How Headlights Became So High-Tech

cars today are stuffed with safety technology and among the most important pieces are the headlights you know a lot of people forget that your headlights are a safety feature um and unfortunately about half of the fatalities on u.s roads occur at night or in low light scenarios where better headlights could be effective headlights today are undergoing some of the biggest technological changes seen in the history of the automobile and at least in the united states regulators are trying to catch up the goal with headlights has always been to illuminate as much of the road as possible automakers have worked toward this goal by improving the bulbs used and by building features into them such as the ability to swivel headlights back and forth to follow the turns of the steering but innovations have also created other challenges one persistent problem is headlight glare when a headlight is shining in the eyes of an oncoming driver or pedestrian it is irritating and sometimes dangerous now there are headlight arrays that can selectively dim individual lights to reduce glare and offer excellent visibility there are some systems with such high resolution they can display images and animations these can make driving safer and perhaps more enjoyable for everyone on the road but they are unlike anything the automotive industry has seen before that presents its own challenge [Music] in the earliest days of the automotive industry headlights were not a top priority for drivers or car makers in the early days and we'll say the 1890s right into the turn of the 20th century there wasn't a whole lot of call for for headlamps because most folks wouldn't bother driving at night simply because the roads of course were so poor largely non-existent and uh the cars were frankly rather poor or unreliable and you don't want to risk that at nighttime having to stop on the side of the road and change a tire or make some other kind of repair it just wasn't worth the bother early headlights were fuel burning and very simple if you did want to venture out at night your option was pretty much limited to a kerosene lamp or a whale oil lamp you know the technology that we've been using for for more than a century prior to that and you could buy those and in some cases you'd just buy a lamp that you'd use in your home or something and create some kind of a bracket you could mount onto the car in other cases there were lamps a little more thoughtfully designed for automobile use but that was about it until about 1905 1906 when uh the first great advancement is the uh acetylene gas lamp that you could put on your car the acetylene lamp was a big investment but had a very unique way of working so you've got a tank now on the side of the car that operates with little tablets of calcium chloride that you put in there then there's water in a pan on top that drips onto the calcium carbide and that's what creates that acetylene gas which causes the flame to burn the trouble was that the calcium chloride tablets and the water needed to be replaced and the water could freeze in cold weather the flame also wasn't very consistent or stable and in a lot of cases it was just a flame inside a glass case with a mirror behind it there wasn't much in the way of focus and amplification the first electric headlight was introduced near the turn of the 20th century by the electric vehicle company cadillac brought out the first full electric headlight system in 1912 which it piggybacked on the electric starter system at least that year and now since you've got to have that electrical apparatus the batteries and so forth to run the starter it's not that big a deal just to add an electric headlamp system once headlights went electric car makers began working on ways to amplify the light by the mid 19 teens there's this realization that maybe we don't have to just depend on a mirror in the back to to amplify the light from the headlight let's use special optics on the headlight lenses themselves and i'm always a little surprised that this didn't appear sooner because you know we've been using that kind of technology lighthouses for example where the whole idea is to take a beam intensified and direct it but this for all the good it did gave the world its first instance of a problem that drivers have complained of ever since people started complaining about the glare from these bright headlights and now that they were too much so it sounds familiar to today doesn't it to address this problem the first system incorporating both low beams and high beams came out in 1924 originally high beam headlights were supposed to be the default mode for a headlight low beams were intended to be used only when encountering other drivers or pedestrians but somehow over time drivers began driving more with low beams on perhaps in part to avoid offending other drivers and it seemed to be ever more necessary to do so as headlights became more powerful as early as the 1950s and 60s automakers began installing early versions of what are now called automatic high beams which automatically switch back and forth between high beams and low for a long time they didn't work that well but that changed in recent years with improved cameras sensors and image recognition software they can be useful and convenient for drivers but over time changes to headlight bulbs have still caused problems with glare that even automatic high beam systems haven't