ISAL: The Main Takeaways
This year’s International Symposium on Automotive Lighting was, once again, highly fruitful for the lighting community. Watch for our DVN Report on the event, with detailed coverage. Meanwhile, here’s a summary of the main messages we retain a week after the event.
Innovation more Focused on Functions, less on Technology
Several lighting innovations were described, and they leaned heavily toward new functions—road projections, for example, implemented so as to attract attention without distraction. But few innovations were showcased in technologies other than light sources.
Headlight Safety Performance Ratings
The need for a unified, veritable headlamp safety performance rating is becoming urgent to avoid unworkably confusing proliferation of ratings in the market and to be able to assess all functions—especially ADB. Work ongoing under GTB auspices were presented, and we will soon have a method to objectively quantify lighting system performance. Audi presented interesting sample data generated by assessing their various headlighting systems according to the HSPR.
A reliable, uniform rating system is absolutely necessary to improve lighting performance for the engineers working in the field, as well as for external and internal communication. It will be a great tool to avoid degradation of lighting and recognition of experts. It is, in fact, one of the key themes of the DVN Study published last October.
Lighting as Part of New System Architecture
Lighting is increasingly integral to a global system, for example with the integration in a new type of front fascia including illuminated grille and logo, also equipped with sensors (radar, lidar, camera…). Lighting engineering decisions now have to be considered with a system-based approach, not just in terms of discrete components. Integration is accelerating, too; evolving from distributed architecture, then domain centralised, before going massively to vehicle-centralised architecture.
Design
The styling trend carries on marching toward slimmer and slimmer lights; 10-15 mm height is becoming a standard target. Innovations in LEDs and related optical systems allow thin, efficient headlamps.
Sustainability
Sustainability is becoming more and more important. There’s heavily increased focus on energy savings and weight reduction; material recyclability; repairability; modularisation, and new materials. The improvements for energy efficiency are not only done through the traditional improvement of LED sources, but also with more efficient optical solutions for lamps all over the vehicle. Smart systems are now necessary to adapt lighting to dynamic ambient situations. Yet at the same time, we’re still presenting new systems using 50W-100W to make one function on each side of the vehicle—that’s the same as in the days of halogen!
Simulations
Virtual reality is improving rapidly, with more calculation power getting us closer to true-to-life simulation. We’re still not quite there yet, but simulation is increasingly relevant and useful to optimise light distribution and numerous other parameters.
Some interesting lectures
- Wolfgang Huhn presented a grand keynote with his forecasts and predictions for the future of vehicle lighting.
- Nice pictures from Stephan Berlitz on digital light and communication
- Technical presentation of Michael Kleinkes on µLED ADB module