LED technology

How can LED technology influence the reliability of lighting sources and improve driver safety?

Traffic accidents, or simply road accidents, are often the result of a combination of causes. Obviously, faulty or inefficient vehicle lighting can pose a serious risk to the occupants of the vehicle as well as other road users. While faulty lighting requires no comment, it is worth highlighting the technological and performance issue by limiting ourselves to dipped-beam headlamps on vehicles, i.e. those most used by drivers after dusk and in conditions of reduced visibility.

Installations based on halogen bulbs are still the cheapest and most popular lighting technology. While their efficiency also depends on the design of the headlamp itself, the range of the lights and their effectiveness is also determined by the light beam itself. In the case of halogen lights, they emit light with a spectral range concentrated around the colour yellow.

This is completely different for metal halide discharge lamps, i.e. xenon and LED lights, which emit light with a broader spectral range, covering more of the white light spectrum. In particular, they contain more blue and violet light, which not only gives them a noticeably greater range for the human eye, but also better reflection from non-reflective surfaces, which enables the driver to see an obstacle earlier and react accordingly. Of course, this is all the more important the faster the vehicle is moving, e.g. on a motorway.

Nowadays, additional equipment options in the form of light assistants, mainly LED and xenon, are available on vehicles that are generally considered to be state-of-the-art, which, by automating the functions of dipped headlights, high beam and any related combinations, aim to achieve the maximum possible lighting performance at any given time