fixed the 1930s brought sealed beam headlights the form of headlights that dominated for decades these were basically large 7-inch glass bulbs the entire headlight was the bulb over time the design changed and headlights moved more toward a design where smaller bulbs were housed inside a larger fixture replaceable halogen bulb headlights were allowed in the us in the 1980s whereas sealed beam headlights were just a piece of filament inside of vacuum halogen bulbs had a bit of gas in the bowl that helped the tungsten filament burn a bit brighter what that gave the the auto manufacturers was an ability to style a headlight they didn't have to work a body around just round or rectangular they could now make shapes and it looked a little cooler all the consumer did was re exchange them both that is still predominantly what's out there halogen replaceable bulb technology around the turn of the millennium car makers began rolling out xenon bulbs often called high intensity discharge lights high intensity discharge headlights have no filament instead an electrical current passes through the xenon gas which amplifies the light xenon bulbs were known for having a lower operating temperature and a longer life span than halogens they also glowed much wider even a bit more blue than halogen bulbs and that made them seem to light things up better in our eyes we have these receptors called rods and cones usually you think of rods as the nighttime ones and cones as the daytime ones actually at night we're using both rods and cones but rods are more sensitive to the bluer parts of the spectrum so so actually that blue more bluish light can be a little bit more beneficial for peripheral vision although it doesn't seem to make as much of a difference for seeing things in your central field of view so straight down the road uh a lumen is illumina a candela is a candela it doesn't matter whether it's warm white or cool white but even even though your visibility is no different in the center of the road it still looks brighter they were also very powerful and allowed manufacturers to throw a much wider beam in front of a car than a halogen bulb would be able to throw which meant drivers would be able to see the sides of the road and would be able to see a bit better when making turns or driving on a curvy road the trouble was that headlights are often pretty poorly aimed when they are installed in cars we found that about two-thirds of all cars that we measured had at least one headlight that was more than a degree misaim of course halogen bulbs can be misaimed too and often are but the narrower beam they give off was less noticeable for drivers the cooler white light xenon bulbs gave off also seemed to be more irritating to the eyes than the warmer light halogens gave off finally these lights were taking off as sport utility vehicles were becoming more popular among drivers so headlights were typically higher off the ground than they would be on a sedan or a coupe so all those things kind of happened simultaneously that that sort of created this mix of you know perfect storm of factors that were made it more likely for people to experience headlight glare a lot more frequently the department of transportation received thousands of complaints about these headlights nitsa has a for for everything uh vehicle safety related they have a public comment uh mechanism so people who you know spend time driving cars and trucks can can write to the government and say look here's an issue i've experienced they get enough of these then they'll start to investigate and see what the problems are um and in the days just as you know email and the internet was becoming popular right around the turn of the turn of the millennium um was was a time when you know that started to happen too so people were you know spreading the word that you know oh there's something really awful about these blue headlights we should write to the government here's the email address to send it to and so they normally would get on a very hot topic uh like car seats or other other things with tires for example you know a couple hundred comments from various members of the public and consider that a big deal for headlight glare they received over eventually over 5000 comments much of the rest of the world started using technology that automatically leveled the headlights and even wipers to keep the lens clean the beams straight but these things were not required in the u.s so they were usually not included the life of xenon lights was relatively short-lived due in large part to a lot of the problems they posed they were rather quickly replaced by light emitting diodes or leds the leds have kind of leapfrogged over that high intensity discharge we rarely see a high intensity discharge on a new car i don't think we've tested them in the past year and a half two years leds have opened up some new possibilities for improved safety and visibility both in terms of the level of light and the direction in which it is pointed part of what made high-intensity discharge lights so attractive is that they could help drivers see such a wide view of the road this brought benefits such as seeing better when driving around curves letting a driver see around curves is another challenge automakers were trying to tackle long before xenon bulbs had come around many vehicles have been made with headlights that can swivel to follow the turns of the steering wheel often called