Hector Fratty

Christian Amann is managing BMW’s Light and Visibility department. He’s responsible for all exterior lighting functions as well as wiper systems, windscreens, and washing systems. He studied aeronautics in Stuttgart and soon encountered Finite Element Simulation. After doing research work for the Ariane 5 spacecraft, he joined a small startup company named PARS. This was the first time he came into contact with the car crash community. He was doing crash tests and airbag simulations for nearly all German OEMs and specialized in side impact tests. Then Christian was responsible for the simulation team.

Two years later, he switched to BMW, doing side impact tests and development for 7 series, Range Rover, Rolls Royce and some conceptional and innovation projects. After that he built up a team for interior simulation and soon later got the responsibility to manage the department for interior testing and simulation, including seating comfort and acoustics. A change in the team structure brought him to quality and serial current development, the department he was head of for 4 years until he switched to Lighting and Visibility.

Here Amman shares his perspectives with DrivingVisionNews:
DVN: How are BMW organised in lighting, have there been changes since you arrived?
Christian Amann: Simple to say we are responsible for all lighting products in all car programs, currently around 70. We do all the definition for electronic control, as well as dynamical behaviour, whereas the development of ECU’s is done in two other departments. We centralised light testing with other validation topics to a new neighbor department this year in April. We did this to improve efficiency benefits using concentrated testing equipment and competence.

DVN: After one year, what are your thoughts on today’s lighting technologies and the players involved?
C.A.: Lighting seems to me as a business of its own. Similar to car crash community, it is a small group of experts spread all over the world and knowing each other. Similarly there is a complexity related to legal requirements, which requires a lot of efforts during the different development phases. Development looks to me as a compromise between styling work, which sometimes is really an artistic work and optical development that aims at fulfilling the regulatory requirements. The suppliers I got to know so far can be divided into a group of big players, all of them very competent in their fields and a bigger community of small companies doing small lamps and reflectors of any kind, some of them raising up to do bigger business in the future.