Industry—particularly the lighting industry—is hungry for new talent. Likely more than 100,000 managers and engineers work in the vehicle lighting industry at car makers and suppliers; every year, around 10,000 are recruited. That’s the primary main reason why universities are crucial; they are talent pools (or gardens where talent is grown).
Universities are also important for the lighting industry as their cooperation accelerates fundamental research, as well as research to demonstrate the safety benefit of new technologies—a necessary step before new kinds of lighting is allowed by regulations. This cooperation is not always simple, sometimes, industry wants to have its own pace or to do research in secret. Certainly, industry needs to be more patient, and universities needs to move forward much more quickly to meet the demand from industry.
But this cooperation is beneficial for both parties: industry obtains objective results, independent from company strategies or marketing opinions. That’s particularly useful to persuade regulatory authorities. And universities get to be front-and-centre for serial applications and advanced developments. Further improvements can be made by more orders from organisations like GRE and GTB and joint programs founded by governments; by more joint workshops; joint projects; concrete enquiries for industry on research topics, and by supporting the university networks.
To build this report, we interviewed professors from Fudan University in China; Osaka University in Japan; ICAT in India; TU Darmstadt, KIT, THM, TU Berlin, and L-Lab in Germany, ESTACA in France and Mount Sinai in USA. You’ll find these complete interviews in the annex of this report.
We had the confirmation that these universities are well aware about the current challenges of the automotive industry and particularly the lighting industry.
A widely-shared opinion is that the current priorities to improve safety with lighting are improvements in adverse weather conditions and in urban environments crowded with pedestrians and bicyclists. In parallel, vehicle lighting is becoming more and more adaptive. Headlamps can now adapt optimally to their surroundings, and they’re acquiring more functionalities. But surely not everything we can do from a technical point of view is necessarily reasonable or desirable from a physiological point of view, and more lighting is not necessarily better. There is also a trend with the emotional aspect of lighting in vehicles being the most attractive, lighting being more and more interdisciplinary, establishing a kind of bridge to other disciplines.
We can ourselves conclude that the cooperation between universities and lighting has been productive in the past, particularly to build the bases of regulations. This cooperation certainly considered by everybody as necessary is, however, perhaps more fragile today. Shared efforts are needed to keep it going and growing.