BMW Working On Laser Headlamps

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BMW Working On Laser Headlamps

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday September 6, 2011 @04:33AM from the hot-high-beams dept.

MrSeb writes "LED headlamps are only just trickling onto the market — mostly on high-end cars — but now it seems a certain German automaker has plans for laser headlamps. 'Laser light is the next logical step in car light development ... for series production within a few years in the BMW i8 plug-in hybrid,' says BMW. Lasers have the potential to be simultaneously more powerful, more efficient, and smaller than other headlamp types. Before you get too excited, though: the output of laser headlights will be modulated for safety."

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Ah wonderful by Osgeld · 2011-09-06 04:35 · Score: 5, Insightful

Its not like the HID lamps fucking blind you enough as it is, we need LASERS! so we can be blinded up to 2 miles away
1. Re:Ah wonderful by barlevg · 2011-09-06 04:42 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  They can say all they like that they'll be "modulated for safety," but the truth is that THIS GENERATION of LED headlights are too bright. My car is low to the ground, and I don't have the best of night vision, so on more than a few many a dark, rainy nights, I've been nearly blinded by the LED headlights of the SUV behind me to the point that it took several such incidents for me to realize these assholes didn't just have their high-beams on.
2. Re:Ah wonderful by jandrese · 2011-09-06 04:44 · Score: 2
  
  Those HID headlamps are "modulated for safety" too, and that doesn't stop them from blinding every oncoming motorist the instant they're knocked even slightly out of alignment or those crazy cases where people drive on roads that aren't perfectly straight and level.
  
  I especially can't wait for the knockoff aftermarket replacement versions that don't even pretend to care about the safety of the other drivers.
  
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  I read the internet for the articles.
3. Re:Ah wonderful by nschubach · 2011-09-06 04:48 · Score: 2
  
  LED or Xenon?
  
  --
  Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
4. Re:Ah wonderful by Osgeld · 2011-09-06 04:50 · Score: 2
  
  yea really, unmodulated HID lights can be bought at any hot rod shop, in microprint on the back it says "not for stree use"
5. Re:Ah wonderful by mcvos · 2011-09-06 04:51 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Its not like the HID lamps fucking blind you enough as it is, we need LASERS! so we can be blinded up to 2 miles away
  My thoughts exactly. Biking in the dark and rain, oncoming headlines make it impossible to see anything other than painful light surrounded by a lot of dark. I'd like to see headlamps toned down a bit.
6. Re:Ah wonderful by realityimpaired · 2011-09-06 05:36 · Score: 2
  
  My first thought was more along the lines of "what kind of idiot thought a laser would make a good flood lamp?"
  You don't need a point of light in your car headlights, you need a flood lamp that illuminates a large area. Either they're putting the mother of all lasers on their car, or they're running it through a light diffuser which would rather defeat the purpose of it being a laser. Or maybe it's not actually a laser, and this is just marketing drivel.
7. Re:Ah wonderful by black+soap · 2011-09-06 06:05 · Score: 2
  
  So, less work than installing aftermarket headlamps that are too bright, aimed wrong, and miscolored, the way people do currently?
8. Re:Ah wonderful by twistedsymphony · 2011-09-06 06:15 · Score: 2
  
  I'm pretty sure VW/Audi is the only manufacturer with LED headlights in production cars at this point... IIRC the 2010 Audi Q7 is the only production SUV with LED headlights, so unless you live in some really strange area where the entire population decided to buy Audi Q7s this year, I think you're confusing LED with HID, which are two COMPLETELY different technologies.
  
  Not to mention HIDs, despite being brighter, when designed and installed PROPERLY will actually do much less blinding than traditional halogen headlights.
  
  The problem are these jokers who install cheap retrofit kits in headlight housing that weren't designed for HIDs, this results in glare and uncontrolled light that will blind other motorists... Properly designed and tuned HID housings will produce a very sharp light cut-off that should have zero light spilling in through the rear windows of the other vehicles on the road...
  
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  Collector's Edition
Yeah thanks..... by jhoegl · 2011-09-06 04:36 · Score: 2

Even my local news reported this before ./

And as they stated, the LEDs are bright enough.. WTF we need lasers?
1. Re:Yeah thanks..... by Fnord666 · 2011-09-06 04:42 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  And as they stated, the LEDs are bright enough.. WTF we need lasers?
  Among other things, laser light is a lot more energy efficient. According to the article, BMW is getting 170 lumens per watt as compared to 100 lumens per watt for LED lights.
  
