Meet the Woman Behind BMW’s Color-Changing Car

The color-shifting BMWs that stole the show at CES two years in a row were born after Stella Clarke took apart her Kindle e-reader for fun.

Clarke will tell you that she’s been doing this her entire life. As a kid growing up in Australia, whenever her family would throw something away, she’d insist on dismantling it first to learn more about how it worked.

As an adult, and as an engineer at BMW, taking apart the Kindle yielded something else: an idea of how its proprietary black-and-white displays integrating “electronic ink,” made by New England’s E Ink Corporation, could be used in automotive applications.

Initially, she imagined its color-changing properties could be used in the car’s interior to allow for more individual personalization or to help deal with sunlight and darkness on display screens. Then, the idea evolved to exteriors.

“I think [e-ink] is totally underestimated in the Kindles, and — compliment to us — it just wasn’t an obvious idea to do,” says Clarke, now a project leader based in Munich.

The result was the BMW iX Flow, an electric SUV whose exterior was wrapped in a material that could shift between white and black at the touch of a button — billed as the world’s first color-changing car. When it debuted at CES in 2022, it made headlines all over the globe and was even named one of Time’s “Best Inventions of 2022,” among other new technologies “changing how we live, work, play, and think about what’s possible.”

But Clarke and her team weren’t done. Seizing on the iX Flow’s momentum, they pulled a genuine Wizard of Oz moment the following year by taking the technology from just black and white to 32 colors on an all-new concept car.

Moreover, Clarke says this color-shifting technology isn’t as implausible, expensive or far-off as one might think — meaning it’s not crazy to imagine BMW actually releasing a color-changing car in the foreseeable future.

That could represent a dynamic change in how we personalize our cars and present them to the world. Meanwhile, the effusive reception to this technology has put BMW, and Clarke, on the map in a surprising way. “It’s awesome,” Clarke says of the sensation around these cars. “It’s a journey, right? And certainly not something we expected. It was a wonderful shock for all of us that it went so positively.”

Stella’s Sense of Color

Clarke stands out in a sea of mechanical gray. Even she’s quick to say she’s not a petrolhead. “I have tech in my blood, but not necessarily petrol,” she says.

Her father grew up a native Maori speaker in New Zealand, and her mother is Chinese-Indonesian. Clarke says that growing up in Sydney, she came from “an uneducated family” who were fairly traditional about career paths.

But when she showed interest and promise in going into the STEM fields as a child, her very progressive all-girls school — the first one in Australia to let girls wear shorts, she says — encouraged her to go for it. “One of the new subjects they had was design and technology, and I knew that that was my thing,” she says.

This led her to study mechatronics at the University of New South Wales, followed by Penn State and then a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering at the Technical University of Munich — BMW’s home turf. Her Ph.D. research specialized in controlling remote-control robots with haptic devices (“It doesn’t get much cooler than that,” she says), which led her to join the Bavarian automaker in 2007. She initially focused on interiors and user controls.

“We’re always looking for ways to make the user interfaces more user-friendly, and we always have the issue of sunlight in displays and reflections,” she says. This helped lead to the appreciation for e-reader technology and how it could be used on a car. “But it certainly started with the fascination for the tech itself.”

The iX Flow works like this: The car is wrapped in thin sheets of material that contain millions of tiny microcapsules about the diameter of a human hair. When a small amount of electricity is applied, black and white pigmented particles within those capsules shift in a preset pattern, creating a color change in much the same way a Kindle generates letters on the page.

Clarke and her team took things to the next level with the i Vision Dee concept shown off at this year’s CES conference. That concept car adds different-colored particles to the mix and applies them to 240 individual panels across the car so that each one can be controlled individually. The result is a vibrant light show.

Now, they’ve shifted to working on real-world ramifications, like car washes, dirt and impacts. Fragility remains a problem. But the amount of electricity used to switch colors is extremely minimal, Clarke says. E-ink only uses electricity to change the "ink" on the screen, which is akin to changing text on e-readers. Otherwise, its power consumption is static. And deploying this technology for road use isn’t as expensive as it may seem — though BMW demurred on questions of cost.

An Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

For years, global car color choices have trended heavily toward monochrome: black, white, gray and silver dominate the automotive landscape. According to a color study by Axalta Coating Systems, a major supplier to the auto industry, those colors accounted for a depressing 78% of North America’s new car selections in 2022.

It wasn’t always this way. Colors like teal and salmon complemented the tail fins and rocket-inspired designs that reflected the postwar optimism of the 1950s. The muscle-car era meant a “Plum Crazy” Dodge might square up against a “Le Mans Blue” Chevy in a drag race. Shades like orange and green had a great run in the ’70s. Even reds and greens were popular in the ’80s and ’90s.

Today, vibrant colors tend to exist at extreme ends of the spectrum, on expensive supercars or cheap compact runabouts. In between, you have a sea of black, white and gray. Even Tesla, as groundbreaking as it is, doesn’t really get more adventurous than red or blue these days.

Nonetheless, color still matters to car shoppers, says Ivan Drury, director of insights at the car-buying website Edmunds.

“Color has a very dramatic effect on your first impression of a vehicle,” Drury says. “That’s why when we see an automaker choose a specific color to highlight a lineup or a redesign, it is vitally important.”

But our changing tastes may reflect our changing relationship with cars. “As more consumers look at a car as just an appliance for point A to point B, or something that’s even autonomous, that connection to color and emotion becomes muted,” says Drury. 

The pandemic-prompted semiconductor shortage and its subsequent lack of new and used car inventory have meant that car buyers take what they can get these days, not necessarily holding out for the color they want. So the prospect of an actual color-shifting car, at this moment in time, is pretty alluring.

Drury says the possibilities are almost endless; business owners could use their cars to advertise what they do, and even different family members could change colors on the same car to suit their individual tastes.

Ed Kim, president and chief analyst at automotive research firm AutoPacific, adds that color choices are something of an unmet need among buyers — especially ones with money to spend. He called BMW’s E Ink “fascinating,” but says its success would depend on execution.

“How will it look in person? Will it be durable? Will it be expensive to fix in the event of sheet metal damage? And of course, what will it cost?” Kim asks. “If these concerns are positively addressed, I think it could be a unique differentiator for BMW and potentially a useful tool in reaching certain types of consumers that BMW may want.”