Volkswagen is developing new car lighting systems that will boost safety for all road users. Look into the light below…

Volkswagen has opened a Centre of Lighting Excellence at its Wolfsburg plant. It’s a light tunnel that is 100 metres long, 15 metres wide and 5 metres high and it’s where Volkswagen is testing and developing new lighting systems that will eventually feature on upcoming production models.

In this controlled environment, tests are easily reproduced and repeated but it’s also useful in that it’s an ideal setting to study how drivers and pedestrians perceive light. Importantly, the light tunnel also reduces development time of lighting systems which means that they can be introduced to market quicker.

Volkswagen's lighting tunnel enables rapid lighting technology development in a controlled environment.

Lighting the Way

As autonomous technology develops further, road users will be confronted with new situations, such as lack of eye contact with drivers and that’s where interactive lighting functions will help improve safety.

These new lighting systems will comprise micro-pixel HD headlights with up to 30 000 light points and high-performance LED lighting that will for the first time be able to project information onto the road surface. This technology will also enable new assist systems such as ‘Optical Lane Assist’ which will project lanes in front of the vehicle, showing the driver exactly how wide the vehicle is as well as the distance to road lane markings. The lanes will also follow the direction in a curve and so forth.

Micro-pixel HD headlights will be able to project lanes directly ontothe road.

Revolutionary matrix tail light clusters are also in development and they will incorporate warnings to defuse potentially dangerous situations such as at the end of a traffic jam for example while also using car-to-car communication to warn other drivers.

Furthermore, a new ‘Optical Park Assist’ system will be able to alert passers-by of the parking process by projecting the vehicle's path onto the road.

These new lighting systems were showcased at an international workshop and they highlight new lighting innovations that you can expect to see on future models. Volkswagen, however, did not state when these innovations will come to market.

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