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Modern adaptive lighting techniques offer the chance to improve the vision of car drivers in front of their car in situations which are not well served by conventional static headlamps. Especially curved roads, intersections and the far zone on straight roads and highways at higher speed need to be illuminated better by the automotive headlamps. This can be achieved by well-designed and tested adaptive light modules. The application of headlamps with adaptive light pattern requires special attention to a new set of questions: Which light pattern should be used to illuminate curves and other areas in the field of vision, how do they fit to the main beam and how should these functions be activated? Technical alternatives to realize the light modules will be discussed and performances will be presented.

In most cases of night time driving the low beam light function is used for the road illumination in front of the car. This conventional low beam function has a constant light pattern: no matter whether the driver is actually driving on a straight or curvy road, whether the road is wet or dry, always the same beam pattern is applied. Test experiences of the last years prove that a headlamp with an „adaptive light pattern” having different optimum light pattern adapted to different driving situations should give a better illumination than the conventional constant low beam pattern which can only be a compromise. In this paper an outline of the basic idea of the „adaptive light pattern” is given. Different driving situations and their corresponding optimum light pattern, basic technical concepts and the legal situation regarding homologation of such an advanced lighting system will be discussed.

Car Designers are asking more often for headlamps that adapt well to highly inclined and low vehicle bodies or other exotic shapes e. g. of sports cars. In other cases headlamps are additionally used as stylistic elements and must therefore have a certain appearance e. g. oval shape or a clear, unprofiled cover glass. To realize a headlamp for such applications and at the same time keep it cost-effective with good light quality special headlamp systems have to be developed. Especially the normally used profiled scattering lens in front of the reflector causes complications under these circumstances. Therefore headlamp systems with complex reflector shapes have been developed whose reflectors produce an almost complete light distribution. Some different reflector concepts to realize this idea are presented in this paper and concrete examples for the application of this new technique are discussed.

In the last years, motor vehicle lighting systems were required to be more efficient, to have shorter development times and to be of higher quality. One important tool used in complying with these demands is the computer calculation of the optical characteristics of the complete headlamp system. A newly developed software package is presented in this paper which permits the configuration of a headlamp in its basic optical components and the quantitative calculation of its light distribution, luminous flux and other optical quantities. It is now possible for the first time, to assess a headlamp's total light pattern in advance, without hardware (e.g. model headlamps etc.) being required. The simulation results show a high degree of concurrence between the computed and the measured light distributions. This will be demonstrated in detail using concrete examples.