car design thread

Here's one that i've never seen.
Seat Nardi 750 GT by Carozzeria Vignale 1964
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Wow, those bottom two are very cool!

 

Those guys & gals in the shop could build & make anything. True artists.

 

• 12-13-22

Welcome to the golden age of car headlight design
From Audi to Chevrolet, automakers are embracing more creative—and audacious—lighting design.
[Images: Zoox, Audi, Chevrolet]
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BY NATE BERGLONG READ


When Cesar Muntada joined Audi as a designer in 2007, the carmaker was on the verge of transforming the automotive industry. Audi’s next big production model, the 2008 R8, was getting its finishing touches, including a significant change to the front of the vehicle. One of the most important elements of the vehicle’s branding, the face of the R8, would be the first in the industry to use all light-emitting diodes.



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[Photo: Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images]
No longer reliant on the large and heat-intensive headlamp light bulbs of the past, Audi’s designers used LEDs to reinvent their headlight for the R8. Car headlights traditionally used a three or four lightbulb package on each side of the grille. Audi’s new design swapped those bulbs for an array of 25 LEDs throwing out main beams, fog lights, turn signals and previously impossible decoration. Below the main beams on the front of the R8 were two angled strips of light, gleaming above the asphalt like glowing eyeliner. This seemingly minor upgrade in components—the changing of a lightbulb—created a sea change in the look of cars.

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Cesar Muntada [Photo: Audi]
“We brought light design into the car industry,” says Muntada, who is now head of Audi’s lighting design and considered one of the top lighting designers in the industry. “There’s been a revolution in the technology.”

By the time the R8 arrived at dealerships, a gradual transition to the use of LEDs had been underway for a few years, with automakers playing up the safety benefits of these brighter-shining lights. Audi first introduced LEDs as daytime running lights in its 2004 A8 model, but the 2008 R8’s full turnover to LED headlights is something of a Rubicon for the car industry, marking an under appreciated but dramatic change in the way cars are designed and how they communicate with drivers, people on the street, and other cars alike.


Now, after years of experimentation and advancements in lighting and computer control technology, headlights are taking radical new forms. In the latest concept cars as well as production vehicles now available from brands like Audi, Rivian, Chevrolet, and Lincoln, designers are creating headlights and taillights that do far more than simply light up the road.

There are so-called adaptive driving beam headlights that can automatically shadow out and avoid shining in the eyes of oncoming drivers, and spotlights that can detect pedestrians and cyclists on the side of the road. There are animated displays that sparkle up when an owner approaches their car, and taillights using more finely controllable OLEDs that can boost their brightness when an approaching vehicle comes up close behind.

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[Image: Audi]
Some concept cars like Cadillac’s Innerspace do away with the standard double eyeball look altogether, making the front and end of cars more like digital screens. Audi’s A6 e-tron conceptturns headlights into a kind of entertainment, allowing parked cars to project films or even playable video games onto the ground or a nearby wall. “While some regulations won’t allow us to do things while the car is in motion, there’s a lot more freedom when the car is stationary. There are things we can do in terms of other features, or Easter eggs,” says Jeff Hammoud, head of design for the electric carmaker Rivian.


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[Image: Cadillac]
Compared to the halogen bulbs of the past, modern LED headlights are also significantly brighter–to the chagrin of many drivers. One survey found that nearly 90% of drivers believe headlights today are too bright. It’s an issue lighting designers recognize, and many car companies are implementing emerging technologies to better direct light onto roads and out of people’s eyes. Adaptive driving beam headlights are common in Europe, for example, and changing regulations mean they could be coming to the U.S. soon.

As the motor vehicle industry shifts its focus to electric vehicles, and eventually to autonomous vehicles, the design of headlights is about to become even more audacious. That’s opening up an abundance of opportunities for designers, and leading to an industry-wide rethinking of what lights can do, from upstart brands to the long-established leader in lighting design, Audi. “We created the first revolution,” Audi’s Muntada says. “I think we might now be in the second revolution.”

“THE NEW CHROME”
It’s the first day of the 2022 North American International Auto Show in a convention center in downtown Detroit and Secret Service agents are everywhere. At the head of a security line that would make an airport blush, they’re rifling through purses, backpacks and wallets, and on the vast show floor their stern eyes are scanning the crowd of thousands. President Joe Biden is here, announcing $900 million to build a network of EV charging stations, and popping behind the wheel of a few electric vehicles, including a Cadillac Lyriq and a Chevrolet Silverado.


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President Joe Biden behind the wheel of a Cadillac Lyriq at the 2022 North American International Auto Show. [Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images]
Biden’s not the only bigwig on hand. There’s Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg checking out some new Chevrolets. Over in a corner, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer is doing a TV interview in front of the electric version of the once-gas-guzzling Hummer from General Motors. Press and industry insiders gather to gawk at the new models on display and wait for their chance to take a seat inside. The mainstream shift to EVs is an overarching theme in the show.

