DVN walked the Los Angeles Auto Show and CES in Las Vegas, doing what we do best: looking at the lighting and broadly vision-related devices, features, and design aspects on display.
At the LA Auto Show we saw new levels of weight being put by automakers on lighting design as an anchor for brand identity and visual signature, vehicle family cohesion, technological and technical advertisement—and, of course, the improved safety and marketability brought by improved seeing. We saw a seemingly giant increase in the prevalence of LED headlamps, to the extent that they really, practically have to be considered the standard technology. Even if LED headlamp prevalence by the numbers doesn’t add up to a majority share, it’s plain to see that rather than LED being a response to a vehicle-specific need related to marketability, design, packaging, fuel consumption, or whatever other exigency, they are now the go-to technology. As such, they’ve displaced halogen, which now moves to the special-need category with a shorter list: halogen lamps, in general, are specified where there’s a need for utterly minimal cost either on an absolute basis or relative to a higher-content version of a lamp or its vehicle. HID lamps are rapidly disappearing from the new-car fleet—not quite gone,