Lighting

Extract from LEDs Magazine

Paul-Henri Matha is a French engineer educated at École des Mines. He has been working at Renault for 17 years, with 15 years’ experience in the lighting department and he is the chief lighting expert at Renault.
He spoke with LEDs Magazine about his recent activities:
“Automotive headlight design is an important part of the Renault brand these days, and our C-shape LED-based headlights are a signature part of the appeal of our cars. About 30% of the cost of automotive headlight assemblies can be found in the mechanics and 70% in the electronics. Hence, any savings that can be made on the electronics side will have a profound influence on the overall cost of these units. This article outlines how we have broken down our headlamp costs and used thermal analysis tools to incrementally optimise headlight design, achieving a 50% cost reduction in the two years from 2014-2016, and how we intend to halve it again in the next few years while relying on solid-state lighting (SSL) technology.

“In Generation 1 of our full-LED headlight assemblies, we looked at six of our C- and D-segment vehicles from the Espace to the Koleos. We first standardised all platforms to one common height sensor, one common static leveller, one common DRL/low beam/high beam driver, one common central connector, and common low- and high-beam modules with two suppliers for each. We did this in one year by examining the partition of costs and standardised about 60% of the components of our headlights.