The DVN Tokyo workshop held last week with more than 130 attendees was quite a challenge. This event convened the leading Japanese car makers Toyota, Nissan, and Honda; lighting pioneer Audi, most of worldwide tier-1 and -2 lighting suppliers, and VIPs from the international regulatory community. This was never been done before now, and it was a terrific success with two particularly salient highlights: It was held in Tokyo with bidirectional English-Japanese translation for a real and effective balance between Europe and Japan. And the lectures, panel discussions and round table sessions were all of exceptional quality and presented in a most pleasant environment.
I want to address my heartiest thanks to the seven speakers: the visionary Wolfgang Huhn, the rigorous Kamislav Fadel, the surprising European-Japanese Olivier Barthomeuf, Benoist Fleury who presented a precise synthesis on a very thorough analysis, Masaru Sasaki with his clear data and strategy, the charismatic Rainer Neumann, and the hidden gem Takashi Sato showing very interesting figures and pictures—we hope to see more from him.
I also thank the two co-chairmen of the panel session, Geoff Draper and Ralf Schäfer. Draper’s expertise, curriculum vitae, and friendly persona were key to gathering representatives of JASIC, MLIT/NTSE, JAMA, JAPIA, JELMA, a contribution of the Chinese CATARC, and Audi. Schäfer, for his part, led a very dynamic session on the future of LEDs with experts of light sources, headlights and car makers.
Of course I do not forget the three chairmen of the round tables, Jean-Paul Charret, Salomon Berner, and again Ralf Schäfer who led their round tables with rigour and sharp insight, not such an easy task with such a diverse mix of nationalities and players, and presented a clear and fruitful synthesis of each of their round table discussions.
The workshop convinced everybody of the great future of LED with a penetration rate higher and faster than expected, led by the Japanese industry searching desperately to decrease energy consumption because of their nuclear production shortage. Challenges such as regulations, reliability, and the burgeoning demand for engineering skill and talent are still to be faced.
With this workshop, a major stride has been made in the coöperative sharing of technical information amongst lighting players on an international level and for the benefit of new lighting technologies. Thanks to all who attended!
Sincerely yours
DVN Editor in Chief