BMW’s recent filing with the European Patent Office is a practical response to a long-standing problem of sun visors always seeming to be in your way when you don’t need them. BMW proposes making the sun visor out of a material that only turns opaque to block out the sun when necessary, and stays transparent the rest of the time.
Defining The Problem
In regular cars, the sun visors are not obstructive when they are folded away against the roof. They only really become an eyesore in cars with a panoramic glass roof, where they sit against a mostly transparent backdrop and can reduce the airy feeling a glass roof usually imparts to the cabin. There is no way to completely hide them when they are not necessary.
Traditional Fixes
Automakers address this by making the sun visors narrower, so they can be hidden against the windshield frame and not overlap onto the glass. The disadvantage is that it may not be big enough to block out the sun when you really need it. Electrochromic glass is too slow to respond for use as a quickly activated sun visor, so it doesn’t really present a solution.
The Sun Visor That Vanishes
BMW’s solution is to make a sun visor from a transparent material, so it effectively becomes invisible, without obstructing a panoramic glass roof’s transparency. The visor can then be set to opaque in an instant, presumably similarly to how glass roofs from automakers such as Porsche can currently be set to become opaque at the touch of a button. BMW goes one step further and says the intelligent system may also react to factors like time, location, and weather to automatically set the sun visor to opaque, as well as react to a physical switch.
Our Take
BMW doesn’t state what the visor will be made of, but it would likely have to be a totally transparen material such as plastic or glass. This leaves a few obstacles that would have to be overcome, such as:
- Emulating the safety factor of a softly padded sun visor
- Addressing unsightly smudging and fingerprinting
- Providing separate front and side visors or retaining the current swivelling design
