“The wonderful world of passenger car lighting” covers in around 100 pages the history of a century of achievements in the automotive lighting industry, from the first tungsten filament light source to the cutting edge intelligent Xenon and LED headlamps which came in production during these last few years. We identify the main players, lighting suppliers and car makers, who contributed to bring this industry to its current advanced technological and economical state. We outline the future potential of new lighting technologies.
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The report presents in its first chapter the history of automotive Lighting through around 50 meaningful events, calling back to mind 6 successive technological breakthroughs: halogen bulbs, complex optics, Xenon light sources, dynamic bending lights, adaptive cut-off with auto beam select, LED headlights better than Xenon, but also 2 dead-end lighting developments: polarised light and UV-augmented head lighting.
In the second chapter, putting aside halogen considered as a well-known conventional technology, the author draws a complete description of current lighting technologies with their on-going developments, completed by the author vision of the future of lighting technologies in a time filled with numerous and great lighting innovations. The following technologies are presented in details: rear LED systems, Xenon 35w, A.F.S., Xenon 25w, LED, and adaptive systems.