Ford has come up with a new anti glare high beam car lighting technology ready to sport with larger Ford vehicles.
This new headlight technology is capable to angle out the light beams away from facing and oncoming vehicles and can also prevent glare caused by rain or snow hitting the driver’s eyes.
The technology will surely help in avoiding visible distractions while driving at high speed on dark highways.
Though it will sport larger Ford vehicles at present, in the near future it will be available in smaller models as well.
The technology will allow Ford drivers to take advantage of their powerful headlights without causing any glaring distraction to oncoming vehicles on the road.
The new headlight consists of a windscreen mounted camera that can detect the headlights of oncoming vehicles and rear lights of tailing vehicles and even cycles and bikes up to 800m away.
The camera then guides the headlight system to beam out the light in an angled manner to avoid causing glaring effect on the drivers of vehicles in front or in rear side.
While glaring headlight beams often cause temporary blindness to the drivers of oncoming vehicles, this new technology can be considered as a godsend security measure for drivers on nighttime highway.
Almost all auto experts agree that the new headlight system is a much awaited move from the car manufacturer.
Dale Gillespie from JenningsFordDirect said: “There are users who just prefer not to use headlights at all because of glaring effect.
“This new system from Ford will let them use their beams more frequently now.”
The new lighting system has been developed by a global team of Ford engineers and affiliate Ford partners and it is designed to work alongside adaptive LED headlights and powerful auto high beam system of Ford.
This anti-glare system is designed to adjust both the angle and intensity of the headlight beam in response to car speed, oncoming vehicle light, ambient light, steering angle and distance from the oncoming and rear vehicle.
Some years ago Carnegie Mellon University team of experts worked on the anti-glare vehicle light and introduced a DLP projector in their project.
To their surprise, this resulted in offering minute control over the emanated light from the headlights.
The researchers became successful in dividing the light beam into millions of tiny beams and thereby diming the light or brightening it by partially controlling the tiny light beams as and when needed.
This positive research output finally resulted in an advanced anti-glare headlight system that make use of a camera to detect oncoming vehicles and accordingly dim out certain light beams to avoid causing glare.
With the present technology Ford went one step ahead as no longer any diming effect is needed.
Maintaining the same intensity of light you can avoid glaring effect as the beams will automatically be angled out preventing glare for the oncoming drivers.
The technology can also deliver great result during snow or rain.
By detecting these elements in the same manner can prevent glare from raindrops or snowflakes right in front of the headlights.
Though the system is still to go through several practical use scenarios before being labeled as perfect, at present it seems to offer a headlight technology quite ahead of time.
Drivers who often have to traverse through the dark highways knows how the glaring light from approaching cars causes terrible distractions, sometimes to the point of temporary blindness.
However attentive you remain, in a long journey you cannot avoid such situations completely.
This is why this new adaptive lighting technology from Ford seems like a robust road safety system.
Following the path shown by anti-dazzle headlamps of Volvo and adaptive high-beam assistant of Mercedes, Ford in this new headlight system introduced a similar windscreen mounted camera to detect both approaching headlights and taillights of cars, bikes and even cycles.
Image courtesy of Ford, via YouTube, with thanks
