Intelligent Lighting Solutions

Light can build an emotional connection with a vehicle including dynamic “welcome lighting” and “farewell lighting”, which use software to fade individual LEDs on and off at different increments and create animation sequences. “Depending on what the automaker wants customers to feel about their vehicle, or brand as a whole,” he explains, some may convey a soft, organic sensibility while others may seem more technical. “Both are very effective at enhancing the emotional connection between the customer and their vehicle,” Grant adds.

For instance, Ford Motor Co.’s Lincoln brand features Embrace, which activates when a key holder approaches the vehicle (welcome) or leaves (farewell). In welcome mode Embrace lights up the signature LED headlamp and tail lamp elements and the running boards beneath the doors, projects a Lincoln star logo on the ground beside the vehicle, and turns on ambient lighting in the passenger cabin.

Embrace “plays into what we’re seeing at CES but other shows, too — more animation in the lights,” says Todd Clark, chief engineer for lighting, mechatronics and switches at Ford in Dearborn, MI. “The challenge is delivering that technology that can wow the customer at a cost that is affordable,” Clark says. Ford is accomplishing this by standardizing the necessary electronics across the company’s entire product portfolio. He says, “The building blocks of what we’ve set with Lincoln Embrace, we can scale up to other animation in the future.”

Further in the future Clark foresees an Embrace-like function targeting rideshare vehicles such as using a custom light color on the outside to identify the rider’s vehicle (selected by the user in the service’s app) or lighting up the rider’s seat in a selected color.

Another trend Ford has identified is the use of smart surfaces that light up when appropriate but otherwise remain dark, and these could include both interior and exterior trim pieces, and hard or soft materials such as leather and wood. “We’re pushing this as far as the art of the possible,” Clark says.

At least one automaker is studying lighting design outside the industry for ideas on how to style car interiors. “We look to architectural concepts — how they’re using materials like different plastics and glass, and laser etching,” says Mike Nicholas, chief designer of lighting, badging and under hood design at FCA in Auburn Hills, MI. “We used to do traditional graining of our lenses and bezels. Now with laser etching you can actually design textures, and when the light hits it, it has this dynamic effect.”

Also, with the advent of driver and passenger monitoring systems, there’s a health and wellness application for car interior lighting, says Dominique Massonie, head of innovation at Elektrobit, based in Erlangen, Germany. He imagines, for example, automatically adjusting the cabin lighting to help wake a sleepy driver at night.

Indeed, lighting — or more specifically photonics — is itself part and parcel of car sensing, says Mike Godwin, director of automotive marketing at Osram Opto Semiconductors Inc. in Novi, MI. It can be used for eye gaze and emotion detection inside the passenger cabin. And then, reacting to the findings, it can be adjusted to, for example, mitigate motion sickness.

“Everyone’s looking for those right solutions,” Godwin affirms. “The car makers are looking for how are they going to differentiate their brand, and differentiate the outer shell of the vehicle, plus the experience that is related on the interior of the vehicle.”