How Audi’s light digitization is pointing the way toward the future
How Audi’s light digitization is pointing the way toward the future
Posted on August 4, 2022
Light technology is steadily growing more important and creating a wider range of possibilities and perspectives, from added safety for the driver, to external communication and individualization. Systematic light digitization is making all of this possible. It is particularly visible in the new Audi A8: the forward-looking Digital Matrix LED headlights and digital OLED rear lights raise the customer experience to a whole new level: for the first time in any Audi model, light is completely digitized. The car can be individualized even further through its digital OLED rear lights. The Digital Matrix LED headlights also include three new functions: advanced traffic information, a lane light with direction indicator lights on highways, and an orientation light on country roads.
We’ve all been there: it’s dark and there is a lot happening on the highway at night. The lane light with the orientation light is extremely helpful in a situation like that. It illuminates the car’s own lane, helping the driver focus on driving events. The integrated position marking from the orientation light – darkened arrows in a kind of “carpet of light” known as the lane light – predictively indicates the Audi vehicle’s position between the lane markers, encouraging safe driving in the center of the lane. With its focus on the car’s own lane markers, the lane light with the orientation light on the highway helps, for example, in narrow lanes around construction sites: the illumination is deliberately restricted to the car’s lane and not the lanes of the construction site in order to optimally center the driver’s focus on the road. Now that the headlight has been digitized, this orientation light is also available independently of the lane light on country roads, which is a new feature. That is the first new function that is made possible in additional driving situations due to digital light technology.
Back to the highway: during lane changes, the lane light brightly illuminates both lane markers, while the orientation light indicates the car’s exact position in the lane to give the driver the most support. That is where the second new function comes into play: the direction indicator lights in the lane light. With the blinkers activated, the Digital Matrix LED headlights create a dynamic blinking area on the appropriate side of the lane light. That way, the lane light reiterates and intensifies the signal from the direction indicator lights on the road in front. This means that additional, clear information about the upcoming lane change goes out to traffic in the immediate vicinity. That is one way that Audi is making driving safer for everyone on the road, particularly in heavy traffic. While driving with low beams through curves, in cities, or on highways and when driving with high beams, the still greater precision that light digitization brings makes driving even safer for other road users because it makes it possible to mask oncoming traffic as well as cars that are on the road ahead far more precisely.