19, however initially filed in 2022—house owners might wish to change paint colours to maintain up with tendencies or simply to modify issues up. Sellers might additionally change colours to make automobiles simpler to promote, Toyota suggests.
However as a substitute of a fancy repaint or vinyl wrap, Toyota claims to have developed paint that may alter its hues in response to warmth and light-weight. As described within the utility, a automobile can be pushed right into a storage bay with tunnel-like heating components that may encompass it on all sides. Because the paint floor is heated, a light-emitting “colour modulator” machine can be handed over the paint floor to finish the transformation.
The colour modulator, which could possibly be managed by a human operator or a robotic, Toyota suggests, would primarily function the controller for this course of. It might talk with a distant server in addition to temperature sensors embedded within the car’s bodywork to find out the right settings for a selected colour, in keeping with the appliance.
Toyota color-changing paint patent picture
Toyota admits that it’s not the primary automaker to experiment with color-changing paint. As famous by the automaker within the utility, BMW demonstrated one thing related at CES 2022 on its iX electrical SUV.
Based mostly on the electrophoretic expertise utilized in e-readers, the color-change impact utilized by BMW was created by tens of millions of microcapsules suspended in an exterior wrap. An electrical present precipitated pigments to flow into inside these microcapsules, altering the outside from white to grey to black on the push of a button.
Toyota’s model appears a bit totally different, because it would not use an exterior wrap as a medium. Whether or not that makes it extra more likely to attain manufacturing than the BMW design (which was for demonstration functions solely) stays to be seen.
