As part of our participation in the UN’s International Year of Light, DVN will publish a sumptuous coffee table book about automotive lighting technologies and their contribution to car design. Our goals are to share our passion with newcomers in the field, celebrate our touchstone achievements, and describe today’s newest promises for tomorrow’s car lights. Brilliant illustrations showcase how lighting is the soul of car design and can generate emotions like any piece of art. Why? Because car lighting design has become a key lever for all successful car models, and decision makers at the highest levels in the car industry recognise that lighting design speaks directly to the heart of potential buyers.
The vehicle lighting industry generates passion because it both demands and creates team spirit, bringing together a variety of actors from the car maker to the set maker, from the light source supplier to the material and components suppliers, from engineers to designers. It involves a tremendous number of fields as diverse as optics, thermics, electronics, systems, styling, simulation and so many others, all working as a coördinated team to meet tight deadlines and cost and packaging constraints.
We are now in the intelligent lighting period. Our community’s luminaries are driving evolution and promoting lighting technologies through their active participation in conferences and auto shows all around the world—and at venues not traditionally regarded as vehicle lighting related, such as the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Many new technologies and techniques are still in the pipeline. The car lighting of the 2020s will differ radically from today’s even in the low and middle range cars, with increased safety and always more possibilities for styling differentiation.
This book is our outreach, communicating our love for a discipline which has matured with time into one of the main levers to differentiate not only cars but also brands one from the other. Lights have become prominent billboards to advertise the vehicle’s lineage, family ties, and technology content. There are to be five chapters:
• Why Lighting is so important
• Lighting through Years: a success story
• A bright future and new dream
• Lighting Players
• Driving Forces for the future