  --
  'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
2. Re:Yeah thanks..... by nschubach · 2011-09-06 04:42 · Score: 2
  
  I certainly hope so. dotslash.com looks to be some kind of East Asian search engine and dotslash.org is a parked domain.
  
  --
  Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
3. Re:Yeah thanks..... by Solandri · 2011-09-06 05:18 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Because they are more efficient for the same brightness levels, which is especially important for electric cars, since they'll be less of a drain on the batteries.
  The typical sedan needs about 20-25 hp to maintain highway speeds. That's 15-19 kW. Car headlights are about 50 Watts each. If as a post above says, laser headlights represent a 70% improvement in efficiency, that means you could replace 100 Watts of headlights with about 60 Watts of laser headlights - a 40 Watt savings.
  
  40 Watts is 0.2%-0.3% of 15-19 kW. If you take the Nissan Leaf which has a nominal 70 mile range at highway speeds, saving 40 Watts will get you about 800-100 feet (240-300 meters) in additional range on a full charge compared to regular halogen headlights. So they represent a trivial amount of energy savings which nobody is going to notice, even on an EV.
  
  That said, BMW is a luxury brand (in the U.S.). So they'll probably be able to sell enough of these to rich people (early adopters) to justify the R&D costs, and it'll help improve the state of the art for everyone. But don't make the mistake of thinking that this will result in any significant energy savings for EVs.
4. Re:Yeah thanks..... by canajin56 · 2011-09-06 05:31 · Score: 2
  
  This change will probably save you about a dime for every $100 you spend on fuel. Assuming you only drive at night, of course.
  
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  ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Almost Obligatory... by Jawnn · 2011-09-06 04:36 · Score: 2, Funny

OK. Fine, but will the sharks be able to operate the headlight switch?
1. Re:Almost Obligatory... by Jeremiah+Cornelius · 2011-09-06 04:43 · Score: 2
  
  Jumped the shark with lasers...
  
  --
  "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
  Never been known to fail..."
sharks are optional by roman_mir · 2011-09-06 04:37 · Score: 4, Funny

Beamers always looked nice, now with the optional tiny sharks inside the headlamps they'll be simply irresistible.
What would PETA say?

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You can't handle the truth.
1. Re:sharks are optional by nschubach · 2011-09-06 04:43 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Lasers give new meaning to "Beamer".
  
  --
  Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Re:why lasers? by barlevg · 2011-09-06 04:43 · Score: 3, Interesting

(what's the word for non-laser?)
incoherent?
Re:why lasers? by otis+wildflower · 2011-09-06 04:44 · Score: 3, Interesting

incoherent light?
IMO I'd rather see laser 'sparkplugs' first, I know Ford is working on them..
Car Analogy + Lasers + Sharks by Anonymous Coward · 2011-09-06 04:46 · Score: 5, Funny

Put them on the Hyundai Tiburon.
Re:why lasers? by Megane · 2011-09-06 04:52 · Score: 2, Informative

Headlights should fade out in a couple hundred yards, not be blinding people from 10 miles away.
That's called "collimation", which is not an inherent property of laser light, just a typically desirable one. Laser light is monochromatic (one frequency) and coherent (all waves in the same phase). Collimation is the focusing into a narrow beam. Some laser types are inherently collimated, some aren't.

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#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Sales Point: Pink Floyd by gregg · 2011-09-06 04:54 · Score: 2

The only car where the Pink Floyd music library is included as a feature; complete with laser light show.
next logical step by Krau+Ming · 2011-09-06 05:01 · Score: 2

why the hell are lasers for headlights the next logical step? i think everyone agrees that headlights all do their job adequately given the limitation of not being allowed to completely blind oncoming traffic. the next LOGICAL step (assuming we are trying move in the direction of eliminating visibility issues/unknown elements from nighttime driving) should be to have some kind of sonar/radar device that can detect and relay a warning to the driver...maybe by having a terminator-esque translucent LED screen overlay on the windshield that would highlight things out of range of the regular headlights (eg: deer getting ready to pop out of the forest). if BMW customers are willing to pay for frickin' laser beams then surely they'd pay for this.
Re:why lasers? by jittles · 2011-09-06 05:01 · Score: 4, Informative

