Future Requirements of Automotive Front Lighting

Adaptive driving beam (ADB), which was first homologated in the ECE world (ECE 123) in 2012 has changed the automotive Front Lighting philosophy completely. Whereas we currently live with separate low beam and high beam features, also used in a combined way, we will have in the future a camera driven light distribution, which is a kind of modified high beam light pattern. ADB is a camera based lighting system, which enables the driver to achieve at night nearly high beam visibility without glaring oncoming or proceeding vehicles and road users. Once the presence of other vehicles is detected the headlamps change the light pattern and block the light where the oncoming or proceeding vehicles are located. The typical low beam light distribution with given and specified cutoff line will only be used in small speed areas. In US this development was well recognized and NHTSA is preparing a way to enable and approve the ADB systems with specific boundary conditions also for the US market. Several surveys have proven in between that the use of ADB is contributing to safety in night time driving. Therefore the suitable application of ADB in US is a target of NHTSA with a specific modification of the standard FMVSS108. A task force group (J3069) was introduced to define these boundary conditions. The paper will give an outlook of the potential applications in the future, both in the ECE world as well as in US . Although we do see first production of ADB headlamps in ECE, both with HID and LED light source, the concept of front lighting distribution is not yet using the full advantage of the existing opportunities. Some proposals for future concepts will be given.