As you already know, our next DVN workshop will be held near Detroit next month. As an introduction to this US workshop, DVN decided to publish this week a report on the lighting activities in this 2012 second half year because so many decisive things happened in this period. The 4 events detailed in this report which all took place during H2-2012 illustrate the fact that autolighting new technologies have entered into a decisive phase, not only for premium cars but also for the upper medium range.
The rubric for the workshop will be “How New Technology Will Enhance Night Driver Vision”. After the lectures in the morning and the 2 panel sessions in the afternoon, there will be 5 round tables. One of them will be about mechanical versus non-mechanical solutions for the LED light movement. What will be the future: mechanical solutions? Software-operated matrix beam/pixel lights? Maybe both?
We might immediately think that the future will not use mechanics for reliability, volume, or weight reasons. High tech tends to prohibit, when feasible, mechanical movement. But there are a lot of very interesting new developments in actuators. My recent visits to Sonceboz in Switzerland and AML Systems in France and the innovations they showed me emphasise these enormous new possibilities: much better reliability, lower volume and weight and a great technology on this side.
BMW for example confirmed at Haus Der Technik symposium (see our next news about it) that the swivel mechanism is a well proven and robust solution resulting in a smooth and continuous lighting function for the customer. They think they can get better performance than matrix for quite some years and will have lower cost as well as headlamps free of functional risk.
The interview of Pierre Gandel, next, shows that mechanics has still a future. The DVN US workshop round table will be chaired by Thorsten Warwel, the lighting engineering manager at Ford and the main actor of the launch of the first affordable LED headlamp in the Mondeo. I am convinced that fruitful exchanges will be take place in this area.