Automotive exterior lighting systems has to meet several regulatory requirements & manufacture specific internal standards to achieve desired performance. These test specifications are usually generic in nature and formulated mainly to validate the standalone product under standard laboratory conditions. Most of the time these specifications are common for entire vehicle portfolio.
The rationale of these standards is to define the basic illuminance in the safe braking distance. Thus, however, using the requirements in these standards to evaluate the performance of front lighting systems is only qualitative. Research on working out method for quantitative evaluation of front lighting system is necessary [1]
In practice, however, the luminance levels at road surfaces are usually very dynamic; depend largely on the variations in vehicle parameters, ambient weather conditions, road surface uniformities and effects of light intensity & color contrasts on target visibility. Unavailability of such assessment mechanism has motivated the authors to generate test specifications & measurement methodology.
One objective of this work is to bring actual road scenario into laboratory environment to identify and introduce an advanced evaluation approach for photometric performance assessment of lighting system in terms of its intensity, range and reduction in glare under various weather conditions, vehicle design parameters and road conditions.
This subjective evaluation is the judgmental methodology to identify the effect of these variables. Test results were analyzed to understand the acceptable limits of light intensity & color combination to achieve desired performance. The results gives border view to take judgmental decision for optimized performance when the product is in design stage itself, making evaluation process more robust and avoids performance evaluation on physical proto type, which usually requires many iterations, time-consuming and adversely affects project timeline.