2010 was a good year for the global economy and especially for the auto industry—particularly compared to the difficult times of 2008-09. We’ve seen several significant innovations rolling out in the vehicle lighting and driver assistance fields.
We have decided at DVN to celebrate this turnaround and have selected the 2010 lighting winners of the year classified in 4 different categories:
– Headlights of the year
– Men of the year
– Technologies of the year
– Brands of the year
The names of the winners will be published during next two weeks
We at DVN are looking forward to an exciting 2011, which will pave the way to the next decade. We are sincerely convinced that thanks to high-tech digital camera systems, LEDs, and miniaturisation, good lighting is morphing into intelligent lighting, and this is something more and more consumers will be willing to pay for.
A few tricky questions related to the take rate of safe lighting still remain pending:
– The consumer who walks into a car showroom expects safety to be a prerequisite; he certainly doesn’t want to pay extra for it. What should car makers and dealers build into good lighting to help increase its take rate? Will style and comfort be convincing enough?
– Although the price of intelligent advanced lighting systems will gradually decrease, how long will it take for those technologies to be cheap enough for most cars to benefit?
– Making some of them mandatory in the European Union could help make the technology affordable, but it still would increase the car prices in a way which could hurt unfairly car manufacturers whose customers have limited budgets.
We intend to address all these questions during this coming year and meanwhile, we wish everyone in the Driving Vision News community a happy and prosperous New Year!
Sincerely yours,
Hector Fratty, Daniel Stern, Salomon Berner and the whole DVN team.