In recent weeks we’ve been talking a lot about the surprising IIHS survey. There’s still more to discuss on that front, and you’ll see more about it here in DVN. But don’t let’s forget the enormous progress being made in car lights. I do a lot of night drives with new cars and I consider we have better lights than we’ve ever had before.
Just look at some of the recently launched cars like the Audi A5 and Mercedes E-Class. Their lights are marvelous! That really is the best word for them. You’ve already seen my review of the A5 headlamp. This week, see my review of the E-Class lighting. These two cars are surely on the top-3 list of best lights, at least for the moment; so fast is the progress that new performance benchmarks are being broken almost as fast as they’re being set.
In the E-Class, I was impressed by three things :
- The number of functions to offer to the driver, a clear visibility from the maximum light in all the kinds of environments. There’s a full raft of AFS functions, including the impressive bad-weather function. There’s also the welcome lighting function with a nice dynamic colour show, position light function with a nice blue colour, special city light mode with prefield light made by 3 elements, curtain animation when we move from low to high beam, surroundings-aware light distribution that does nice things like avoid over-lighting retroreflective signs, etc;
- The perfect ADB functionality with impressive quantity of light, smooth dynamism, and great homogeneity allowing increased comfort and safety at night, and
- The importance of software. Long and costly hardware modifications are in the past. All is now done by software but a huge number of night drives are needed; Daimler say the development cycle had over a hundred iterations.
Truly our lights are great and getting better. The interest in objective testing is legitimate, now we need rigourous assessment to be done with the help of universities and labs.
Sincerely yours
DVN Editor in Chief