Last month, just after the Lidar event in Wiesbaden, Frank Langkabel and Rouven Haberkorn invited me to drive the Lotus Eletre at night. Of course I couldn’t refuse; it is not every day one gets to drive 900-horsepower car!
During the San Francisco DVN Triple Workshop, we had an overview of the Eletre’s lighting perfomance in Haberkorn’s presentation. It’s a featureful system: AFS Classes C, V (town light), and E (motorway); static and dynamic bending light, and ADB. It is also a very performant system on paper, with a high beam Imax of 125 kcd—far above the 56-kcd values with a halogen bulb—and a 500-metre range.
The Hella headlamp has a 2-row pixel setup, with 12 pixels for the low-beam hot spot/kink and 12 pixels for ADB. There are three modules with 3 cm height, providing 2,000 lumens on the road per headlamp in high beam mode. The illuminated field is ±19°H × +6.5°V.
Driving the car at night feels really safe; those fancy headlamps are doing the job. Even at high speeds on the unlimited Autobahn, you see far ahead thanks to the 500-metre range you get from the additional high beam module. Definitely what is needed to match those 900 horses!
ADB is really smooth and you can drive with really good visibility on curvy roads. This is not HD technology—no DLP, no microLED—but the 12-segment matrix has really good performance. The glare-free zone is inherently a bit larger than with HD, but not annoyingly so, thanks to advanced and finely-tuned software.
Enough subjective description with words; take a look at a 2-minute video, which shows you some of what I saw. And as a bonus, you get to see the welcome and goodbye sequence!
I encourage everyone in the lighting community, including R&D engineers from automakers and suppliers; designers, specifiers, and purchasers to do night drive tests every chance you get. I know it is not easy when you have a family, in summertime (especially at northern latitudes with very late darkfall), or when you live in a big city with a lot of street light. We always have a lot of excuses to say “maybe next time”, but really, the night drive is the pure expression of the sense and the purpose of our job.
Sincerely yours,
