A year ago, Christian Amann from BMW asked me to lead a study on the future of the automotive lighting market. Ralf Schäfer, Jean-Paul Charret, and I started to visit set makers, light source and other tier-2 suppliers, regulators, and academics involved in lighting—24 organisations worldwide, all in all, and I am deeply grateful to each of them for their willness to answer our questions.
It was a difficult job, but very exciting, talking with:
– A variety of experts within single companies, sometimes not having the same position;
– Professors from universities having a clear vision of the very long-term future;
– Scientists on the deep development of LED and laser technology and technique.
The conclusions are presented in the report released today—read it to discover our forecast on light sources and lighting functions. The future of LED technology is clear but there are interesting new details in the picture brought by laser and hybrid laser-LED headlamps, ADB, and OLED and hybrid LED-OLED signal lamps.
And several question marks are still open, regarding regionalism, regulations, how the value chain ecology might change in response to new technologies and players entering, and the consequences of lighting on autonomous vehicles and vice versa.
DVN Seoul Workshop
The official docket will be published this Thursday, 22 May. In advance we thank all the speakers, notably Wolfgang Huhn and the Korean companies who are not (yet!) often present in international congresses or workshops. We will hear with great pleasure and keen interest the six Korean lectures about their vision on the automotive lighting. The workshop was not easy to organise, but I’m confident our work will prove to have been worthwhile; world-class speakers are ready to talk and listen about the future of lighting. I can’t wait to see you there!
Sincerely yours
DVN Editor in Chief