After an impressive DVN event in Munich in February, we are continuing to cover the vehicular lighting landscape with visits to OEMs, tier-1s, and tier-2s – I was in Beijing, Tianjin, Baoding, and Aachen last week alone! We’re keeping track of regulatory developments, too; Wolfgang Huhn was at GRE two weeks ago, and Mark Verplank was at the SAE Lighting Systems Group meetings in Florida last week. It’s a complex environment we’re all living and working in. Geopolitical complexity, market stagnation (or even reduction, in China) and increasingly tough competition makes it utterly crucial for me (you too?) to keep the connection with our members and to keep the lighting community discussion going.
We are actively preparing our next lighting events this year in the USA, China, and India for a great atmosphere, diverse exhibition, and informative conference – mixing innovation, design, technology, and regulation under the same roof. Each of these events will gather more than 400 people, with intense interest from design studios. Here I’ve tried to represent my quick-snapshot vision of those countries’ exterior lighting markets in three pictures each – a glimpse of how I see the market in these countries. Quite interesting to see how design signature, welcome and personalisation, highly visible technology, importance of CMF in lamp design, autonomous driving, V2X, and safety can be implemented in diverse ways.
In October we will return to India, this time near Delhi. To understand the Indian market, I talked and listened with Maruti’s Senior Executive Officer and head of R&D Tarun Aggarwal. We discussed the automotive market and especially the lighting market; Maruti launched last year their new E-Vitara with the first Indian local ADB. Take a look at the interview in today’s DVNewsletter to learn about the importance of LED lamps, safety, and glare reduction in India.
In September, we will return to Shanghai for our annual event, also comprising our DVN Interior community. China is putting a lot of effort into interior design, and lighting innovation is a key support pillar.
InJune (next month!), we head for Detroit. The docket is now final (here), with two full days of events including a deep dive session focusing on SDV the afternoon before the official start of the event, followed by our DVN member barbecue like last year. Find the docket and register online for this SDV session and for the barbecue.
We will also start our mailing from Wednesday 13 May for the event registration.
To give a short taste of US, we bring you this week in the newsletter an extract of a LinkedIn post from Dustin Hostetler, Strategic Design Communications at Ford, about the Ford lighting team. We will have the chance to have Scott Anderson, Senior Director of Ford Design’s XLAB, as keynote speaker for the Detroit event, to talk about future innovations and inspiration, with most of the team joining us.
Last but not least, we are preparing a special local event in Gothenburg, my second-home country, for the end of November. We got feedback from the lighting and design community in Sweden, who are supporting this initiative. We will share more information soon; in the meantime, you can always contact me.
Regards
