Hector Fratty

For several years now, we’ve been reporting on the accelerating decline of NAIAS—and DVN is far from the only publication running headlines like the one on this article. This year the Detroit auto show’s irrelevance seemed absolute, not just relative to other shows and events that have grown more popular as the Detroit show has lost lustre. Consider: a DVN Report coming soon contains nearly 300 pictures from the Los Angeles auto show, while the new and notable exhibits at the much smaller Detroit show can be adequately covered with this article here in the weekly news. Likewise, the Automobili-D sideshow down in the basement of Cobo Hall—the “D” is for “Detroit”—looked and felt like a small-town pie-eating contest versus CES’ world’s fair. This places some participants in something of a difficult position; there are quite a few universities within easy distance of Detroit with highly worthy engineering programmes, no surprise given the longstanding industrial seat, and they really deserve CES-level foot and eye traffic. But they surely didn’t get it. And up on stage, panellists valiantly discussed vehicular autonomy and technology before rows upon nearly-empty rows of seats.

So the Detroit show is clearly ailing. This was the last one to be held in January; it’s being moved to June and reworked as a more immersive experience with test rides and other suchlike. Will that be enough, and in time, to save it? We’ll have to wait and see. Meanwhile, here are some notable things we saw:

DVN walked the Los Angeles Auto Show and CES in Las Vegas, doing what we do best: looking at the lighting and broadly vision-related devices, features, and design aspects on display.

At the LA Auto Show we saw new levels of weight being put by automakers on lighting design as an anchor for brand identity and visual signature, vehicle family cohesion, technological and technical advertisement—and, of course, the improved safety and marketability brought by improved seeing. We saw a seemingly giant increase in the prevalence of LED headlamps, to the extent that they really, practically have to be considered the standard technology. Even if LED headlamp prevalence by the numbers doesn’t add up to a majority share, it’s plain to see that rather than LED being a response to a vehicle-specific need related to marketability, design, packaging, fuel consumption, or whatever other exigency, they are now the go-to technology. As such, they’ve displaced halogen, which now moves to the special-need category with a shorter list: halogen lamps, in general, are specified where there’s a need for utterly minimal cost either on an absolute basis or relative to a higher-content version of a lamp or its vehicle. HID lamps are rapidly disappearing from the new-car fleet—not quite gone,