Lexus shows off car with human heartbeat

You’ll often hear real car nuts talk about how their cars feel like an extension of who they are and that there are times when it feels as if they and the car operate with a single heart beat.

Lexus has taken that to a new level with a concept car that actually mirrors your heartbeat on the outside of the body.

The concept, which is being used to advertise the new Lexus RC F, comes out of Australia and is the result of a collaboration between M&C Saatchi Australia, Tricky Jigsaw, and Lexus Australia.

“We’re changing the conversation from top speeds, to talking about what the car does to you emotionally,” Ben Cooper, innovation director at M&C Saatchi, told Mashable Australia.

“We saw firsthand that when you sat in the passenger seat with a professional driver taking you around the track, your heart goes through the roof when he takes that corner,” Cooper said. “From there, we looked at how we were going to take the heartbeat and express it throughout the car.”

The tech behind the vehicle is actually pretty simple: a standard heart-rate monitor sends the driver’s heartbeat wirelessly to a control board in the rear of the car.

The custom-built board then takes the electrical signal from your heart and prompts the electro-luminescent paint, which displays the heartbeat in a pre-determined pulsating pattern.

Cooper has big hopes for it though.

“The [control board] is the biggest opportunity because the inputs are endless,” he said. “Suddenly, I could [show when I’m] turning left or turning right or accelerating.”

That said, there are no current plans to implement the tech into any production Lexuses in the near future.