Just ten short years ago, lighting suppliers were still making all the innovations and proposing them to automakers. That’s how it worked with complex-shape/free-form reflectors, window-clear lenses, projector optics, HID and LED light sources, and AFS, among others. Now that’s no longer necessarily the way things flow; innovations are arriving from lighting suppliers and a wide array of automakers alike. Take the example of ADB, the most important innovation since the electric headlamp. It was extremely difficult to develop this technology without automakers’ early buy-in and participation because this innovation needs a lot of components and sensors, and configuration is widely variable depending of the marketing and the styling strategy of the brand. Now automakers can choose to offer a giant menu of lighting technology: LCD, DMD, laser scanning, µAFS, and many more.
Which are the best? Automakers have to make these decisions, brand by brand and model by model. So automakers must now carry lighting expertise. Dr. Wolfgang Huhn opened the path with more than 20 years experience in the lighting field and so it is not surprising that a big part of the innovations came from Audi.
Now most automakers have their senior experts, special experts, and expert managers—such as Uwe Kostanzer, Ingolf Schneider, Shammika Wickramasinghe, and Michael Larsen. Paul-Henri Matha and Whilk Gonçalves, all with years of experience in lighting.
Larsen steered the rapid and careful development of the SAE technical standard for ADB. Matha, Renault’s expert, explained at a DVN Workshop the great job to standardise Renault’s lighting modules, decreasing the price and increasing the lighting performance. And Gonçalves, after 13 years at Valeo and seven at PSA, is newly named as PSA’s expert.
This week we bring you in-depth coverage and an interview describing Gonçalves’ achievements.
Shifting gears: today we release a DVN Report presenting four engineering consultancies with the skills, talents, and the capacities to take on lighting design and development work from automakers and tier-1 suppliers.
Each firm is introduced and profiled with regard to their expertise and newest achievements.
Download your copy today!
Sincerely yours
DVN President