Windshields Blocking Signals—When Will the “Pseudo-Innovation” in New Energy Vehicles Come to an End?

"A gap the entire 140-year automotive industry never noticed — we've filled it." At a new product launch, the CEO of a certain upstart automaker declared confidently.

Summer weather is hot, and the front windshield of a car has a relatively high thermal conductivity, which easily causes the interior to become stuffy. Many new energy vehicles use an all-glass roof design and lack a metal roof for heat insulation, so the cabin gets even hotter in summer. To cool the interior, this new automaker came up with a solution — a triple silver-coated front windshield, claiming it can block 99.5% of ultraviolet rays and 97.6% of infrared. Silvering can reduce the glass's thermal conductivity while preserving light transmittance, achieving heat insulation and temperature control.

However, recently a Bilibili creator revealed that his car's front windshield silvering blocked signals, causing the GPS to stop working. After repeated complaints, the automaker offered him two solutions: either replace the front windshield, costing a total of 4,359 yuan and covered by the company, or add a signal amplifier at the ETC location.

The creator also said the automaker is providing windshield replacement services to other owners. But some media contacted the automaker's official customer service, which claimed it had not heard of any glass replacements.

Once the incident broke, it immediately sparked online discussion, and even a high-profile influencer with millions of followers reposted it. Is it a product defect? Does triple silvering affect signals? Supporters on both sides remain divided. Beyond wanting to get to the bottom of the matter, some netizens began to focus on certain so-called “innovations” in new energy cars: in the end, are these innovations really beneficial to consumers? What other similar “innovations” exist on new energy vehicles?

Poor signal — is the front windshield entirely to blame?

On the question of whether triple silver-coated glass might interfere with signals, less than a month after that model's launch another new automaker mentioned it at its April 23 product event, and the two companies soon engaged in a war of words.

On April 24, the automaker said it had tested with the three major carriers and 15 phone models, and that navigation, calls, and streaming on all phones were normal. On June 1, at the Second Future Auto Pioneers Conference in the Shenzhen Greater Bay Area, executives from the two companies met again, and that automaker's CEO insisted that the triple silver coating would not affect mobile signals.

The creator replied that the automaker cleverly said it would not affect mobile phone signals but did not mention the car's own GPS. On July 2, the creator posted that he had received a written complaint from the automaker, but this is only his one-sided account, and whether everything in the video is true can only be judged by the audience.

In theory, metal affects electromagnetic fields. A car body is metal, and if the glass is also silvered it can easily form a Faraday cage that blocks electromagnetic signals.

Some may remember that when metal bodies were popular, the iPhone 6s had a plastic filler strip on the back to avoid losing signal. That white strip houses the phone antenna to mitigate the metal body's effect on signals. Metal bodies, prized for feel and durability, were abandoned by many manufacturers because of their impact on signal reception.

In the automotive context, the Yubei traffic patrol public account once published a case where Mr. Chen applied a high-end window film to his car because of the heat, and afterwards the in-car GPS navigation could no longer receive satellite signals. Yubei traffic patrol explained that the film contained a metal layer that affected GPS signals; the solution was to replace the sun film or adjust the GPS antenna position.

As for why phone signals were not affected in the automaker's official tests, it relates to location. After the front windshield is silvered, signals have to enter through the side windows, and phones can still receive them. According to the user manual, the vehicle's GNSS antenna is located just below the front windshield, and that area was not de-silvered, so the signal was severely blocked.

Interestingly, the area used to install the ETC was de-silvered. No wonder one of the automaker's proposed solutions to the creator was to install a signal amplifier at the ETC location.

In fact, as early as early April, shortly after deliveries began, there were online reports of some GPS outages, but they did not attract widespread attention at the time. It was only in late April, when an executive of a rival openly stated that triple silvering would affect signals, that the issue received more attention.

In the era of smart cars, signals are almost a product's Achilles' heel, especially as high-level autonomous driving becomes more widespread. If navigation fails, autonomous driving cannot function properly and may even create safety risks.

Overall, the problem has so far appeared only among a small group of owners, making it hard to determine whether it's a design defect or an isolated quality issue. Based on past automotive industry practice, if it were a design problem it might require a large-scale recall and rectification, but the situation has clearly not reached that point yet.

While waiting for an official statement, more netizens began discussing a series of “innovations” from new-energy startups. It is undeniable that many of them have changed how we used cars before, but some are clearly “innovation for innovation's sake” and rest on assumptions.

This signal incident may have just been a fuse, and similar design problems are not uncommon across other brands and models.

New entrants roll out new features — more gimmicks than genuine innovation.

