Hector Fratty

Prof. Khanh, Darmstadt, 28 th February 2014

Last month’s DVN Workshop was organised to look at what strategies we have for automotive lighting in the 2020-25 timeframe. Participants were managers and leading engineers of automakers, T1 & T2 suppliers, research institutes, technical standards boards, and regulatory agencies.

The world of tomorrow will bring many changes. We shall have:

a) Social changes with demographic development, urbanisation, and development in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. We shall have more than 70% of people living in cities and mega-cities; the conception of car lighting systems optimal for use in the city (without high beam) has to be worked out. The average driver of some car types like Audi, BMW, Mercedes and Opel is at least 55 years old, so human vision behaviour and lighting needs have to be taken into account.

b) Technological changes: the car of tomorrow is a product of smart systems with central or/and decentralised microcontrollers and signal processing units with sensor systems characterising online in real-time the driving behaviour and status information of the car and of the drivers (activity of the driver, age of the driver), the traffic structure (traffic density, road topology, relative position of the cars real on the road, geographical position, weather) and allow communication among cars, between cars and motorcycles and pedestrians, between the car and the future regional and central safety road supervision offices, between the car and street lighting equipped of course with LED light sources…