Laser lighting to disappear - carsales.com.au (2024)

The technology war that included a fierce battle between Audi and BMW to be first to market with laser-powered headlights is over, with BMW admitting it is quietly “disappearing” the long-range high-beam technology.

While laser lighting is currently available with the BMW X7 and 4 Series GranCoupe and the Audi A5, A7, Q7 and Q8, BMW large-car product manager Andreas Suhrer admitted the Bavarian car-maker has no future product plans for laser lighting.

Laser lighting systems made their debut on the BMW i8 and delivered twice the high-beam range of contemporary LED systems while using 30 percent less energy.

They could reach out beyond 600 metres in a narrow beam, supplementing the wider spread of Matrix LED systems, by using higher-intensity developments of BlueRay DVD-player diodes and reflecting them forwards.

Laser lights also promised to liberate designers from headlight hard points because they reduced the reflector surface down to 3cm squared from the 9cm squared of LEDs.

Laser lighting uses high-performance diodes, beamed into special lenses and then passed through a fluorescent phosphorous to generate an intense light that brightens the road without heating up the adjacent area.

This strategy, combined with the active, camera-based digital high-beam assistance system, prevents them from dazzling oncoming traffic.

In a golden-age of headlight development, laser lighting was joined in the premium vehicle segment by thermal-imaging cameras to detect the heat signatures of pedestrians and animals on or near the road, but they have also fallen out of favour with car-makers.

BMW fought a fiery battle with Audi to be first to market with laser light technology, which Audi showed first at the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas (the year before Dieselgate poleaxed its development department), when it was still fizzing with technical and innovation confidence.

BMW then hurriedly organised a limited launch to i8 reservation holders, sneaking laser lighting onto the market just a week before Audi’s scheduled production launch.

Audi then fitted laser lighting to its own R8 sports car, which has how ended its production run.

The laser-light fight entered into automotive industry legend, but the two Bavarian neighbours had been concentrating on the wrong enemy.

The nemesis of the laser light turned out to be the US Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard rule 108, which limits headlight power on vehicles sold in the US to 150,000 candela, while European systems allow up to 430,000 candela.

European car-makers lobbied to allow stronger lighting in the US and the regulation framework was altered in 2022 to (technically) allow adaptive lighting systems like the Matrix LEDs, which black out other cars to minimise glare.

But the rule change, which came as a draft bill totalling more than 300 pages, hasn’t worked and no current adaptive lighting system complies with it.

Laser lighting’s power was diluted into ineffectiveness, with its range effectively cut from more than 600 metres everywhere else in the world to just 250 metres in the US.

“At the moment, we still have laser lighting on the G26 [4 Series GranCoupe] and the X7, but we don’t have future plans,” Suhrer admitted.

“The G61 and G61 [5 Series] does not have it and the new 7 Series does not have it.

“I don’t think it’s completely done but for the next models we are making, the LED Matrix lights will be our focus.

“The laser lights are pretty good with absolute range, but the latest generation of Matrix LED lights does a better distribution.”

The difficulty with that argument is that it was always the case, with laser going for length and Matrix LEDs used for a wide spread and blanking off other road users. Besides, laser lighting was always used in conjunction with Matrix LEDs.

“Matrix LEDs and lasers [were fitted] together on the predecessor cars but the LEDs are getting better in performance with distribution and they are getting closer to the range of lasers,” Suhrer explained.

“There are some markets like the US where we could not use the most performance from the lasers, so that makes the decision easier.”

An Audi spokesman said the company had no fixed plans for laser lights to be fitted to any future production model, but did not rule it out.

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