HANDSHardware · brand · the whole marketing budget
The car is the advert.
We won't buy billboards, radio spots or bus wraps. A small LED panel goes in the back window of every car, and the fleet drives past everyone in the Tri-Cities all day, for the price of a phone charger. That's the plan; there is no fleet yet.
That's not a video. It's the same code that will generate the frames for the physical panels, so what you're looking at here and what ends up in the car can't drift apart.
The mascot
It's the old circle-game gag, and it's doing real work.
You make an OK sign with your fingers, hold it up to your eye like a monocle, and wait for somebody to look. Two of them is double the fun. Everybody over the age of about six knows this bit without being told.
It earns its place three times over. It's a hand doing something other than holding the wheel, which is literally what we sell. It's an eye, which is the thing a supervised self-driving car is entirely about — something is always watching the road. And it's a dare to look, which is exactly what you want from a shape stuck to the back of a car in traffic.
It also survives being rendered in sixteen pixels — just — which knocked out every other idea we had. Up close it is a ring, an eye and three fingers; at forty feet it reads as a face looking back at you, which is the job. It is the one part of the brand worth judging in the car rather than on a screen.
01 · 34-COLUMN, SIDE WINDOW
Same loop, narrower panel. Watch the two-eye frame — it does not fit at this width, which is why the rear glass gets the wide one.
02 · 64-COLUMN, REAR GLASS
The full loop, at the size the panel will be fitted at.
The decal on the door, the sticker we hand out, and the panel in the glass are all generated from one file. A mascot redrawn by hand in a second place becomes a second mascot within a month.
What it says
Six frames, on a loop, forever
Short enough to read at a red light. Nothing that needs a second glance to understand.
| Frame | Shows | Holds | Why it's in the loop |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wink | OK-eye, two slow blinks | 4.2 s | The hook. Movement in a rear window makes people look up. |
| Double | Second eye slides in | 3.6 s | Completes the gag. This is the frame people film. |
| Scroll 1 | HANDS FREE · THE CAR IS DRIVING | 5.0 s | Says what the company does in five words. |
| Supervised | SUPERVISED / BY A HUMAN, amber | 3.0 s | The honesty frame. Also the one that keeps a lawyer bored. |
| Scroll 2 | RIDE IT · HANDSFREEFSD.APP | 5.2 s | The only call to action. One domain, easy to remember. |
| Wink 2 | Single blink, back to top | 2.6 s | Loops cleanly so it never looks frozen. |
Total loop: 23.6 seconds — short enough that a car sitting behind you at a typical set of lights sees the whole thing at least once.
Rules it has to obey
A sign that gets you pulled over is not marketing
Tennessee is relaxed about a lot of things and quite specific about lights on vehicles. These four constraints are built into the animation, not left to whoever loads it.
CONSTRAINT 01
Nothing flashes
Every change is a slow wipe or an eased fade — the fastest thing on the panel is a blink that takes about half a second, and there are two of them in a four-second scene. Nothing switches abruptly at all. Worth saying plainly: three flashes a second would still be flashing, so the rule here is no switching, not slow switching.
CONSTRAINT 02
Never red and blue together
That combination is reserved for emergency vehicles in Tennessee, and using it is a Class C misdemeanour. The palette is cyan, white and amber, and there is no red in the file at all. The open question is the cyan — it is a pale blue, and Tennessee restricts blue on non-emergency vehicles separately from the red-and-blue rule. It is a question for the state before any panel goes in a window, and swapping to amber or white costs nothing if the answer is no.
CONSTRAINT 03
Nothing faces forward
Light shown to the front of a vehicle has to be white or amber, and a moving display up there is asking for trouble regardless. Rear glass and rear side glass only. The windscreen stays empty.
CONSTRAINT 04
The driver's view stays clear
The panel mounts below the defroster line on the rear glass, and on side windows it sits behind the B-pillar. Nothing goes anywhere the operator needs to look, which matters more here than anywhere, because the operator is the safety system.
State law is the floor, and some municipalities add their own rules about moving displays on vehicles. Every city we operate in gets checked with its own clerk before a panel goes in a window there — once, up front, rather than after a fleet is fitted.
The hardware
About sixty dollars a car
This is the cheapest marketing channel any transport company has ever had, and it's the reason the whole plan works on no ad budget.
| Option | Roughly | Good for | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flexible RGB matrix panel 16×64 or 16×96, app-controlled over Bluetooth, USB 5 V |
$35–70 | The real answer. Full colour, custom animation, thin enough to sit flat against glass, sticks on with the supplied pads or cups. | Brightness varies wildly between sellers. Every panel gets judged in daylight before we buy any quantity of it. |
| Single-colour scrolling bar The classic taxi message board |
$20–40 | A backup, or a second panel in a side window running just the URL. | No animation worth having. The OK-eye doesn't survive it, so you lose the brand and keep only the words. |
| Cut vinyl decal No power, no rules, no failure mode |
$12–25 | Every car gets one regardless, low on the rear glass or on the rear quarter. Works parked, works with a dead battery, works in the sun. | Static. It's the floor, not the ceiling — movement is what earns the second look. |
| Rear-seat tablet Facing the passenger, not the street |
$80–150 | The what-the-car-sees screen. Different job from the sign, same brand. | Needs mounting that survives a hard stop. Nothing loose in the cabin, ever. |
They are sold as car window LED signs by plenty of suppliers, and daylight visibility is the thing that varies between them. Every panel gets tested in the back of a car at noon and at night before we buy any quantity of it, because that is the only property that actually matters.
Files
Take the artwork
The mascot, the sign frames and a to-scale cut guide for a vinyl shop are all generated from one source file. Ask and we'll send them over — hello@handsfreefsd.app.