The laser plugs aren't to save electricity. The laser burns so hot that you get a much better "spark" if you will. In other words, more complete combustion and therefore more power, less gas fumes in exhaust, and (I am no expert but I imagine) less CO as well.
Re:why lasers? by vlm · 2011-09-06 05:04 · Score: 2

That's called "collimation", which is not an inherent property of laser light, just a typically desirable one. Laser light is monochromatic (one frequency) and coherent (all waves in the same phase). Collimation is the focusing into a narrow beam. Some laser types are inherently collimated, some aren't.
Those properties also make lasers idea for projecting holograms.
I assume the same crowd that considers "naked lady outline" truck mudflaps to be tasteful and classy, will soon have ladies with "high beams" when the brights are turned on.

--
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Re:Excellent by badbart · 2011-09-06 05:09 · Score: 3, Funny

Forever more I will be stuck with the image of Bullwinkle in a lab coat, saying "watch me pull a spectrum out of a hat!"
White and monochromatic? by wgoodman · 2011-09-06 05:42 · Score: 2

I'm just curious how they are making white lights? "...laser lighting is monochromatic, which means that the light waves all have the same length." followed by "...resulting light is very bright and white"
The bigger news is that they've found a single wavelength of light that is white!
1. Re:White and monochromatic? by jbengt · 2011-09-06 06:00 · Score: 2
  
  As it says in TFAs, they are shining the lasers onto phospors to create white light. So, in spite of the hype, no laser pinpoint straight lines, no monochromatic, locked-in-phase laser light in the eyes, just another headlight that's too bright.
2. Re:White and monochromatic? by dr2chase · 2011-09-06 07:59 · Score: 2
  
  There's a big difference between actually monochromatic, and essentially monochromatic. The phosphors, as I was told by a physicist carpooling on a boy scout ski trip, are wavelength multipliers of some sort. You can see this when you look at a fluorescent light through a diffraction grating; you'll see 6-12 images of the light, each an exact different color, offset from one another. 2-3 spectral lines get multiplied out to 6-12 lines.
  An LED emits a continuous range of frequencies tightly clustered around a particular wavelength; fed through wavelength multipliers, you get multiple overlapping smears, making a good-sized blob of frequencies. Through a diffraction grating, you do not get multiple images, you get rainbow smears.
  I don't know exactly what the wavelength multiples are; I only know what I see with my eyes through a diffraction grating. I also took pictures for comparison: http://dr2chase.wordpress.com/2008/05/08/spectrum-led-vs-fluorescent/ (and I just rechecked it again). The LEDs emit a continuous smear; the compact fluorescents (and presumably, the phosphor-enhanced truly monochromatic lasers) do not.
3. Re:White and monochromatic? by erice · 2011-09-06 13:43 · Score: 2
  
  Only humans paint using RGB/CYMK. Almost all natural scenes are going to come out with the wrong colors under pure RGB lighting even if very few are fully black.
Let's get this straight. by smcdow · 2011-09-06 05:58 · Score: 2

When referring to a vehicle manufactured by BMW, the following rules should be used:
2 wheels: "Beamer"
4 wheels: "Bimmer"

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In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
Not Laser headlights by jklovanc · 2011-09-06 06:46 · Score: 4, Interesting

Read this sentence from the last paragraph of the article; "Importantly, therefore, before the light from the tiny laser diodes is emitted onto the road, the originally bluish laser light beam is first of all converted by means of a fluorescent phosphor material inside the headlight into a pure white light which is very bright and pleasant to the eye." Therefore no lase light escapes the headlight. This is in effect laser stimulated florescence. The one number they miss in the article is what is the conversion ration between the light incoming to the phosphor and the light given off by the phosphor. It could be 100% but I don't know. After this conversion the light is probably no longer coherent and will disperse like a headlight should.
No man, that little switch is an amazing bit.... by way2trivial · 2011-09-06 07:28 · Score: 2

it's the neatest bit of engineering in your every day life.
it's calculated to change from the mirror's silvered reflection (dead on) to the natural reflection angle of plate glass...

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every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Re:They are missing a big point. by black+soap · 2011-09-06 07:41 · Score: 2

My point was that people would misuse and alter these things probably as much as they do current technology.