This week we release our DVN report on the 2012 SAE Congress and Expo. There was robust participation from Europe and Asia, a happy improvement over last year. The presentations covered a great depth and breadth of topics under the rubrics of lighting and driver assistance. Not only were there new presentations from well-known lighting veterans, John Bullough, Josef Schug, and of course Rainer Neumann with one of his incomparable dancing-photon movies, but there were also lectures from voices we have not heard from before—certainly a welcome state of affairs.
Overall, the salient themes were both revolutionary and evolutionary. There was considerable discussion, of course, of the developments and refinements in LED headlamps and supporting technology. There was also a very keen paper on how to make better thermoplastic headlamp reflectors, and several interesting lectures about fancy and promising new developments in advanced crash avoidance systems—a term, we note, that appears to be gaining traction and may eventually either supplant “driver assistance systems” or come to refer to a particular subset thereof. One particularly fascinating new idea is to extend present notions of V2V and V2I communication by incorporating positional satellite data into crash avoidance systems. We live in the future, as it seems!
And speaking of the future, don’t forget to mark your calendars for the VISION congress in October. Take a look at the program in this week’s News; there’ll be 37 interesting and relevant lectures, a great many demonstration cars. See you there!
Daniel Stern, General Editor