After last week’s report on my visit to the Renault Technocentre, this week we bring you an interview with Jean-Philippe Benoist, Renault’s lighting boss. Following on the tenure of Matthieu Lips, Benoist is changing Renault’s corporate mindset about lighting, with a strategy based on innovation and styling differentiation. The most interesting point in the interview is Renault’s interest in matrix beam. From Benoist’s perspective there are two primary main benefits: a new function very valuable for the customer from the safety performance standpoint, and a styling differentiation with the multiple-compartment lamps very different to what came before. There’s also discussion of important points on the logistics and hazards involved with deploying ADB. Done wrong, it creates customer dissatisfaction that could kill the technology and degrade the image of the carmaker.
I think year upon year, we will see more and more vehicles equipped with ADB combining the evolutionary progress of this technology with better lighting performance. We’ll see higher resolution, smoother light pattern changes, and reduced latency (reaction time) to avoid glare. We are arriving at the top of what a driver wants to see at night. What amazing progress in just one decade! And it is still evolving; BMW’s Christian Amann likened it to progressive computer OS updates, referring to “the next versions of ADB like we have the Windows 8, 9, 10…”.
In the coming months, we’ll be presenting papers on lighting achievements by BMW, Jaguar, and ZKW. Meanwhile, don’t forget the two important events in October in Paris: the Mondial Auto-show and the VISION congress which will be held at the famous Cité des Sciences and at Mortefontaine for the night drives.
Sincerely yours
DVN Editor in Chief