GTB held its 113 th session in Copenhagen, Denmark this past week and also recalled its first session that took place 60 years earlier in Brussels.
It’s quite a long list of achievement in regulation the group has contributed starting from the first meeting in May 1952. Since then, we’ve seen enormous evolution from the first regulation on incandescent lamps, up to and including today’s revolution in intelligent LED lights.
I have been in the automotive lighting field since 1966. Back then we had very crude tools compared to today. Our measurement installations could be diplomatically described as “basic”. We had no software nor computers to run it on, and no automation, but we did have deep and passionate involvement from the highest level of management of all the lighting suppliers of the day: Marchal, Cibié, Bosch, Carello, Hella, and others. Optics were calculated by hand (and then tried, and then recalculated, and then retried…) but the level of creativity was very high.
It’s an amazing amount of progress the European vehicle lighting industry has provided over the last fifty years, joined in the mid-1980s by Japanese makers with the advent of aerodynamic headlamps in that market, and now even the long-snoozing US suppliers are on the way to produce headlamps with styling differentiation and top lighting performance.
All of us automotive lighting players, we can and should be proud of the current technical level of our lighting industry—but we mustn’t be satisfied with it, for nothing is ever finished. A lot of new technological innovations are still coming. Pixel light, pedestrian detection, laser headlamps, spot marking lights, and new LED modules to name just a few, and who can guess what might come afterward? But the new champions will be those who will equally master global marketing and manufacturing footprint, styling and innovation.
All best success to all—onward and ever upward!
Sincerely yours
DVN Editor in Chief