May focus: Lighting

After a while certain conversations begin to feel familiar, repetitive even. When that happens, it is usually indicative of a growing trend.

Indeed, the team here at Car Design News has recognised that among various brands – and even across teams and disciplines – the discussion around lighting has evolved. Increasingly, light is viewed in the same realm as CMF and often dubbed “an extra material.”

We heard this some time ago through casual conversation on our travels, and later reinforced on camera during a livestream last year by Bentley’s exterior design manager Nigel Ratcliffe. We have since heard others in that group employ similar parlance. “We treat light as a material,” noted T. Jon Mayer, the brand’s head of UX design and design operations. “Physically accurate material capture is essential, but it’s not enough. It’s about nuance - subtle imperfections, warmth and depth.”

A similar view was shared more recently at a different brand and on a different continent, no less. At CDD Beijing, Huang Jieping, head of HMI at Chery’s Shanghai Design Centre, enforced that lighting and CMF should not be “separate” from one another and should be “merged together… And when lighting and material works well together, they become what we call the living surface.”

In a similar vein, lighting is also being folded in with UX. And for obvious reasons. Light is a wonderful communicative tool that is incredibly intuitive. Green equals good, red equals bad. It limits the chance for mixed messaging or misunderstanding. 

But modern technology can do more than provide traffic light signals and work in tandem with other systems to distribute safety critical or at least “mission interesting” information to the driver and passengers. Other times, it will simply encourage a particular mood. “Lighting welcomes you to the vehicle, talks to other drivers and makes you feel something different," says Karma Automotive’s vice president of global design Nicholas David.

In terms of design trends, it would seem that the horizontal lightbar remains enormously popular around the globe. While futuristic at first, the fact that so many brands and models have adopted this look now makes it feel mainstream – the new normal. No longer futuristic? 

That is perhaps why we are seeing signs of a return to more shapely independent head and tail lamps, albeit often in tandem with a thin DRL elsewhere. And in today’s environment where the appetite for retro is at an all-time high, might some brands seek to explore dynamic lamps that can be partially hidden or revealed upon request? The days of true pop-up lamps have gone, but are there other possible derivatives? Let’s see.

So, what do we hope to see, find out and explore in more depth? While the entertainment value may be a little lower than a conversation around pop-up headlamps, we will strive to better understand how regulations impact lighting design. There are clear constraints in place to ensure lamps are safe from various standpoints, and designers are tasked with navigating those to come up with interesting implementations.

We will also no doubt see a continuation of the trend for lighting as decoration, not only as conservative (and often less so) ambient lighting inside the car, but also becoming a dominant feature of the grille and beyond. Mercedes has epitomised this with the new GLC and other models. And perhaps this will lead to lamps and LEDs in unfamiliar areas: in Beijing this year, we even saw a full-width DRL in the cowl directly beneath the windshield. Whimsy may also come into the equation — remember the SUE autonomous shuttle and its flickering digital candle? Or the Bentley EXP concept and its elegant reading light?

Will playful animations, scrolling messages and flashing pixelated hearts become more than a fad? Some designers are doubtful. “This is like a party trick,” comments GAC’s design chief Fan Zhang, “and at a certain point, when you consider the opportunities for everyday use, it's probably not that practical.”

Among the established lighting giants, will we also see a growing presence of new players? Not necessarily start-ups, but those with transferrable skills and technology. We have already seen Huawei supply the head and tail lamps for the Aistaland GT7 fastback and, separately, the tech company recently presented some headlights that can project films into a flat surface. Multifunctional may be the operative word for lighting moving forward.

On a personal note, conversations this month may feasibly dip into the prickly topic of ‘glare.’ For all the work that has been done to create distinctive, engaging and unexpected light signatures, anecdotal evidence would suggest more drivers than ever are being blinded by ever-brighter lamps. The rationale for the technology is sound – illuminating the road as clearly as possible while dipping the beam away from oncoming eyeballs – but it seems not all solutions manage to do that effectively as promised. What more can be done to improve the situation? We hope to find out.