Everyone who has driven a car knows how much the A-pillar blocks the line of sight. Especially under today's increasingly stringent collision regulations, the A-pillars of cars tend to become thicker and thicker. Increasingly thick A-pillars will cause many traffic accidents due to blind spots. So both car owners and the industry have been discussing a question: How to reduce the blind spots caused by the A-pillars as much as possible while ensuring safety?
The solution for Toyota and other traditional car companies is to tilt the A-pillar forward and use a triangle window to rescue it. But if you have driven a car that uses this structure, such as Ralink and Avalon, you will find that this design basically does not play a big role, and the blind spots are still there. Therefore, in theory, the most effective way to eliminate the blind spot of the A-pillar is naturally to directly make the A-pillar disappear.
This is the purpose of the transparent A-pillars recently launched by some new car-making brands. So what is this so-called transparent A-pillar implementation? Is it reliable? Could it become mainstream in the future?
How is the transparent A-pillar realized?
The A-pillar is right there, and it is getting thicker and thicker. It is absolutely impossible for you to cancel this thing, so how can this guy be "transparent"? There are just a few methods. One is to use some kind of alien black technology to turn the entire A-pillar into a completely transparent form, just like glass. But this method is limited to science fiction movies or fantasy worlds, and there is no such thing in the real world.
Another method is also quite straightforward: paste a flexible OLED screen on the A-pillar, and then use the camera outside the car to capture the real-time image of the A-pillar's blind spot onto the OLED screen, thus achieving "Transparent A-pillar". The transparent A-pillar technology of Nezha Auto, a new domestic car-making force, and the transparent A-pillar technology already mass-produced by Continental, a world-renowned automobile supply chain company, are of this form.
The third form is Toyota's patent. This form does not need too much introduction, just look at the picture:
It is the hollow A-pillar. But to be honest, although this method is low-cost, the A-pillar blind area is still very large. If you want to completely eliminate the blind area, you can only rely on the OLED screen method above. This method is also the basic standard technology on most of the next-generation pure electric vehicles we see that are still in the form of concept cars.
How far is this kind of thing from becoming popular?
To be honest, with today’s human technology, whether a thing can be popularized on a large scale depends not on the technical difficulty, but only on the cost, and the cost depends on the scale effect. At present, the mass-produced version of Nezha Automobile has been equipped with transparent A-pillar technology based on flexible OLED screens. In the WM EVOLVE concept car that we have reported before, a similar feature has appeared near the door handle. OLED screen with transparent A-pillar. We cannot rule out that WM Motor will put this OLED screen directly on the A-pillar in production cars.
According to anecdotal reports, the BMW i4, which is still in the quasi-concept car stage and Mercedes-Benz's second pure electric car, will be equipped with this transparent A-pillar. According to the current time point and combined with the current global situation, it is speculated that the real large-scale popularization of transparent A-pillars will not be until the end of 2020 or early 2021 at the earliest. This also depends on when the main supplier Continental can fully resume production.
So what is the principle of this technology?
This transparent A-pillar technology based on flexible OLED screens is actually not technically difficult. It mainly consists of several modules: First, the flexible OLED screen installed on the A-pillar, which has already become a big Large-scale mass production, and has been widely used in mobile phones (curved screen is flexible OLED).
The other is a camera, which is used to capture images outside the car, but how does the camera know what to capture? This requires a sensor: the pupil sensor. This sensor looks at your eyes, calculates where your eyes are looking, and then commands the camera to shoot through the AR algorithm.
These things are already mature technologies, and their costs are not high, but the difficulty lies in how to integrate these things into the car and match them with mature and reliable software algorithms.
This article comes from the author of Autohome Chejiahao and does not represent the views and positions of Autohome.