Just in the last two months alone I’ve done two night drives of advanced new lighting systems. In November it was the future BMW i8, and last month I tried out the forthcoming Mercedes CLS. Both of them exemplify the huge progress in automotive lighting in the handful of years since the dawn of LED high and low beam headlamps on production cars.
There are two main reasons for the sudden glut of innovation. Firstly, for many years we had only point light sources (filaments and then HID) with imaging optics. This necessarily constrained the possibilities in styling, lighting performance, and energy efficiency. Now we have all-new light sources—LED and lasers—together with all-new optics. Headlamps can be designed and built to comprise many light sources, and the design and performance possibilities are burgeoning along with the energy savings from more efficient optics and ever-better light sources. These two recent night drives of mine show very well what we are able to do now, and point the way of the future.
Secondly, and very importantly, OEMs are newly seeing the value of investing in the ever-more-competitive race for better lighting performance and fresh styling differentiation. Not just in premium cars, but also in mass-market ones. I recently had a generalist OEM tell me that from one model to the next, the price of the headlamp increased by 50%—this would have been unheard of just a few years ago!
Even though costs are still important in R&D and in project development, lighting players can offer endless innovations with the condition that a perceived addition to value and quality is present.
So this is the context in which the DVN workshop will be held next month in Paris: a period wherein the lighting players seek to improve their vision about styling, technology, light sources, and regulations. It will be an exceptional opportunity to better know the strategy of OEMs, setmakers, lighttsources suppliers, to know the lighting developments in research institutes, and to get the latest updates on the many pending regulatory issues.
See you there!
Sincerely yours
DVN Editor in Chief