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The concept of driver assistance systems has been a major focal point of the research at BMW and comprises among other things Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC), a concept for assistance in longitudinal control; Adaptive Light Control (ALC), a concept for headlight adaptation to different driving situations; and Situation Adaptive drivetrain Management (SAM), a concept for recommending drivetrain related handling strategies to the driver in order to reduce fuel consumption and emissions. Advanced vehicle navigation based on the U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS) will play a major role in future BMW driver assistance systems. The integration of precision navigation in vehicle control systems enables automatic adaptation of the vehicle (its states as well as its parameters) depending upon the future geometry of the roadway and memorized attributes/events using a GPS positioning system in combination with a digital road database.

A new light concept called Adaptive Light Control (ALC) is developed with the aim to improve night time traffic safety. ALC improves the headlamp illumination by means of continuous adaption of the headlamps according to the current driving situation and current environment. In order to ensure rapid prototyping and early testing the step from offline to online (real-time) simulation of light distributions in the driving simulator has been successfully done. This realtime simulation enabled the interactive development of new light distributions in different driving situations and driving environments. The solutions are directly ported to real vehicels to allow further testing with natural road conditions. In this paper, results of the development of movable headlamps are presented. These headlamps are controlled by means of path prediction based on vehicle dynamics and route vectors of the navigation system.