High beam seeing with low beam glare:
– Every lighting engineer and regulator, every traffic safety researcher, they’ve all dreamt of it for decades, and now it’s here with ADB.
– Every driver needs it—without knowing it. Right now, buyers and drivers don’t really know about the technology, and so they can’t even imagine that such a clever, useful technology exists.
– It’s a simple, catchy message, easy and intuitive for anyone to grasp. But it hasn’t yet been effectively put across to the people who need to hear it.
VIPs from automotive companies frequently ask me what I think they should do to increase their business. I tell them to pull the lever that is ADB, the uniquely great breakthrough in vehicle lighting considering safety.
To succeed with ADB and strongly increase business, two actions have to be launched.
The first is to advertise ADB directly to the buying and driving public through all sorts of media—magazines, newspapers, TV, social networks, ride-and-drive demonstrations…the works. Automotive companies of every kind involved in the ADB value chain need to loudly welcome journalists and drivers to experience ADB live on real roads at night. Me, even after I have done probably more than a thousand night drives in my life, when I make night drives with a performant ADB system I am still amazed by the increase in safety and comfort compared to even the best static headlamps.
This week’s in-depth contains some nifty old examples of how new lighting technology was advertised to driving enthusiasts in the past: through articles in motoring magazines, describing how new lights were being engineered and produced, better than the ones they were driving with. Now we have so many more tools and can reach so many more market segments: not just the driving enthusiast, but also the safety-minded parents, the frequent commuter, the outdoors hobbyist. We have to make a big push directly to all of these people, showing and telling how ADB makes night driving safer, easier, and more comfortable. And not just in places where ADB is already available; probably one of the best ways to turn up the heat in America is to go directly to car buyers and tell them the truth: ADB means high beam seeing with low beam glare, and it’s a “today” technology, but NHTSA won’t let you have it.
The second action is to convince the regulation authorities themselves on the great safety benefit of ADB and to launch field studies to quantify the improved seeing distance, decreased glare, reduced frequency and severity of crashes and their consequent deaths, injuries, and property damage. We have now enough cars equipped with ADB—more than were equipped with HID headlamps when BaST demonstrated that technology’s safety benefits. We’ve put parts of that study in this week’s in-depth, too, to give a sort of demonstration of the kind of data we need to collect and scrutinise with ADB.
In sum: after the hard technical and technological work, now we must do the most important part: convince drivers and buyers that ADB should be on their next car, and regulators that ADB should be on every new vehicle on the road!
Sincerely yours