Advanced Lighting Technology: Vision and Strategy between customer perception, Styling Opportunities and safety features

摘要

Lighting Technology has been influenced in the past years by styling experts. The lighting equipment is more and more a tool to differentiate between brands and types of vehicles, to demonstrate the level of technology of the vehicle and to generate solutions, which are attractive for the consumer. Due to the number of technology improvements we have been confronted with, i.e. projector modules, Xenon, Bi-Xenon, adaptive lights, dynamic bending light, cornering light, motorway beam, LED front and rear light, light pipes etc. we do have generated opportunities to use these features not only for safety improvements at night but also as styling element. The paper shows by means of a few examples how the synergy between technical improvement, styling attractivity and consumer recognition has been successful so far. The question will be raised, what kind of features is a normal driver able to see? What is the target the industry should have? Is it better to go forward with an R&D approach in making the lights more safe independent of the subjective recognition of the driver? Who will pay for it in this case? The paper tries to give some answers to this topic.