adaptive headlights they have been around in some form for several decades an early example of an adaptive headlight was found on the tucker 48 also known as the tucker torpedo invented in the late 1940s by preston tucker a former policeman the pucker 48 was a remarkably innovative and futuristic vehicle that never made it to mass production among its quirks was a third centered headlight that could swivel with the steering wheel the swiveling action allowed the car to skirt a federal rule limiting the number of headlights to two the third light only activated after the steering wheel had been turned a certain number of degrees many of these adaptive headlights are actually on swivels and the trouble with moving parts is that they tend to break more easily a new class of headlights made up of leds seems to be able to solve this problem while also dramatically reducing headlight glare these new headlight arrays are called adaptive driving beam headlights adaptive driving beam headlight systems typically make use of strings or clusters of leds attached to a controller the idea is that leds in these bunches can be selectively dimmed or turned on or off an led array can deliver a very complex formation of lights at different levels highlighting what needs to be seen by the driver while simultaneously reducing glare for those around the vehicle for example a camera can track the position of an oncoming car and dim the leds shining in that direction in real time as the car passes by so i can see perfectly everything on the side of the road i can see perfectly everything on the other side of the road but you as the oncoming driver think i'm on low beam because i've turned off those segments uh around you and then if you have more than one car you can you can turn on and off these these individual elements the technology has the support of auto manufacturers and industry organizations such as the automobile association of america consumer reports and the insurance institute for highway safety it has the potential to be highly beneficial again because it's your high beams all the time except for in areas where there are other vehicles adaptive driving beam systems occupy a kind of legal gray area the national highway traffic safety administration has rules for high beams and low beams but not for lights that don't fit into either category when the regulations around automotive lighting for the us were writ and north america basically were written you know in the 60s and so so forth there was absolutely no concept that computerization and led lighting would revolutionize what's possible so the regulations are very clear in calling for specifications around low beam and high beam um and nothing in between because nobody really imagined that you'd be able to bury the lighting in such a way um so now we're able to do that but the problem is it takes you know up to 10 years or more so to really change a regulation that's been written for decades on end many other countries already do allow these types of systems but available technologies can yield an even greater array of possible applications in 2020 audi became the first vehicle brand to offer what it calls digital matrix led headlights in a production vehicle these lights go a step further than the typical adaptive driving beam headlights they can display animations and an array of messages such as a patch of light on the pavement in front of the car signifying an intended lane change or another warning a driver of a patch of icy road or even showing where the car is within the lane or how wide the road is such a feature might be useful when a road narrows on a bridge or in a construction zone we're hopeful that you know as technology the pace of technology and the opportunities really kick up often times you know that comes down to uh aligning a little bit more concretely between what u.s regulations call for and how they appear in other parts of the world at least as a guide to say okay this has been in the market in europe or in asia for quite some time and it really has proven itself out so we'd like to be able to hopefully get more of that cross-market sharing in the regulatory world too the national highway traffic safety administration told cnbc that adaptive driving beam technology offers exciting safety potential and the administration is working to finalize rulemaking to establish appropriate requirements it said it is also following the development of technologies like audi's digital matrix led system including any safety related implications nighttime car crashes are responsible for half of all crash passenger deaths only about 25 percent of travel occurs during hours of darkness so the fatality rate per vehicle mile of travel is about three times higher at night than during the day a staggering share of america's roadways headlights are the only source of light for a driver improving them for those in and out of the car can save a lot of lives and give peace of mind [Music]

Channel: CNBC

Views: 752,687

Keywords: CNBC, business, news, finance stock, stock market, news channel, news station, breaking news, us news, world news, cable, cable news, finance news, money, money tips, financial news, Stock market news, stocks, top gear, motortrend channel, chrisfix, doug demuro, carwow, scotty kilmer, cars, automakers, headlights, automobiles

Id: 4lG_nKj7k5E

Length: 16min 6sec (966 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 15 2021