In 1940, a US consortium of state motor vehicle administrators standardized upon a system that required that all cars use two 7-inch round sealed beam headlights. This remained standard until 1957, when the US government decided that four 5¾-inch headlamps could also be used. Most luxury carmakers had already been employing the quad lamps, but this setup was only legal in certain US states until 1958.
Design creativity was severely limited by this dumb regulation. Although this regulation was only for vehicles sold in the United States it had a major effect of Japanese and European imports; some really bad looking cars were the result of this law. These sealed beam lights (often wrongly called ‘seal beams’) were one-piece units, if they went wrong you threw the whole thing away.
The US government was still meddling in the design process in 1974, when Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 108 allowed for the implementation of rectangular lamps. Lens and reflector technology at that time meant that one ineffective light was replaced by another ineffective one and yet more similar looking design solutions resulted.
It was not until 1983, granting a 1981 petition from Ford, that the 44-year-old US headlamp regulations were amended to allow replaceable-bulb, nonstandard-shape, architectural headlamps with aerodynamic lenses. Designers were, for the first time, given a free hand to design lights that better integrated with the overall form of the car.
The next big step forward for the designer was the arrival of the projector light, a simple reflector with a small but complex focusing lens at the front changed the packaging requirements. Designers and engineers needed to find more space behind the lights but less room around them. The trouble then was that these projectors could not dip so you needed a high beam and a low beam light as separate units. Some cars, such as the Subaru Legacy, used a mixture of projectors and what were called ‘complex reflector’ dip beam lights in the early 21st century.
Xenon bulbs pushed light technology ahead but the result was dazzling blue tinted lights that tended to annoy oncoming motorists! With each of the technological advances the light units and accompanying electronic control boxes became heavier and the power usage became greater. The arrival of electric cars, where both weight and current use affect range, brought about the development of LED (light emitting diode) lights. Cheap to make and light weight but very costly to develop, LED lights are said to be set to replace ‘incandescent bulb’ style lights within a very few years; they offer almost infinite freedom for designers, maybe even too much freedom judging by some of the recent show car proposals – the Aston Martin Vulcan for example!
The ‘daylight running’ and ‘after dark’ graphics of head lights have become more a tool of marketing and brand enhancement and less about seeing down the road at night in 2015; and just when we think that LEDs are the future, along comes BMW (and Audi) with laser lights combined with LEDs. Audi also dabbled in OLED technology a few years ago, showing the Audi Swarm OLED Lighting Concept at the 2013 CES and BMW followed suit in Las Vegas this year with the M4 Concept Iconic Lights.
The interesting thing is that technology is moving ahead so fast, particularly for premium cars, that what we think is the latest thing will soon be out of date.
