2009 has been a rocky year for the global economy and especially for the auto industry, but it has also been a year of great innovation in the vehicle lighting and driver assistance fields.
We at DVN 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 extra for. We’re looking forward to an exciting 2010, which will pave the way to the next decade.
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 increasing 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