BMW's Laser Lighting Showcased

[White-Light]

Showcase of BMW laser lighting:

[DrEvil]

Prepare for $5000 (each) headlights from BMW. The light may not shine directly into your eyes but you can still see the source. That is what bothers me. I hate LED and projector style headlights as it is.

[DSOTM1973]

What happens when a small animal crosses the path? Or when driving in a city full of people?

[mixedgas]

A blue laser focused to a small spot pumps a phosphor converter that emits the white light. No direct, coherent, laser light is intended to leave the headlight.
It is a laser pumped fluorescent lamp. It gives a few optical design benefits over a LED, being a tiny point source like a filament.

Steve

[DSOTM1973]

So if I understood the video, it would actually flash the person to better alert the driver and pedestrian. I could see how this could be both an awesome and annoying technology.

[White-Light]

Yeah I though the small space demo was questionable. So you're going to overtake a truck and car together through roadworks and squeeze between the barriers and the truck (anyone else sensing the danger / stupidity of this?), so the BMW measures the space and indicates on the road there's just enough room. So you go for it.

The the truck driver moves over slightly or the a cone or piece of temporary barrier is sticking out somewhere, or maybe it just narrows further beyond the truck. Boom! New laser lights needed or worse....

I'm not sure that encouraging people to go for small gaps is a good idea. Maybe a good feature to have in city's below 10mph so on side streets where there's bad parking and a narrow gap, but at normal road / possibly motorway speeds?

[Draco]

Prepare for $5000 (each) headlights from BMW. The light may not shine directly into your eyes but you can still see the source. That is what bothers me. I hate LED and projector style headlights as it is.

I am wondering why you hate projector style head lights? when they are "correctly" aimed they provide a better more defined cut off pattern and that does not cause as much glare to on coming traffic, the better ones use a mechanical shutter that drops out of the way for high beam and when used with an oem hid lamp they work very well and generally last the life of the vehicle. if you are seeing one that causes glare it is not adjusted right or is an illegal mod

[Draco]

i had that idea of adaptive lighting a decade ago and was going to make a motorized system to adjust the lights while on the road, the only snag was it being to slow for oncoming traffic and the worm gear was not water resistant and i lost interest, too bad this system is so expensive, but i will be drooling for salvage once these get into the road. My current car is a buick i have had since 2003 and it's lighting sucked so i built new head lights into the housings. they consisted of a bi xenon projector made by hella and used on bmw, the system will pass inspection and has a totally legal beam pattern with the cut off shutter controlled by a solenoid, I drove a lot at night with out opposing traffic and that extra light saved my self and a few deer over the years

[DrEvil]

I am wondering why you hate projector style head lights? when they are "correctly" aimed they provide a better more defined cut off pattern and that does not cause as much glare to on coming traffic, the better ones use a mechanical shutter that drops out of the way for high beam and when used with an oem hid lamp they work very well and generally last the life of the vehicle. if you are seeing one that causes glare it is not adjusted right or is an illegal mod

Just because the light isn't shining into your eyes doesn't mean you can't see the source of it whether it be directly or a reflection. Take a narrow beam LED for example. You can hold it at an angle that you don't get hit by it but you can still see the source. Take a projector style headlight vs one of the plastic halogen ones. Let's say both of them are using the exact same 2500 lumen light bulb, the reflective area of the old style is 20 square inches and the projector lens is 4 square inches. That same 2500 lumens is coming out of a smaller area making it appear brighter. That's annoying as hell.

[daction]

I think that having the lights as a thin strip would be cool. Perhaps blend them into the gap between the bonnet and front bumper.
It would look like there was no head lights.