GM patents self-cleaning touchscreens that erase fingerprints overnight
newatlas.com
newatlas.com
There is just such an annoying push towards high-tech "gadgetization" of cars even when they provide a worse user experience in every way. Case in point, I hate auto-windshield wipers. Where I live we get a lot of "misty" rain, so I often need to turn the wipers on manually anyway. Auto-wipers just solved a problem I never had (I mean does someone somehow forget to turn on their wipers when it's raining?) and they work worse than plain, intermittent normal wipers.
Another ridiculous example. My car has the concept of different profiles for different drivers to remember different settings like seat position (that's good), but the copying of garage door signals is part of that profile. So I did the song and dance to record my garage door opener in my profile, only realizing it isn't available in my spouse's profile, and there is no way to transfer it over. So I have to do the same cumbersome recording procedure for each driver, which is nuts. As opposed to my old car where there was a simple physical button on the ceiling, it was one and done, and it was much easier to hit the physical button while pulling into my driveway than futzing on a touchscreen.
Every other material good I can think of is cheaper in the US (from new homes to electronics and apparel), but cars are 2x the price of their European counterparts?
Here (Italy) the cheapest Dacia (the Sandero) is around 12,000 Euro.
What was usually considered the cheapest car (the Fiat Panda) is around 16,000.
A part of it may be due to the fact that those entry levels (I mean the setups with the least of accessories) are not anymore manufactured (and possibly never really existed or sold as they were too basic) in the sense that the new bare minimum has raised a bit.
* https://www.autoblog.com/2008/10/31/nissan-versa-1-6-becomes...
You say it introduces an obvious problem in your comment but don’t say what that obvious problem is. It’s not obvious to me.
Streaks or trails on the self cleaning device? That's their whole selling point, I don't think a company like GM would humiliate themselves like that after all the R&D and testing.
>where is that water going to go?
Who knows, maybe some drip chamber. Dishwashers have beads all the time, well designed ones prevent them from ending up on your wooden, porous floors. That's an obvious issue, I'm sure the engineers at GM have thought that one out. If they didn't and it's some maintenance nightmare, then they'll probably not continue with the device in their cars but we just have to wait and see.
Why is that a problem for cars? Even if so, self cleaning touch screens have all sorts of applications, it sounds pretty smart of GM to patent it.
I personally really like my auto-wipers. Not because I forget to turn them on, but because when it rains here in Phoenix (an admittedly infrequent event), we go from regular rain to no rain to misting to hurricane style rain in the course of a 10 minute period. It's extremely convenient being able to set it to auto and not have to constantly fiddle with the speeds as the desert rains rapidly change. It lets me focus on the roads more, which is a must during rain here because people seem to forget how to drive on wet roads here.
My wife's Sienna is a "Limited" trim with every possible feature, and we never use anything other than the memory seats.
This method depends on the screen not being exposed to UVA while the driver is touching the screen, so any car equipped with this would need to have the side windows tinted against UVA.
This is something that should be required by the DOT anyway... 90 minutes of UVA exposure a day is a significant carcinogen, but since the glass blocks UVB you don't get a sunburn and don't realize you should be wearing sunscreen while you commute.
UVA through car windows is such a significant factor that in the US melanoma is most common on the left side of the body where a driver is exposed to the sun.
For this process they need a wavelength outside the visible light spectrum (UV), and so they need a completely separate LED as the normal R, G and B are all in the visible spectrum.
I believe most screens use a white backlight and then each pixel filters this to red, green or blue. OLED and micro led screens use a separate set of leds per pixel.