Marelli’s Flat Lit Surface combines OLED and Folia-LED rear lighting with personalised content and software-enabled functionality, pointing to a different product lifecycle for lamps.
Source date: 2 April 2026 Primary organisation: Marelli
A rear lamp with a digital layer
Marelli’s Flat Lit Surface combines OLED with Folia-LED surface lighting. It supports conventional stop, tail and turn functions, but also welcome and goodbye animations, personalised content and a foundation for external communication.
Software extends the hardware
Marelli says additional functionality can be enabled through software updates. That changes the economics of lighting. A lamp can leave the factory with physical capability that is subsequently refined, activated or personalised over the vehicle’s life.
A new commercial model
Software-defined lighting raises questions familiar elsewhere in the vehicle: which functions are standard, which are options, what can be updated after sale, and how long must the hardware remain supported? Lighting moves from a fixed component towards a platform.
Design for latent capability
This also affects engineering decisions. If future functions may be downloaded, the initial hardware needs sufficient addressability, processing, thermal margin and communications capability to support them.
The Lux View
Software-defined lighting does not mean hardware becomes unimportant. It means the hardware must be designed with tomorrow’s functions in mind. The lamp becomes a long-lived optical platform rather than a feature frozen at launch.
Publishing information
Source and research links
Marelli – Auto China 2026 lighting technologies