Two great events heve been held in the very fine October weather in Paris: the Mondial motorshow and the VISION congress. For me, highlights of VISION included:
- Top-class lectures, including the last one from Paul-Henri Matha in a Renault capacity; now he will join Volvo and we wish him great success there. We regret missing a planned lecture by Rainer Neumann with his cinematic photons; we wish him a quick recuperation.
- Wonderful expo booths of big, small, and startup companies in optics, electronics, and simulations.
- Night demo drives with 25 cars showing the latest technologies. The voyage from Cité des Sciences to the Mortefontaine track is long, and participants arrived back at their hotel late at night, but the feedback I received was enthusiastically positive.
- The great involvement and interest of the 600 attendees visiting the exhibition booths and freely asking questions—the most I’ve seen at a lighting congress, proving the strengths of the lighting community.
- The panel discussion with great minds in lighting and ADAS. What a great moment, with passionate discussion about ways of combining lighting and ADAS. The main conclusion: lighting needs ADAS to lead the intelligent lighting, and ADAS needs lighting to aid visibility of sensors and integrate cameras and lidars inside the headlamp. I thank again all the people who helped to make such a grand success of this event.
About this year’s Mondial, I am less enthusiastic. There were a few interesting cars—Peugeot’s ELegend concept, Audi’s e-Tron, the BMW X5 and 3 Series, the Mercedes GLE, the DS3 Crossback—but no messaging on lighting, despite strong levers begging to be pulled (ADB, anyone?).
Meanwhile, there’s big news from America, where an important step has been taken toward allowing ADB. Read a first report about that in this week’s news. And Gold members, download your copy of the Varroc Lighting profile! It’s loaded with information about this dynamic and interesting company. There’s a preview for you to read, here in the newsletter.
Sincerely yours
DVN President