The car is changing – and so are the expectations for what a vehicle should offer. For decades, mechanical factors dominated purchase decisions: performance, efficiency, powertrain. Today, it's the emotional and sensory experience that truly defines a car’s appeal.

Mobility is becoming electric, connected, autonomous – and increasingly experiential. McKinsey highlights the ACES trend and points out that the new vehicle architecture opens up entirely new in-car experience spaces for drivers and passengers. China is leading this shift with radically reimagined interiors, setting global benchmarks others are quickly following.

At the same time, broadly homogeneous electric drivetrains are flattening the dynamic differences between one model and another. As a result, buyers’ attention is shifting to the mobility experience more widely, and in particular to the feelings that the cabin evokes. Interior design, lighting, and human-machine interaction have emerged as key differentiators and powerful brand tools.

The modern vehicle interior is expected to feel open, airy, and immersive. Light plays a central role in achieving this – not only as a visual element, but as a bridge between form and function. It creates atmosphere, reinforces brand identity, and supports intuitive interaction.

Interior designers are pushing boundaries, experimenting with new forms, materials, and above all, advanced LED technologies. Lighting is no longer an afterthought – it's a core part of how a brand expresses itself and how drivers connect emotionally with the vehicle. It guides, responds, and gives depth to the entire interior experience.

ams OSRAM is helping shape this transformation – with cutting-edge technologies for intelligent light control and transparent interior illumination.

Lighting and Beyond: Designing for Experience and Function
To create a mobile living space in the cabin, designers have various tools at their disposal, enabling them to shape an experience that the user enjoys and finds pleasurable. These include:

• Design features: shapes and proportions
• Materials: for upholstery, the dashboard, door panels, and more
• Sound: from engine note to ambient acoustics to noise management
• Light: ambient lighting for mood and functional lighting that ensures clarity in displays, instrument clusters, and controls

Since LEDs are an ample source of technological development, lighting probably offers the greatest scope for interior design innovation, intensifying the effects that the other three factors produce. And cabin designers are eager to exploit the new possibilities.

Traditionally, interior lighting has been a mostly functional element: task- or safety-focused light sources were limited to functions such as backlighting to show the location of buttons in the dark, or instrument lighting to enable the driver to safely control the vehicle.

The new interior lighting performs these functions, and so much more. In the future, lighting will also be ambient: its function will be to give the occupants their desired feeling – of calm and relaxation, of excitement, or of freshness and vitality.

The success with which designers achieve these emotional effects plays a central role in differentiating one brand and model from another. That is why ams OSRAM is increasingly answering requests from the automotive industry to develop products and technologies which enable new ways of using and embedding lighting that go far beyond traditional units such as roof-mounted luminaires.

Transparency and Control with New Automotive Lighting Technology
Drawing on a decades-long heritage in automotive lighting, ams OSRAM has pioneered the development of technology which meets the new design-driven requirements for the car interior.

Its ALIYOS™ technology gives an impression of floating ‘light out of nowhere’: ultra-thin ALIYOS™ LED foils can be applied almost invisibly to any base material, including curved surfaces.

Design concepts enabled by the ALIYOS™ technology include light appearing from ‘behind’ wood paneling on a fascia, or from behind fabric, through the integration of an extremely low-profile assembly for the lighting functionality.

This technology may be combined with electronic touch sensors to enable illuminated buttons to be embedded into surfaces in the dashboard or elsewhere, creating a striking space-age effect, and allowing user-interface devices to be integrated more seamlessly into the materials and structure of the interior than conventional buttons or knobs can be.

The ALIYOS™ technology can also be used to create almost-transparent light panels capable of showing pixelated symbols, multi-segment symbols such as numbers, or other information implemented in customized light patterns. The transparency of ALIYOS™ LED-on-foil technology helps designers to intensify the sense of spaciousness inside the cabin, and to produce the desirable effect of airiness demanded by the new design philosophy.

This precise control makes it possible to not only create specific moods or harmonize with changing visual elements like center displays, but also to unlock dynamic lighting effects that add a whole new layer of experience.

These dynamic lighting effects are not just about aesthetics. Patterns like pulsating or sweeping light can fulfill clear functional purposes – such as warning the driver, drawing attention to controls, or reinforcing system feedback while also adding a sense of motion and emotional depth to the design.

The color-changing capability provided by RGBi LEDs such as the E3731i is supported by the AS1163 Stand-Alone Intelligent Driver (SAID) IC. Both devices are compatible with the Open System Protocol, or OSP, which provides an open, license-free method for connecting LEDs and other devices in a simple control network.

The configurable OSP system enables various network configurations – daisy chains and loopbacks – as well as parallel branching. The intelligence in the AS1163 SAID enables it to receive color-changing instructions from a host microcontroller and implement them in up to three RGBi LEDs, eliminating the need for several local microcontrollers in a dynamic cabin lighting system.

Car manufacturers can implement an LED array to create dynamic emotional effects with any OSP-compatible LEDs . 

Continuing Innovation in Interior Light Sources
In addition to ALIYOS™ and intelligent RGBi technologies, the stream of innovations in light sources continues at ams OSRAM, across the domains of LED lighting, intelligent lighting control, and microLEDs, offering car manufacturers new ways to harness the powerful emotional impact of light and color inside the cabin.

This points to a future in which lighting plays a central role in the revolution of car interior design, providing even more ways for car brands to successfully differentiate their new products.

(Photo credit: ams OSRAM)

TrendForce 2025 Global Automotive LED Market- Lighting and Display Product Trend
Release Date:
1. PDF (196 Pages)- 30 June 2025
2. EXCEL- 30 June 2025 and 31 December 2025
Languages: Traditional Chinese / English