Toyota has filed a patent utility for color-changing paint, a expertise that would let house owners or dealerships shortly change the colours of automobiles.

As Toyota notes within the utility—which was printed by the USA Patent and Trademark Workplace (USPTO) on March, 19, however initially filed in 2022—house owners could wish to change paint colours to maintain up with developments or simply to change issues up. Sellers may additionally change colours to make automobiles simpler to promote, Toyota suggests.

However as an alternative of a posh repaint or vinyl wrap, Toyota claims to have developed paint that may alter its hues in response to warmth and lightweight. As described within the utility, a automobile can be pushed right into a storage bay with tunnel-like heating components that will encompass it on all sides. Because the paint floor is heated, a light-emitting “coloration modulator” gadget can be handed over the paint floor to finish the transformation.

The colour modulator, which might be managed by a human operator or a robotic, Toyota suggests, would basically function the controller for this course of. It may talk with a distant server in addition to temperature sensors embedded within the automobile’s bodywork to find out the right settings for a selected coloration, in response to 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.

Primarily based 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 completely different, because it would not use an exterior wrap as a medium. Whether or not that makes it extra prone to attain manufacturing than the BMW design (which was for demonstration functions solely) stays to be seen.