After debuting in German luxury car brands in Europe several years ago, LEDs are finally entering the mainstream headlight market in the US, with the Ford Motor Company announcing that it will be equipping its new line of F-150 light trucks with an LED headlamp. Osram and Sylvania have a long tradition of supplying automotive headlamps. Sylvania, in fact, produced sealed beams for cars back in the 1980s, and more recently, it manufactured halogen and Xenon sources for automobile headlights. Osram Sylvania will now be the first to introduce an LED-based headlamp assembly on a mainstream vehicle in the US market. As with many applications, LEDs offer an opportunity to reduce power consumption and maintenance requirements. The new Osram headlights should last the life of the truck. Perhaps more significantly, LEDs permit Osram and Ford to leverage the LED's unique characteristics, and depart from the limitations of the traditional bulky light source and reflector combination. In addition to the obvious benefits of longer life, LEDs have the potential to change the headlight's beam angle and colour characteristics. Done properly, these characteristics could be used to improve the lighting system's overall effectiveness: the ‘human factors’ of the design. In a recent article in LEDs Magazine, Ford claims: “... the LED-based design will outperform traditional headlamps optically. Ford's engineers took advantage of the small size of LED sources to create a unique design that relies on 16 precision surfaces and 80 facets on the lens to spread the light evenly on the roadway.”
