Audi’s lighting tech to make night into day without the glare

Your rear-view mirror is a much coveted spot! Attempting to create a unique brand signature that is instantly recognisable, there are rings, slashes and curvy lines of LEDs or LED tubes that have been vying for our attention in most modern day luxury cars. Sometimes the car’s design and recent history seems to flow around its LED signature.

One brand which is striking and inseparable with its LED tube signature across all of its models is Audi. But Audi’s work with its headlamp and tail-lamp design and construction goes beyond just looks. For engineers at Ingolstadt automotive lighting is an obsession.

Audi is attempting to use lighting not only for aesthetics; but also to function as an information medium. The light comes alive; it moves and takes on new forms of expression and differentiation.

In that, Audi’s new Light Assistance Centre at the company’s German HQ could just alter the future of road safety and travel technology. This underground light tunnel, which is 120 metres long, is home to development of innovative lighting solutions and camera-based lighting assistance systems, which improve visibility, reduce glare for oncoming traffic and increase safety.

Audi claims that the facility, finished in matte black, is the biggest lighting tunnel for vehicles in Europe. The tunnel went into full operation in March and we decided to tiptoe in the darkness and check if there was light at the end of the tunnel (sorry, couldn’t stop that pun).

The lighting competence centre and the laser lab, which are housed under an 11-storey building, apparently presented a great challenge for the civil engineers because it had to do without supporting columns and required an interior height of up to nine metres. The floor surface mimics a normal road, which helps with the research and development. Audi invested €4.5 million in the facility and it is about 400 feet long and 40 feet wide mimicking the average road. Over the last 25 metres, it widens to about 60 feet wide and 30 feet to emulate different conditions. It is also equipped with a street-like floor surface, a turntable and a scale for the cars, a laser laboratory, a workshop, a media room and separate rooms for the development of interior lighting technologies. What this ensures is the elimination of the need for night-time tests in uncontrolled conditions. Audi engineers work with the designers and also receive inputs from their motorsport

colleagues, which help in bringing fruition to new ideas even faster. Audi claims lighting is of central importance as a design element. The most recent lighting signature in the company’s model range is characterised by the Matrix LED headlights with their individually controlled light-emitting diodes. They light up the road without blinding opposing traffic.

Marc Lichte, Head of Design at Audi, says: “Our lighting design stands for the perfect interplay between technology and design. It expresses the character of our models even more clearly. The lighting signatures at the front and rear of the car have a great impact on how our models look on the road.” He says in 15 years, he can imagine: “A light that is in motion and interacts with the driver from the moment they approach the vehicle.”

This technology is not only innovative in terms of lighting solutions but also adds to the look and design of the entire model range.

One of Audi’s next steps will be Matrix laser technology, in which a laser produces the light. This will enable the ideal light pattern for virtually every situation, such as special lighting for construction zones and similar bottlenecks. In this case, two strips of light about 15 metres (49.2 ft) long are projected onto the road to indicate the vehicle’s width. The new light pattern is a great help when driving through construction zones or similar bottlenecks. The driver can follow the light as if it were rails.

These have already arrived on the TT and A8, but Audi demonstrated for us a mock-up of a headlamp that takes these diamond-shaped LED-powered reflectors and creates a rather intriguing headlamp design, with neat LED strip-light indicators. At the demonstration, we were told this technology will be incorporated into all future models. No specific timeline was mentioned though.

As futuristic (read: difficult to execute) as the concept may sound, Audi claims it is entirely possible to replicate the idea into real life situations. The big question is whether the idea will actually reach Indian shores.

We already don’t have certain radar-assisted sensor technologies in some of the luxury cars being sold here due to frequency limitations and regulations.

Even if it does make its way here, it is difficult to judge the efficacy of this tech in a chaotic country such as ours. But, that’s the exact purpose of Audi’s light assistance technology; to make driving safe for the driver and the oncoming traffic.

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