Chinese EVs Can Now Project Movies from Their Headlights

mmooreds 3 days ago 32 commentsRead Article on insideevs.com

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Discussion (32 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

JumpCrisscross•42 minutes ago

“The U.S. just recently allowed adaptive headlights”

My most-surprising takeaway is that anybody regulates headlights in America. The runaway-brightness problem is real, well known and totally ignored.

fouc•26 minutes ago

Interesting, this tech is already in some chinese EV car models since 3 years ago, so it's not super new.

meyum33•about 7 hours ago

These EV makers will soon find out they have to set up a team to censor the stuff they can project.

maxglute•about 9 hours ago

Friend really likes the laneway lines feature at night but noted practicality is correlated with proliferation. Can't have too many of these on the road crossing streams with light pollution.

bennettnate5•about 9 hours ago

That'll put a whole new spin on drive in movie theaters...

m463•about 5 hours ago

That means they can project advertisements too.

ninjalanternshk•about 7 hours ago

The demo video saves the most impressive for the very end — the “go ahead and cross, pedestrian” light. Remains to be seen how well it works in the real world but it’s cool nonetheless.

justinclift•2 days ago

American IP Lawyers are gunna be having some interesting thoughts now... ;)

xprnio•2 days ago

Since when is playing a movie off of a projector illegal? Projection is not necessarily distribution, just as playing local media files is not necessarily piracy. I will definitely be grabbing my popcorn for the legal show though

justinclift•2 days ago

> Since when is playing a movie off of a projector illegal?

Heh Heh Heh

While I totally agree with you, the promo pictures showing a movie being played "outside" will give serious vibes like this does for music:

* https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/playing-music...

* https://artandmedialaw.com/live-event-music-licensing/

drivingmenuts•about 9 hours ago

Legal or illegal doesn't matter if lawyers can smell profit (and the smell of money covers any odor of moral or immoral).

ksherlock•about 9 hours ago

Not to mention American adtech execs. If you think being blinded by oncoming halogens is bad, wait until they also burn ads into your retinas.

SllX•about 9 hours ago

s/Chinese/Huawei

It’s 2026. Headlines don’t have to obfuscate brands behind the country of origin.

some_random•about 9 hours ago

Why would you want that?

maxglute•about 9 hours ago

The driving gimmick (which works well at night) is light carpet mode that projects car width, braking distance, lane guidance etc, it's like following racing line in forza. Once you throw in projector, might as well as pitch movie night.

amelius•about 10 hours ago

Now if only this car I'm sitting behind in this traffic jam had a nice big white screen mounted in the back ...

stavros•about 10 hours ago

My BYD has a 15" screen, it's very very nice for watching films/shows while waiting/charging/whatever. I even play Expedition 33 (and other games) on it with an Xbox controller via Moonlight.

kelnos•about 9 hours ago

And I'm sure no one ever abuses that by watching a movie while driving...

As much as I generally don't love technology taking a paternalistic attitude toward restricting what happens on the infotainment system, I really don't think it's a good idea to offer a feature like that, unless it only functions when the car is stopped and not in gear.

anonym29•about 10 hours ago

>It's [sic] can also project interactive games for kids (like hopscotch).

That's exactly what we need, to teach little johnny to go play out in front of the running car!

zzzeek•about 9 hours ago

This is almost like Onion levels of parody how much better Chinese EVs are than American ones

joe_mamba•about 10 hours ago

I wonder what movies the Audi and BMW drivers tailing 3 inches behind me will play when this drops.

VegaKH•about 7 hours ago

This sounds like it was written by the CCP. Chinese EVs = futuristic tech. American EVs = much shame.

bdangubic•about 6 hours ago

If Chinese EVs were available for sale in the US every single US car company would close down (even after government bailouts) within 2 years

naveen99•about 6 hours ago

Usa allowed Japanese and German cars. Maybe one day they will allow Chinese cars also.

JumpCrisscross•40 minutes ago

The way to do it is with quotas. 100,000 vehicles per year per manufacturer with a country cap of 10% of previous year’s total passenger-vehicle sales (the latter currently 15+ million in America).

Then you slowly ramp up those limits over time to e.g. 200,000 and 20%. Enough to give consumers respite and producers a taste of the true competition. But not so much of a shock as to cause a mass extinction.