CES 2026 offered a nice range of production displays for automobiles as well as ones that will show up in the coming years. For example, many companies showed production and future versions of pillar-to-pillar displays, Panoramic Head-up Displays (P-HUDs), electronic rearview mirrors, center console displays, rear-seat entertainment displays, window displays, and AR-HUDs.

One trend was more vertical integration and focus on the automotive market from traditional panel suppliers. For example, AUO has formed the AUO Mobility Solutions Corporation which now includes Germany-based BHCT, a well-established Tier One automotive supplier. At CES, they announced their first design win of a cockpit controller. Innolux has formed CarUX to focus on mobility solutions and used CES to announce it is acquiring Pioneer Electronics for its strength in audio and access to the Japanese car market.

Rollable/slidable/shaped OLED displays were shown mostly as concepts this year. Particularly impressive was an S-shaped inkjet printed OLED center console display from TCL CSOT along with a slidable version of this same panel. Other form factors included J- and L-shaped OLEDs along with rollable OLED demos.

Dual-View displays were demonstrated to offer an alternative to driver privacy solutions that simply black-out the driver’s view of the passenger display, while allowing the passenger to continue to see their content. Samsung Display calls their solution “Flex Magic Pixel” and LG Display had a very similar OLED panel. Both are based on a dual-pixel approach while CarUX showed an LCD display that uses a parallax barrier to deliver separate images.

One interesting emerging area of innovation is decorative panels or “smart surfaces.” Surfaces in the car that have traditionally had a fabric or textured material treatment can now include illuminated icons. The surface material can be smooth, textured or a painted surface and illuminated by microLED displays, segmented LEDs, or LCD displays. BOE showed a microLED and segmented LED version while Tianma uses a QD miniLED LCD to create image in their woodgrain surface. CarUX can integrate a display with leather or carbon fiber treatment. Only Aumovio, the new name for Continental’s spun-out automotive business, showed a color E-Ink-based smart surface.

Transparent window displays are also a hot topic area. These can be transparent microLED displays glued to or laminated within a window, or a projector coupled to a diffusing layer affixed to the window. To support these applications, Texas Instruments revealed a new auto-qualified DMD chip set that reduces the pixel pitch from 7.6 microns to only 4.5 microns with a much smaller package as well.

The projector diffusing layer can be a film optimized for displaying images inside the car, outside the car or both. They can even be darkened with an electrochromic layer or switchable by embedding a polymer dispersed liquid crystal (PDLC) cell inside the window. PDLC automotive windows are already commercially available, which should aid in commercializing this option.

Aumovio was showing a DLP projector with a diffusing foil optimized for displaying the image outside the car – useful for a ride-sharing application, for example. For an interior facing window display, Aumovio’s solution is also tied to the car’s GPS tracking so an advertiser can serve up geo-specific advertisements – a potential new business model that the car makers are evaluating.

These side window, windshield and P-HUD solutions are all what might be called “in-plane” displays because they are not placed at a virtual depth. They are different from AR-HUDs which can place an image at a single, dual, multiple or variable virtual depth planes. Such displays strive to minimize any refocusing of the driver’s vision for safety reasons. These are more suitable for the driver while in-plane HUDs are potentially better for the passengers because of the near focal distance.

Mirror-based HUD solutions with a single virtual depth plane have been commercialized for years, but to offer AR capabilities larger fields of view are desired. The problem with mirror-based approaches is that the volume of the solution gets way too big for car makers to accept at the desired FOVs. As a result, new approaches using eye-tracking and stereoscopic displays are emerging.

CarUX was showing an eye-tracked stereoscopic HUD using a microLED panel with a volume of only 2 liters, but without a well-defined eyebox, so light was scattering inside the cabin demonstrator. Aumovio showed a demo based on an LCD panel with a lenticular array and eye tracking that has a 15×8 degree FOV with a volume of 8 liters. Both are early in development. AUO and Tianma have shown microLED-based eye-tracked versions as well.

The upside of this approach is the small volume, lower costs and ability to software warp the image to allow a single HUD solution to fit in multiple automobiles. And by adjusting the disparity of the image one can easily change the image virtual distance. The downside is that the system still has vergence accommodation conflict and only one object/image can be moved in the virtual space.

Many companies showed under-display IR camera solutions aimed at driver monitoring applications. All demos proved it is now very hard to see where the camera is located under the display. Only Samsung Display and LG Display showed both an IR and RGB under-display camera solution, however.

Some of this technology can be found in cars today, but others will have to wait for 2028 models years and beyond.