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[Image: GM]
The Hummer behind Whitmer is a noticeable draw. People line up to climb into the gargantuan vehicle to grab the wheel. One pops open the “frunk,” or the front trunk, made out of the cavity that would have held the internal combustion engine in a nonelectric car. On the front end, in the space where the air venting grille of an internal combustion vehicle would be, Hummer is spelled out in lights. The headlights of the car stretch across this space, no longer needed for airflow and now fully handed over to the realm of branding. Even the LED taillights have the car name etched into the side of their barbell-shaped lenses.

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[Image: GM]
“We really used the lighting technology to try to show off that this is a new vehicle, that it’s tech forward, that it’s a complete departure from the old fossil fuel burner,” says Rich Scheer, a director of design for General Motors’s Chevrolet studio. A different approach to lighting, he says, was part of helping change customer expectations about a car name with some environmental baggage. “Now it’s an EV and it really wants to look like it’s influenced by technology.”


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[Image: Chevrolet]
Across the hall, there’s a Cadillac whose headlights twinkle in a choreographed animation for its approaching owner, and a trio of Chevrolet EVs with razor thin lines of LEDs for its head and taillights. Behind a thick crowd, one of the few concept cars on display disseminates lighting throughout the entire exterior and interior. The Star concept from Lincoln features a glowing lattice wrapped around the transparent hood of the car that creates a half-halo of light on the car’s front end; thin accent lines are illuminated over the wheels and around the roof. As an EV, the engine-free space in front has been turned into an extension of the cabin, and stripes of light run along the floor from the nose past the two front seats.

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[Image: Lincoln]
Robert Gelardi, chief interior designer for Lincoln, says the concept behind the concept is using the car to create a sense of sanctuary. During the design process, his team aspired to blur the lines between natural and technical light. They wanted to evoke the experience of sitting under a tree on a breezy day, with moving sunlight and shadows streaming down through the leaves. “What we did with the lattice pattern allows that play of light to happen as you’re driving,” he says.

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[Image: Lincoln]
Being a concept car, this exact headlight design is a long way from ending up on an actual vehicle anyone could buy or drive, but the approved company line is that the Star concept “foreshadows” the next three production EVs that will be on the road by 2025. Earl Lucas, Lincoln’s chief exterior designer, says advanced technology is enabling lighting design to play into Lincoln’s luxury brand of being both functional and experiential. “We say lighting is embracing you. It’s a hug. It’s a warmth that you will feel,” he says. “It used to be on [internal combustion engine] products that the chrome was always the first read. It was the marker to tell you what product you’ve bought. But lighting takes all that ornamentation to a higher level. It becomes mood setting.”


“It’s the new chrome,” says Raphael Zammit, chair of thegraduate transportation design program at the College of Creative Studies in Detroit, one of the top schools for automotive design. Zammit spent years working on the design and concept teams for automakers including Porsche, Hyundai and General Motors, and he says lighting design is becoming one of the main differentiating factors among competitors. It’s why companies like Audi have put such intense focus on lighting design.

“In the old days if you wanted something to sell for a higher price, you’d just slather chrome on it because that’s what the customer can really see,” Zammit says. The sophistication of a light display “really does demonstrate technical precision.”

Take as proof almost any car commercial on television. Zammit says lighting has become such a commonplace part of the marketing of cars because, like the chrome of the past, it’s easy to show how one brand’s design is different from another’s. “A lot of car companies can show a car driving around really fast. But it’s a lot more clear if you can compare this special effect against that special effect. It’s more concrete,” he says.

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BLURRING THE LINE BETWEEN BODY AND LIGHT
From the earliest days of the automobile, lights were an afterthought when it came to design. The vast majority of cars built in the 20th century tacked them on as appendages, relying on basic round incandescent bulbs poking out from the frame like bug eyes. By the 1960s some companies embraced pop-up headlights that opened up from the hood like a jack in the box, and the advent of higher-powered halogen bulbs allowed designers in the second half of the century to create more stylized headlights, integrating them more seamlessly into the overall shape of the car. But even these designs were simple. Through the 1980s, headlight design essentially consisted of putting a multicolored plastic shell in front of a few very bright lightbulbs.

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[Photos: Delius/iStock/Getty Images Plus, Philip Openshaw/EyeEm/Getty Images, RelaxFoto/Getty Images]
As the lighting components became stronger and more powerful, designers had more ability to experiment, but much of this happened within what’s known as the lamp can. Due to the size of the lighting elements and the heat they generated, they required a fairly large enclosure. Within the lamp can, though, designers went wild. Zammit says that by the 2000s designers started thinking of these enclosures as jewelry for the car, carving them into reflective gems. “If you looked inside a lamp it had a thousand surfaces and 20 different textures and all these different metals and carbon fibers, brushed aluminum, polished aluminum, brushed steel,” he says. “It looked like each one of these things was going to open a portal to a different dimension.”

