Continental wins orders worth 2 billion euros for pillar-to-pillar and OLED displays

Technology company Continental has announced that it has won additional major orders worth more than 2 billion euros (Rs 16,158 crore) from global vehicle manufacturers for its pillar-to-pillar display and for OLED displays. This brings the awarded lifetime sales for Continental display solutions with SOP after 2022 to over 7 billion euros (Rs 56,553 crore).

First introduced last year, this further development of the pillar-to-pillar display blends seamlessly into the cockpit across the entire width of the vehicle and uses a continuous display surface instead of individual screens. Drivers and passengers can operate the display intuitively, immersing themselves in an impressive user experience. This is supported by the so-called matrix backlight with local dimming – a technology that can control each LED individually, making it brighter or darker as needed. This results in high contrast as well as excellent optical image quality.

As the central visual interface, the pillar-to-pillar display brings the digital driving experience to the driver and passenger, underscoring the importance of display size as a unique selling point for car brands and models, which was also identified as an important factor by drivers in the Continental mobility study issued earlier this year.

With the OLED display, Continental is also bringing a multi-display solution to a global production vehicle which, thanks to its self-illuminating capabilities, does not require backlighting like conventional LC displays (Liquid Crystal), resulting in extremely lightweight and slim units and significantly greater design freedom due to compact dimensions.

“The user experience adds value. We are providing impressive proof of this with the new orders for our display solutions. They are among the new driving forces for the mobility of the future. Customers are looking for experiences that are user-friendly and offer them positive entertainment,” said Philipp von Hirschheydt, Head of User Experience Business Area at Continental. “We are therefore consistently pushing the envelope with the further development of relevant solutions. We already supply some 30 million user experience products, such as displays, each year and are responsible for equipping more than one in three cars worldwide.”

Mega factory strategy
While demand for integrated display solutions is growing enormously, large screen technologies such as the pillar-to-pillar display require significantly larger and highly innovative high-tech production facilities. For example, the pillar-to-pillar display is around five times larger than a conventional digital instrument cluster.

According to Continental, it is for this reason that it is pushing ahead with a paradigm shift in its production activities, bundling its production capacities for display solutions in selected mega factories. The bundling of production capacities and a focus on standardization, automation and digitisation will create economic and technological synergies that will enable Continental to generate higher sales and further increase economies of scale.

“We are taking our comprehensive manufacturing expertise in the production of complex products to a new level thanks to our mega factory strategy. We are prepared for further growth and new orders, because the complex production of large display solutions in particular is gaining in speed thanks to our new approach to production,” von Hirschheydt said.