While Paul-Henri and the DVN Chinese team were busy in Shanghai last week, I was busy over here in North America.
It’s a monumental moment for technology-based vehicle safety on the North American regulatory island. That’s because NHTSA has just completed a piece of work they started some years ago: upgrading the US NCAP protocol to look at more kinds of ADAS, to add America’s first-ever effort at encouraging less pedestrian-hostile vehicle design, and to plot out a pathway for potential future NCAP upgrades.
This all makes good sense, and is a very fine development in context of the wrong-way trend of increasing pedestrian deaths near American roadways in recent years. For those of us who take a professional interest in the constellation of issues and aspects centred round crash-avoidance, it might seem puzzling that NHTSA chose to exert this effort through NCAP, rather than by promulgating regulations. But there are solidly valid reasons why NHTSA’s choice might have been the smarter one.
As originally proposed, the NCAP upgrade was to have awarded points for high-performance, low-glare low beam headlamps, and for better (amber rather than red) rear turn signals. None of the lighting provisions made it into the final upgrade, though. In your DVNewsletter this week, we look at the evolution of this particular NCAP upgrade, and we review our reporting along its timeline.
We also bring you a show-and-tell report on my DVN field trip to the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Portland, Oregon, where some really cool research happens. They’re looking at glare, flicker, colour rendering, and a whole constellation of lighting-related phenomena.
We also bring you a short summary of last week’s DVN event in China; the detailed report will come next week—your DVN team is hard at work to bring you important news from all around the world!
Through the night brightly,
