I have half a century’s experience in vehicle lighting, and as the years stack up, I am more and more convinced by the message of Dr. Peter Bodrogi—Senior Research Fellow at the Laboratory of Lighting Technology at TU-Darmstadt—who said in his keynote at the 2018 Tokyo DVN Workshop: “The current regulatory requirements are written for young to middle-aged observers, but elderly people need more light and less glare”.
That’s why I proposed to Geoff Draper, himself also a senior expert in vehicle lighting, to make a report on ageing drivers and how best to help them drive safely and comfortably after dark. What I retain from Draper’s great work is that we in the lighting world have a unique opportunity and solution to step up and give senior drivers exactly what Dr. Bodrogi called for: more seeing light and less glare. ADB is an exact match for the prescription; it resolves the 100-year-old conflict between seeing and glare by increasing visibility while also decreasing glare to other road users (and of course, every driver is an “other road user” to everyone else). There’s a sturdy argument to be made that ADB ought to be mandated, or—perhaps more quickly possible—included in NCAP ratings to encourage uptake.
It is (past) time to focus innovative and regulatory effort on the needs of older drivers as there are more and more of them. The way to do that is with the wide proliferation of ADB, just like high/low beam headlamps were rapidly adopted for their giant safety and comfort improvement over the previous single-beam headlamps over a hundred years ago.
We have the responsibility to do this, now let’s work on it!
Sincerely yours
