I had the opportunity to visit Audi last week and try a night drive with the A7 and the A8.
Neither car has much really newly innovative lighting functions or hardware, but I was impressed by the lighting performances, styling, and new animation.
- In terms of lighting performance: progress is relentless! The Mercedes E-Class was the reference standard, but now the new Audis have overtaken it.
- In styling the Audis bring innovative appearances: contour of the DRL, blue colour to draw attention to laser light, and it’s canny styling that lets Audi totally differentiate the A7 from the A8 visually despite most of the lighting modules being the same.
- And about animation: this is the new trend of the lighting features. The lighting is now dancing to welcome the driver or to send them off. It is the new innovating step.
But while it’s premium brands that first bring most of these innovations, the generalist brands follow quickly. The European Seat Leon and American Toyota Corolla followed the LED introduction, Opel Astra followed the ADB introduction and now, Renault use LED technology in all their models after strong development to decrease the price. Paul-Henri Matha made an interesting lecture about it at the last DVN US Workshop. A piece in LEDs Magazine. I want to present it here for two reasons:
- a few years after the first introduction LED in the Lexus at a very high price, we have now a generalist brand using full LED in all their models.
- Vehicle lighting is losing its backwater-niche status and becoming a big, widely-discussed part of lighting and we can read now many papers concerning vehicle lighting on magazines that usually never discuss car lights. Interesting times!
Sincerely yours
DVN President