Since the advent of the new energy era, upstart automakers have developed rapidly and introduced many new features. Some commentary goes so far as to argue that these features are the best evidence that fuel cars are backward, and that these innovations bring clear improvements in experience, making traditional fuel cars seem like products of a bygone era.

However, when we reexamine the suite of features on new energy cars, we find they are not always as the automakers portray. Gesture control is a typical cautionary example: letting users control navigation and entertainment by hand gestures — aside from operational efficiency, safety is a real concern.

We judge whether an operation succeeded mainly by feedback. Mechanical buttons give strong tactile feedback and, after some practice, can be operated blindly. Touch buttons and center screens provide weaker feedback, making blind operation harder, and gesture control provides no feedback at all — without looking at the screen we may not know whether our gesture was correct or whether the camera detected it.

Especially for drivers who are actively driving, using gesture controls requires diverting attention and may introduce safety hazards.

Additionally, another automaker equipped a model with a retractable, 360° rotating roof camera with 1080P resolution that can be activated at speeds below 80 km/h. The company says the camera can be used to photograph scenery, and photos can be transferred to a phone via an app.

The problem is that this camera isn't very good and simply can't compare to a smartphone. A phone can not only shoot wherever you want, but also freely adjust angle and composition. Nowadays some cars come with companion drones, which are a pretty good option—passengers can use them for top-down shots, tracking shots, and other multi-angle filming.

Some automakers, for safety reasons, have developed a "transparent A-pillar" design: a screen is installed on each A-pillar to display the exterior images captured by cameras, allowing visibility into the A-pillar blind spots.

However, the image shown on a transparent A-pillar screen can differ in scale from the real scene, which can easily lead users to misjudge distances; the display may also suffer distortion, glaring reflections, or induce dizziness. Some netizens also worry that in the event of a collision the A-pillar screens could cause secondary injuries to occupants.

Many of the functions and configurations mentioned above were not created by the new carmakers. For example, the transparent A-pillar design has long had patents exposed by companies like Volvo and Toyota, but for various reasons they chose not to put it into production.

Over the past hundred-plus years, although the development of intelligent features hasn't been as rapid as in the last decade or so, traditional automakers have conducted countless explorations in overall vehicle design. It's commendable that new players are developing new functions, but many bloody accidents remind us that blindly adding features to cars isn't necessarily sensible.

Don't innovate just for the sake of innovation.

Many domestic new carmakers were founded around ten years ago and have accumulated rich vehicle-building experience and technical foundations, but compared with established overseas automakers they still appear rather inexperienced. Keep in mind that Toyota has over eighty years of history and Mercedes-Benz over a hundred; even if their electrification transitions haven't been aggressive—leaving them slightly behind in some new energy technologies—it's not rational to completely deny their capabilities in vehicle design and hardware tuning.

For example, gesture control and transparent A-pillars were not first invented by the new forces or even by domestic brands; traditional automakers simply didn't heavily promote or mass-produce them due to cost, safety, and other considerations. Even triple-layer silver-coated glass wasn't invented by the aforementioned new companies: the 2023 Zhiji LS7 is equipped with a three-layer silver-coated panoramic roof and front windshield.

Conversely, why didn't the Zhiji LS7 exhibit similar problems? I personally speculate that SAIC's long-standing carmaking experience played a role: when designing the feature they fully considered issues like signal shielding and implemented targeted optimizations.

Overall, this controversy over an "innovation" is rather special; what it reflects is an attitude of "disregard." New players always think they've found "blind spots" traditional brands don't understand—such blind spots do exist—but some things traditional automakers haven't done are not blind spots but "no-go zones."

Beyond disregard, automakers are also under pressure to innovate quickly for sales reasons. Although China's new energy vehicle sector is doing well, the market is extremely competitive; any product launch needs promotional buzzwords, sometimes even puzzling terms, to highlight a company's technical prowess.

Automakers keep introducing innovative features to delight users and improve the experience, but producing a feature and putting it into mass production isn't enough: it must go through multiple rounds of testing and ideally be validated by user trials to ensure it is accepted by consumers and free of safety issues.

Developing some useless features—or ones that consumers ridicule—is a necessary phase in the development of China's new-entrant brands. The new energy, intelligentization, and smart-driving sectors haven't been in a high-speed growth phase for very long, and automakers are still exploring directions for various designs and functions. During the gasoline era domestic automakers could feel their way forward; now that China has become a leader in the new energy vehicle industry, only they can test how deep the water ahead is.

It's not terrible for a product to have problems; the key is whether the automaker can present solutions that convince and are acceptable to consumers, and whether subsequent products can fix existing defects. Although many functional and design issues from new carmakers have emerged in recent years, this spirit of exploration leads Xiaotong to believe that Chinese car brands will certainly be able to find their own path and disrupt the traditional auto industry.