Audi’s move into LEDs changed all that. Lighting was no longer considered a discrete element of the car, or just a jewelry item that designers could tack on to grab the eye. Muntada says new and emerging technologies are making it possible for lighting to better blend into the shape of the car, or even be embedded in glass windshields. In cars today, these advancements have meant a smoother overall form. Looking forward, Muntada says lights could be integrated in ways that blur the lines between the body and the lights. “We are part of the whole design,” he says. “We are in the line, the message, the character, the personality of these cars.”


Muntada calls these emerging designs a more complete-feeling experience, with lighting showing up beyond the traditional four corners of the car. “It’s not [true] any more that I have lights to see in the front and lights to be seen on the rear and that’s it,” he says.

[Image: Audi]
Emerging technologies make this blurring of body and light even more possible, according to Stephan Berlitz, head of Audi’s lighting development. Digital micromirrors in Audi’s matrix LED headlights use 1.3 million tiny mirrors to precisely shape and project light, making it possible to sculpt the lighting enclosures without sacrificing lighting performance. And the digital OLED rear lights on some new Audi models have a flexible substrate that allows them to wrap around three-dimensional surfaces. “That not only sharpens the form, but it also makes it possible to integrate digital light design within the exterior of the lights, enabling symbol displays for additional communication with the outside world,” says Berlitz.

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[Image: Audi]
But lighting is not the only technology reshaping cars. As cars adopt more features leading to full autonomy, from backup cameras to blind zone detectors to road scanning sensors, fitting all these devices onto the body is becoming a bit of a puzzle. “All those sensors have to be placed somewhere on the vehicle. And a lot of times they have to be placed behind plastic bits because they do not work through metal bits,” says Scheer of General Motors. Inconveniently, the best place for some of these cameras and sensors is right around the same place that head and taillamps want to be, he says. “So all of these things are fighting for space on the car.”


[Image: Audi]
That may be only a temporary quarrel. The evolution of cars towards autonomy could eventually make the placement of headlights a moot point. When cars can drive themselves, the whole purpose of headlights will change completely.

A NEW “LIGHT LANGUAGE”
Autonomous vehicles don’t really need headlights to see where they’re going. Using a sophisticated combination of lidar, radar, night-vision cameras, and detailed digital maps, autonomous vehicles can detect the world around them whether it’s high noon or a total blackout. For example, the autonomous vehicle company Waymo‘s hardware for the self-driving cars it operates in Phoenix and San Francisco includes40 cameras and sensors per car. By the time these and other companies’ autonomous cars are driving on streets in large numbers, the technology is likely to be in a place where headlights will be unnecessary for navigating even the most complex urban environments.

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[Photo: Waymo]
But lighting will still be needed on these robotic vehicles—mainly so that we humans without the benefit of radar or lidar or night vision can see them when they’re coming. It’ll be part safety, part branding, according to Paul Snyder, a former car designer for Honda who now chairs the undergraduate transportation design program at the College of Creative Studies.


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[Image: Zoox]
“You’re going to have lighting that still signifies here’s theZoox autonomous taxi bot, and you’ll recognize it when it’s coming down the road versus whatever the Waymo taxi bot or the Cruise taxi bot looks like,” Snyder says. “Pedestrians on the street will definitely need to see these very quiet vehicles cruising around, but the vehicles themselves won’t need to illuminate the road. So that’ll be an interesting twist.”

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[Image: Zoox]
Even before we get to this robot car future, the gradual shift to autonomous driving will require designers and policymakers to start reckoning with what, if anything, cars should do to communicate whether they are being controlled by humans or driving themselves. Another concern is how to ensure drivers don’t offload too much of their responsibility onto lighting technologies that promise to point out cyclists or pedestrians, for example. “A lot of that interaction will take place via lighting, and probably some sound as well,” Snyder says.

Audi’s Muntada is already thinking about the role lighting can play in this future communication. Cars will need to have an entirely new “light language,” he says. There will need to be a systematic reimagining of car lights from merely lighting the road or indicating turning and braking to communicating driving states, directional intentions, acceleration and deceleration, road hazards, and the service status of taxi cars operating autonomously.


“It’s something that doesn’t exist at the moment,” Muntada says. “We started already, but creating a designed light language is not so easy, because when we drive we need to understand this language in a fraction in a second.”

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[Image: Zoox]
Using lights in this way, Muntada argues, must be done delicately so that cars don’t become roving spasms of carnival light. “You know that ‘audi’ in Latin is listen. Maybe in the future Audi lights mean talk,” Muntada says. “What I really don’t want is people to say Audi lights shout.”

For lighting designers, the floodgates are opening. Whether it’s animated light sequences in the conventional eyeball-like headlights or embedded LEDs turning entire vehicles into signs announcing your taxi has arrived, lighting technology is enabling bold new functions for light on cars. If Muntada’s right, lights are going to become a critical way for cars and humans to interact more smoothly and safely.


Beyond just making it possible for people to drive at night or adding value to a luxury vehicle, lights may soon be vital mechanisms for the way we let robot cars coexist with humanity. “We believe that this is the biggest challenge that we’ve had so far,” Muntada says, “because it’s trying to put the whole world together in a new way.”

 

Portholes!

 

‘59 Caddy of course!