After the Professor Ferdinand Porsche Prize was awarded to AL and Audi, DVN interviewed Kamislav Fadel, Head of R&D at AL, about the latest AL achievements and developments in lighting:
Driving Vision News: Congratulations on winning the Professor Ferdinand Porsche Prize! What does this prestigious award mean for you?
Kamislav Fadel: First of all I would like to emphasise that this prestigious prize is a win for Automotive Lighting’s and Audi’s development teams. Projects like Audi’s R8 full LED headlamp are unique. We needed involvement of more than 100 AL engineers in order to realize this technological milestone in our industry. Teamwork, spirit of innovation, perseverance, knowledge and courage to take and manage the risks jointly with Audi are pivotal to succeed in such a pioneering work. The Ferdinand Porsche Prize symbolises how important lighting has become for style, identity and value of modern cars.
DVN: AL are at the cutting edge in the development of LED technologies. What are the main AL achievements in these technologies?
KF : You are right to mention technologies and not technology!
In fact, AL have been already commercialised three full-LED headlamps: Audi R8, Mercedes CLS and Audi A7. All of them are different optical concepts. They present different styles with continuously increasing complexity, functionalities and performance.
It took us more than 20 years to introduce the Xenon technology, then AFS and recently the AFX technology. We are currently achieving this implementation with the full LED head lamps in two generation of cars, which means 6 years. Making this technological shift in such a short time is a great achievement. Overpassing the Xenon performance is another great success. Introducing the first swiveling LED Low beam in a full-LED headlamp, the first LED infrared function and reaching a high level of light distribution homogeneity