Talk about drive-in movies. Huawei showed up at the Beijing Auto Show last week with a trick no American auto company can replicate. Its latest XPixel technology can use headlights to project a full range of colors, enough to play movies or video clips. 

Huawei’s XPixel tech has been in the headlights of its past vehicle models, but this is the first time we’ve seen it so advanced. The full-color version of the technology is set to appear in an upcoming version of the Aito M9, an SUV EV with self-driving technology that Huaweii has been manufacturing since 2023.

A Huawei representative didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

While projecting movies may seem like a gimmick, you could technically set up a screen and make your vehicle into a personal drive-in movie theater, provided you had enough battery charge. But the technology has more practical aspects, too. 

With these advanced headlights, drivers could get on-the-street guidance in the form of arrows indicating the right path to take while driving. When the car is parked, the lights could project hopscotch or similar games on the pavement. It could also project a music synthesizer for an outdoor rave. 

American headlights, meanwhile, can’t do much more than use adaptive lighting to increase brightness when the road is especially dark or decrease it when vehicles are near. And seeing how people feel about bright blue LED headlight use on the road, multicolor projecting headlights may be a hard sell.