The latest edition of renowned French motor magazine “Auto Journal” contained a piece on the new Audi A8 focusing on three high points of the car, foremost of which is its matrix beam forward lighting. The article explains how 25 LEDs work together, switching on or off, bright or dim to optimise drivers’ seeing range and comfort even when cars are in front or oncoming.
By now, the whole DVN community knows the technology and its benefits. But for drivers—much less likely to know much about how the lights work on a car—we are witnessing a fantastic breakthrough: driving through the night with, more or less, permanent high-beam seeing while producing only low-beam levels of glare. It’s a longstanding dream to resolve the conflict between insufficient low beam seeing and excessive high beam glare, and Audi and Hella have realised it for the first time.
Now if we add the laser beam, the driver will have more than he (or we) ever dreamed possible. We have to communicate much more loudly to the public on the latest lighting innovations—because the pace of innovation is so rapid, there’s a lot of “noise” we have to punch through to make sure drivers know which technologies do what, how to ask for them and where to get them. Headlamps and rear lamps represent a very small part of the car but the achieved progress give a great benefit to our business and it shows how innovation can improve and advertise what we are doing.
DVN Seoul Workshop: A Great Success Expected
As you already know, the next DVN workshop will be in Seoul this coming 24-25 June in the renowned Ritz Carlton hotel. We are happy and proud to announce the sponsorship of Hyundai Motors, who will be very involved in the workshop. Other Korean companies will actively participate with presentations; these include Renault Samsung, Mobis, SL, Seoul Semiconductor, and three others TBC. This enthusiasm from across the Korean industry, together with the fantastic progress in lighting design and technology showcased on Hyundai and Kia models at recent auto shows, clearly points to Korean companies aggressively evolving from full-time students to innovators and instructors. I think the Korean companies are now in a position not at all far from the European and Japanese companies presently leading the technologies in the automotive industry. And I would like also to take the opportunity of this workshop to thank those experts always present at the DVN workshops, including Wolfgang Huhn, head of lighting at Audi, and Rainer Neumann, head of lighting at Varroc Lighting Systems. It’s going to be a fantastic event, well worthwhile…if you haven’t already arranged to attend, by all means proceed!
Sincerely yours
DVN Editor in Chief