Last week was an intensive one in Darmstadt for ISAL ’25, the 16th International Symposium on Automotive Lighting. 670 lighting specialists gathered at the Darmstadt conference centre for 2½ days, mostly from Europe (78 per cent).
55 per cent were from Germany, followed by 10 per cent from Korea, 4 per cent from France, 3.3 per cent from Austria, 2.9 per cent from Japan, and 2.7 per cent from North America.
ISAL has always been a great opportunity to see how our industry is evolving and preview next steps into the future, with numerous lectures from universities and research institutes. Instead of focusing on new hardware innovation, PhD students’ main focus was on intelligent lighting, how to solve challenges with usage of computing and artificial intelligence, how to develop faster, how to reduce cost, and how to cut CO2 emissions. V2x communication with exterior display was on stage during three dedicated sessions in the main hall. The glare discussion was also on main stage during two super interesting sessions. In parallel, two dedicated sessions were focused on Sustainability and Interior Lighting.
My feeling after a lot of discussion with participants is that we are in a super-fast evolving world. LED technology is now mature, but with the tsunami of AI, LLMs, and GPU computing performance, we are now at a revolution of our way of working with totally new things that are just arriving. It will not take decades but only months to be in our daily life. This is what we see most of all in the presented PhD works.
We need to be awake; we need to take up the challenges from all the young engineers that are joining our vehicle lighting community. It was great to see so many students and new faces at ISAL. This is our future!
Sincerely yours
