What will mainstream adaptive driving beam look like by 2025?
Jy K. Bhardwaj, Benno Spinger · 2019
Adaptive Driving Beam (ADB) applications are proliferating from premium vehicles into the mainstream car models. Technology advances are creating the inflection point enabling cost effective digital headlighting to replace light steering by electro-mechanical swiveling shutters. Today’s LED matrix solutions support the mainstream ADB functionality with 5-25 independently addressable pixels. Meanwhile, the premium segment is evolving to a pixel count in the thousands to the one million range driven by additional functional value in beam content. We can predict the usual functionality migration from premium to mainstream segment and hence anticipate the adoption of increasing pixel count ADB solutions in the mainstream to support increased functionality, but at the appropriate cost point. Given the emerging range of high pixel count solutions today and an equally wide range of emerging technologies which support these, it is useful to shed light on which of these solutions have the potential to meet the mainstream requirements. This is the motivation for the work presented in this paper. We will look at all of the major competing technologies and offer an analysis on which technologies could support the requirements to enter the mainstream and based on this, predict the leading solutions with clear justifications. This will allow us also to forecast which new ABD functions are most likely to make the transition from premium to mainstream.