Originally Posted by Vern_in_IL
I just don't get the advantage of a spinning mirror and just 12 led's is going to "rock the world"
IMO HID is near perfection, LED a little better, but much more complex, and more costly.
Even Stevie Wonder can see why adaptive driving beam is being actively developed and pushed by every major player in the industry. Simply stated: headlamps are far from "sufficient" at this point in time. They might appear to be sufficient...but opinions are like stomachs. Everyone's got one.
There's a reason the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has recently jumped into rating headlamps, which has cost them tens of millions of dollars. They tested 82 different vehicles in the first round of testing back in '16, and assuming a very conservative average transaction price of $25,000 per vehicle they bought, that would be over $2 million dollars spent in just vehicles alone. There were a lot of luxury vehicles in the mix from BMW, Audi, Mercedes, etc., in that first round of testing, so it's easy that they spent closer to 3 million in just vehicles alone. They also bought 47 different small SUVs and 23 different trucks that same year for more testing, and assuming an average transaction price of $35,000 for the small SUVs and trucks...that's another $2.5 million dollars in vehicle purchases alone. So they spent probably close to $5 million dollars in just acquiring vehicles for the first year of testing in 2016. Even if they sold them all for 80% of the purchase price, that's a big loss, and it's unclear what they do with the vehicles afterward.
The IIHS is not a government entity and has no obligation to provide citizens with any sort of rating. They only do it because they see significant sums of $$$ in pushing for better headlamps and by extension, reduced crash probability and reduced claim frequency. The IIHS isn't rating cars and spanking manufacturers out of the goodness of their heart. They're doing it because they see greater than tens of millions of dollars of benefit/investment return from better headlamp systems. ADB falls under the umbrella of "better headlamp systems." Even without ADB, there is plenty of room for improvement, as the IIHS knows.
HID is overly complex, expensive, and dead in the water. From now on there's going to be two major technologies for forward lighting: halogen and LED. In the medium-term to long-term future: "laser," or more precisely, phosphor-converted lasers.