Not a single month passes without noteworthy innovation in some aspect of vehicular lighting. Lighting companies can’t successfully commercialise these innovations without developing a structured vision about what automotive lighting will look like in the next decade for each car segment and each geographical market. Under this general rubric, several salient questions present themselves:
• Will there still be halogen headlamps in the new cars of 2022? Why and where?
• Will LED coexist with Xenon? Why and how?
• Can initial factory calibration of sensors be relied on for durable accuracy of advanced and adaptive lighting systems? How will connectivity be integrated?
• Will adaptive high beams gravitate towards matrix beam or actuator-driven techniques, or both depending the car segment? One seems inherently more reliable and high tech but is still in a development phase; the other is available and affordable right now.
• Will front cameras be present in all cars to allow intelligent lighting and to avoid pedestrian fatalities or obstacles on the road?
• Are laser headlamps to be a serious challenger to LED?
Never before in the lighting business have managers seem so depended on their vision for the future. R&D budgets are limited and, as always, choices must be made. To build such a vision, participating in congresses and in workshops is very important. The next DVN workshop in Japan and the VISION congress in Versailles are excellent opportunities to gather all the information needed to build that vision — see you there!
Sincerely yours
DVN General editor