The DVN Delhi Workshop was held on 9-10 February at the wonderful Crowne Plaza Greater Noida Hotel. The event got started with the DVN welcome dinner, which gathered all 200 attendees from 50 companies for a warmhearted special evening.
The next morning, the Workshop itself got started; the theme was:
«Affordable Technologies and Energy Saving» and 20 lectures were presented.
After DVN Editor-in-Chief Hector Fratty’s introductory speech on the status and the future of lighting, Robert Miller gave a keynote focused on styling, entitled “Lighting Design with the Car in Mind”. The first two presentation sessions contained lectures on affordable front and rear lamps for emerging markets. There were interesting talks from Valeo, Hella, Minda, and IJL on affordable products and from Renault about the challenges to develop a worldwide car with such a range of different regulations, environments, and market preferences. Lumax-Stanley presented a new Bifunction LED with great improvements in weight, volume, and performance. Noted vehicle lighting film producer Rainer Neuman gave a charismatic presentation on advanced lighting technologies.
The third session centred on light sources—LEDs, of course, but also halogen for motorcycles (which make up a huge proportion of the Indian vehicle market) with the new H17 and for cars with new H18 and H19. The fourth session was devoted to Tier 2 presentations by Mentor, LMT, Docter Optics, and Snopsys—all of whom gave interesting information on affordable products. As is now de rigueur for a DVN Workshop, a panel discussion about regulations was chaired by GTB President Geoff Draper. This time, the rubric was “The Implications of a new approach to the UN Regulations for Indian Stakeholders”, with participation of all organisations and companies involved in regulations in India. The subject of harmonisation and synchronisation was particularly relevant because although India is not a contracting party to the UN 1958 Agreement, Indian experts are regular contributors to the work of GRE and the country broadly follows the UN technical requirements. This workshop was an opportunity to gather an understanding the Indian perspective on regulation of automotive lights, lamps, and signals. Opportunity was taken to understand whether the stakeholders of India would be interested in a GTB initiative to lead a new global approach to the technical requirements, in close coöperation with the UN World Forum for Harmonisation of Vehicle Regulations (WP29).
15 lighting companies exhibited their products and services with a grand collection of display booths—presented in this report.