Over at DrivingVisionNews, Daniel Stern wrote an interesting article/editorial about Adaptive Driving Beam (ADB), and whether we will see it in all cars or just luxury cars.
Some excerpts:
Quote:
The inadequacy of the [conventional ] low beam is at the conceptual level. Consider: despite decades of trying, nobody has ever demonstrated a practical safety benefit to SAE or ECE headlamps. The list of theoretical relative merits and drawbacks is a long one: less glare from the ECE low beam, less backscatter (stray light) from the SAE low beam, longer seeing distance on the left side with ECE, longer seeing distance on the right side with SAE, etc. But even big theoretical differences don't show up in practical safety differences. Why? Probably because we are just comparing two varieties of inadequate headlamp. They simply cannot do the job we require of them…
In ADB we have technology and technique to fix the problem by giving drivers 30 metres' additional seeing distance without increasing glare. It's a seeing/glare balance much better than any low beam can achieve, and it will take big bites out of problems as serious as the alarming nighttime pedestrian hit-and-kill rate, and as annoying and intractable as the tendency of drivers in China to use their high beams even in traffic. But relying on the short-term-profit mentality that would offer ADB as an extra-cost luxury item stands a good chance of relegating ADB to HID's low take rates, and then it won't save lives because it's not on the roads. We must not allow that to happen….
Consider the lesson of the HID headlamp: when it was introduced in the early 1990s, we all congratulated ourselves on the superior new technology and the safety benefit it offered, and predicted the end of the halogen headlamp within a decade. That never even came close to happening, and it never will. From this we may draw an important warning: If we are to make real progress in leveraging our community's vast recent technical progress toward headlamps that can radically reduce traffic fatalities, we will have to think in radically different ways. To wit: we must all urgently work hard toward every vehicle coming with good ADB as standard equipment….
Some excerpts:
Quote:
The inadequacy of the [conventional ] low beam is at the conceptual level. Consider: despite decades of trying, nobody has ever demonstrated a practical safety benefit to SAE or ECE headlamps. The list of theoretical relative merits and drawbacks is a long one: less glare from the ECE low beam, less backscatter (stray light) from the SAE low beam, longer seeing distance on the left side with ECE, longer seeing distance on the right side with SAE, etc. But even big theoretical differences don't show up in practical safety differences. Why? Probably because we are just comparing two varieties of inadequate headlamp. They simply cannot do the job we require of them…
In ADB we have technology and technique to fix the problem by giving drivers 30 metres' additional seeing distance without increasing glare. It's a seeing/glare balance much better than any low beam can achieve, and it will take big bites out of problems as serious as the alarming nighttime pedestrian hit-and-kill rate, and as annoying and intractable as the tendency of drivers in China to use their high beams even in traffic. But relying on the short-term-profit mentality that would offer ADB as an extra-cost luxury item stands a good chance of relegating ADB to HID's low take rates, and then it won't save lives because it's not on the roads. We must not allow that to happen….
Consider the lesson of the HID headlamp: when it was introduced in the early 1990s, we all congratulated ourselves on the superior new technology and the safety benefit it offered, and predicted the end of the halogen headlamp within a decade. That never even came close to happening, and it never will. From this we may draw an important warning: If we are to make real progress in leveraging our community's vast recent technical progress toward headlamps that can radically reduce traffic fatalities, we will have to think in radically different ways. To wit: we must all urgently work hard toward every vehicle coming with good ADB as standard equipment….
