We’re proud to announce DVN’s acquisition of a majority stake in the capital of LMI, who have more than 50 years’ combined experience in a relevant range of subjects from R&D and product management to manufacturing processes. With DVN’s formidable in-house lighting expertise, as from the end of this past October we run LMI activity efficiently and effectively to bring high-value service to the entire lighting community.
There’s more to it than that, though; it also involves A2MAC1, who have been serving clients with competitive insights for more than 25 years by deconstructing and analyzing complex product assemblies. In recent years, A2MAC1 have extended their core technical benchmarking service with performance and cost benchmarking data, introducing unique 360° vehicle insights. They’ve been benchmarking vehicle exterior lighting for several years, dismantling and analyzing around 20 headlamps a year, and more recently adding performance insights thanks to goniometry.
A2MAC1 and LMIjoined forces to provide clients with deep, comprehensive insights on lighting technology options and applications. Their combined best-in-class competence gave rise to a new service, Advanced Exterior Lighting Insights, further extending their exterior lighting benchmarking activities and consolidating A2MAC1’s performance, technology, and costing insights. They will benefit from the synergies between A2MAC1 and benchmarking clients, and their deep understanding of the lighting market will further complement A2MAC1’s 360° insight offering.
A2MAC1 have been dismantling 60 headlamps and rear lamps per year, from four regions of the world—America, EMEA, India, China—and LMI have been technically analyzing the lamps along nine axes: optics, electronics, manufacturing, aiming, and so on. So far, 37 headlamps are in the growing database.
A2MAC1’s vehicle selection is done with LMI support, to be sure the most relevant technology will be analyzed. Customers are also interactively involved in the selection process. Below is an example of the Q4 2023 selection. Interest in lighting is obvious: the Fisker lit logo, the Cadillac Lyriq grilleboard and vertical headlamps, the BMW i5 lit grille, the Avatr 11 Hello Display, the Aito M5 headlamp, and more.
Before dismantling, all lighting functions are tested to know all details about welcoming sequence and lamp activations. Videos are done and available on the website.
Then lamps are fully disassembled and all details are provided for each component.
To understand the lamp, an assembly tree is built, step by step, and an exploded view is created of subassemblies and modules.
The database is robust and powerful; users can easily scrutinize whatever they want through filters on the functions they want to know about and compare different lamps. You can, for example, see very easily which lamp has a pixel or matrix solution for ADB. You can very easily compare different set makers’ matrix setups for module size, PCB size, connector, and other parameters.
You can also very quickly find information about new technology like AD-signaling lamp with turquoise LEDs on the Li L9 in China.
A2Mac1 and LMI is also proposing private 1-day workshop to analyse all the lamps. Physical analysis is always good and will never be replaced by virtual analysis
