Every year, the automotive lighting industry supplies billions of dollars’ worth of lamps, lights, bulbs, reflectors and related devices to the world’s vehicle makers and a bustling aftermarket. This differs little from the industry of any other category of automotive components.
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However, the lighting sector is unique in the degree of cooperation among its major and minor participants and its degree of global integration. This is due, in part, to the industry’s vibrant and vigorous programme of symposia, congresses and conferences at which the latest research and technology is showcased and discussed in great detail among the industry’s community of researchers, marketers, regulators, scientists, and principal consumers.
In Europe, there are the International Symposium on Automotive Lighting and the V.I.S.I.O.N. congress, the former held in Germany in odd-numbered years and the latter in France in even-numbered years. In North America, the National Academy of Sciences’ Transportation Research Board maintains a Visibility Committee with annual conferences and symposia where automotive lighting research is discussed and planned. These research and development expositions form a framework within which working groups, particularly in Europe, can develop and commercialise new technology in a rapid and coordinated fashion.
Such working groups defined the parameters and sped the adoption of the world’s first halogen headlamps in the early 1960s, the first H4 dual-beam halogen headlamps in the early 1970s, Xenon HID headlight systems in the early 1990s, and advanced AFS front-lighting systems in the early 2000s.
As a result of this type of research openness, life in the world’s automotive lighting industry is rather like life in a small town: almost everyone knows what almost everyone else is doing, most of the time. Everyone is working on advanced front-lighting systems and light-emitting diode (LED) headlamps and tail-lamps. Everyone offers BiXenon headlamps. Everyone can do a combination rear lamp that looks all red, but lights up in the three required colours.
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By GlobalDataOf course, this sometimes makes it difficult to ascertain the true originator of a new invention in the field. Hella, Valeo and a precursor company to AL-Automotive Lighting all claim to have invented the polyellipsoidal headlamp, and it would be difficult to discredit any of the claims. This is not to deny or belittle the various players’ specialities, nor their many innovations and advances in technique and practice.
Valeo is justifiably proud of its special high-efficiency NEO headlamp optics, just as Hella takes special pride in its non-glare high beam, Koito in its ultra-compact projectors, ZKW in its talents with PEI material and polycompliant optics, and so on. But beyond these sorts of innovations, the various individual companies’ products have long been differentiated less by fundamental technology than by unique techniques and their underlying engineering and design philosophy.
The profile of the automotive lighting industry has lately been undergoing rapid and significant change, under the combined influences of multiple forces.
Lighting regulations, once many in number and significantly different in technical prescriptions in the world’s many markets, are now greatly reduced in number and substantially harmonised in content. Aspects of lighting performance long left unregulated, such as pedestrian compatibility in crashes, are now being fast-tracked for regulation that will significantly affect the way lamps are designed and built. Markets have consolidated, as have vehicle makers and lighting suppliers, giving rise to regionally- rather than nationally-based players round the world.
Lighting technology has advanced at a staggering pace since the beginning of the 21st century, presenting an array of engineering and design options of unprecedented width.
At the same time, vehicle stylists and buyers have grown considerably more daring and demanding, so the wide range of options, considered a mere luxury until recently, is now a necessity. The emergence and stratospheric growth of both supply and demand for vehicles (and, therefore, for vehicular lighting systems) in developing nations has significantly pushed and pulled at the world’s automotive lighting makers. As a result, international and intercompany cooperation is at an all-time high in the industry.
The globalisation of the auto industry, with the concomitant cost pressures, could reasonably have been expected to create new competition among auto lighting firms that have historically been largely kept separate by disjointed markets, and that has certainly occurred. However, the opposite effect is also quite prominent: companies that not long ago competed against one another are now collaborating, as are companies formerly in simple vendor/buyer relationships. Technique, practice, subcomponents, and even customers and build facilities are being shared at an unprecedented level.
This is occurring not only in the first world (as for example with ValeoSylvania in the US, Hella-Stanley in Australia and the Ichikoh-Valeo alliance in Europe), but also to a significant degree in developing countries (for example, the ZKW-Neolite joint venture in India). Partnerships, joint ventures, and other collaborative arrangements serve to accelerate the presence and prevalence of better lighting on the roads of developing countries. In a broader context, cooperative arrangements are elevating the industry’s best practices and reducing the cost of every given level of automotive lighting sophistication through economies of scale.
See also: Global market review of automotive lighting – forecasts to 2013
