We presented last week, the lighting winners of the year for the best headlights and the best brands of the year. We present this week, the lighting winners for the best lighting technologies of the year and the best people of the year.
Best lighting technologies of the year
1) Adaptive cutoff with automatic beam selection
Adaptive cutoff is an automatic adjustment of the cutoff shape and placement within the beam ensuring optimised visibility without glare. It is a continuous, progressive transition between low beam and high beam, equivalent to a dynamic automatic aiming with integration of opposite car position and sometimes vertical road geometry (hills and slopes)
The new E-Class from Mercedes-Benz is the first car worldwide on which the headlamps continuously adjust to the traffic situation. The system, jointly developed by Daimler and Hella, gives the driver the best possible road illumination at
all times, without dazzling other road-users. The range of the low beam can be increased from the standard 70 metres to 300 meters. Main lighting suppliers have developed the technologies and several of them equipped cars in 2010.
An improved technology involving slope variation of the road is now available in the new Audi A8
2) LED technologies
After several headlights based on LED technologies have proved it is possible to equip partly or totally headlights with LED, we have seen, for the first time in 2011, two LED headlamps producing better light than Xenon. The spectral output is better matched to the needs of the human eye, there’s better homogeneity