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According to a new report from South Korea, Mercedes-Benz is set to begin including OLEDs made by LG Display in 2020 which will grace dashboards and rear-seat monitors. The roll-out will begin with the Mercedes E-Class, which will see its first model change since 2016, during the first half of the year. Both it and the Mercedes S-Class will make use of a wide-screen combination dashboard/central display panel that will be OLED. Mercedes-Benz will be the first car company to include the LCD-alternative in consumer models, although many makers have demonstrated concept cars already. Additional companies will be following suit with LG Display OLEDs in or around 2020, with the lag stemming from the four to five years it takes to negotiate development and subsequent supply of components. Current predictions have car-industry OLED panels accounting for 20.2-percent of total OLEDs in 2022 according to Ubi Research.
The report reiterates LG Display’s overall ambitions with organic displays, hoping to increase its current 10-percent of OLED sales to 40-percent by 2020. This, in turn, is expected to create a significant amount of competition with its domestic rival, Samsung, which currently enjoys an absolute market-share majority. With respect to automobiles, Samsung is believed to be currently making plans to supply its own OLEDs to BMW. An official from Mercedes-Benz, speaking back at CES in January, indicated that, “We are preemptively responding to customers who demand cooler and clearer screens.” There is a feeling that OLED panels provide superior picture quality and enhance the aesthetic look of a car’s interior.
LG Display, which has been producing large-scale application OLEDs for years now in televisions, has yet to make a big impact on the smaller-scale side of things. While it does provide the screen for Apple’s Watch, the few OLED-equipped smartphones made by its sibling company, LG Electronics, have been met with their fair share of QC-related criticism including “smearing” of black colors in low-light conditions, image burn-in, and a noticeable blue shift when the phone is positioned off-axis. These problems are not unique to LG, however, there has been a sense that the panels are not up-to-par with those of Samsung. Regarding the OLED industry as a whole, and burn-ins specifically, it remains to be seen just what will happen to the displays used in cars, which will see static images displayed for extended periods of time.