Are ‘Smart Materials’ Overhyped or Just Misunderstood?

Smart materials, once a potential revolutionary innovation in the automotive space, now seem to have been merely a facade and a short-lived trend that resurfaces every few years. When you think of smart materials, you think of shape-shifting alloys, color-changing materials, or healing self-healing phone screens that somehow repair themselves like human skin. However, as every revolutionary idea does when it hits mainstream news, smart materials have been oversold by the media to the point where they only exist in our imagination.

A Smart Material is a material whose properties can change in response to external stimulation. Unfortunate to many, smart materials have no AI technology embedded into their molecules, relying solely on science. In response to stress, temperature, electricity, magnetism, and many more, the smart material can change in various ways, including:

Shape (e.g., shape memory alloys like Nitinol)

• Color (e.g., thermochromic or photochromic materials)

• Conductivity (e.g., piezoelectric materials that convert stress into electricity)

• Structure (e.g., hydrogels that swell with moisture)

Lastly, there are self-healing materials, perhaps the most hyped of them all in the automotive space. These materials mimic the biological healing process of human flesh through many different applications. Some close the cracks by rebonding molecular structures, and others function through the force of an electric current running along the material, which allows for the broken particles to reform after damage.

Limitations:

With everybody seeking the next revolutionary innovation, smart materials have quickly gained fame. However, the severe limitation is that most of these materials only function under controlled conditions. Self-healing carbon fiber does not consistently heal and is only slightly reliable for minor cracks, which would never justify the pricetag. Unfortunately, these are not quickly solvable problems but scientific realities requiring billions more dollars in research and development.

Cost: Many of these materials are still expensive to produce at scale.

• Durability: Some smart materials degrade faster than conventional ones.

• Complexity: Integrating them into devices or structures isn’t always straightforward.

• Public expectations: Hype leads to unrealistic consumer demands, which puts pressure on companies to market half-baked solutions.