This car has a bigger screen than your computer

​Byton is a brand you don’t know yet, but you probably soon will, because the Chinese company is about to launch a car with a massive screen in it - like, this is dashboard-spanning, home-theatre-rivalling, mine’s-bigger-than-yours craziness.

This is dashboard-spanning, home-theatre-rivalling, mine’s-bigger-than-yours craziness.

The screen itself is referred to as a “Shared Experience Display”, and it’s the future because it isn’t primarily a touchscreen - it uses “Air Touch” gesture control, and people in the front or the back can control the screen… yeah, because that won’t be distracting for the driver.

I mean, sitting in a traffic jam on a rainy day in Beijing must be a huge pain, but having your backseat passenger decide they want to look at surfers on a beach or a majestic hiker at the top of a cliff will surely make things all the more pleasant. Yeah?

People in the front or the back can control the screen.

The screen won’t just be gesture-driven, though: it’ll offer touch-capacitive response and voice recognition tech, as well as “biometric identification” and “necessary physical buttons”. And if you look closely at the image below, you’ll see that there’s a screen on the steering wheel, and also buttons for P, R, N and D. It’s so future, I’m surprised that this story hasn’t just automatically started playing German techno. 

You’ll be able to connect yourself to the car via the cloud: the driver or their passenger(s) will be able to have their preferred apps, data and connected devices shown up on the screen.

There’s a screen on the steering wheel, and also buttons for P, R, N and D.

And not only will the car have a futuristic interior, it’ll also have smartphone-like facial recognition technology to unlock the doors: there are cameras on the doors that’ll scan whoever is trying to access it. See the pic below to give you an idea of how seamless (or not) the integration of that technology is.

There are cameras on the doors that’ll scan whoever is trying to access it.

Even better, Byton says it’ll finally have production-ready exterior screens made of LEDs - like those screens we’ve been seeing on concept cars for years now, but for real. The company is calling them Smart Surfaces, with the front and rear LEDs and a “luminescent logo” being switchable depending on the driving situation.

Byton says it’ll finally have production-ready exterior screens made of LEDs.

I can’t help but wonder how much of a drain that mega screen will be on the car’s pure electric drivetrain. Like, the company is claiming 500km of range from its battery pack, which is great - and yeah, those sorts of screens typically have a low power draw, but it would have to have some impact, right?

Byton will reveal its crossover/SUV model at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas on January 7. Apparently a sedan and MPV will follow, and the range will be sold in China first (in 2019), then Europe and the US after that.

Is a screen of this size overkill? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.