What's all this about?

The German Headlamp Wars (no, really) continue to escalate, as here Mercedes-Benz unveils its latest development in the field of automotive illumination. It's called Digital Light (after the third track from Daft Punk's seminal second album, Discovery).

You what?

Never mind.

Right. Well, tell me more about Digital Love. Sorry, Light.

Each headlamp has a projector featuring a chip that controls more than one million micromirrors, or pixels, for shining out the light. As with the current trend of automatic LED main beam technology - which can dip parts of a car's brightest lights at night to prevent dazzling other road users - Digital Light does exactly the same job. Only better.

How so?

Camera- and radar-based sensors pick up other road users - cars coming in the opposite direction, traffic ahead of the Mercedes driver, pedestrians, French electronic music duos dressed up as robots and so on - within milliseconds. Then, clever algorithms developed by Mercedes itself determine exactly what level of brightness every single one of the two million-plus pixels in the headlights need to be set at. This prevents scorching the retinas of anyone else in range while maintaining the maximum illumination of the surroundings in front of the car.

So how is Digital Light better than other systems, beyond having more pixels?

Because, like the futuristic F015 concept car which previewed this fancy tech, Digital Light can (potentially) do so much more. Like guide and support a driver in 'critical situations', such as driving through narrow roadworks. Or project light traces onto the tarmac to replace missing road markings, useful when the local council has decided to needlessly scatter those bloody loose chippings everywhere. Or even broadcast signals and warnings to other people, like laying out a field of luminescence to represent a zebra crossing for a pedestrian waiting at the side of the road. In essence, the Digital Light set-up is Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger than other headlights. Although it's to be hoped that the chips in the units don't Short Circuit.

OK, you can stop with the irrelevant Daft Punk Discovery references now.

Right-o.

2 Dec 2016