Seeing the light

Lamplight has turned to superlight in the hightech motor world. ALASTAIR SLOANE looks at developments.

The noise early car engines made travelled much further than the beam of the vehicle's weak headlights.

These days it's exactly the opposite, especially with the technology a German-Italian company is developing.

Automotive Lighting is a 50-50 venture between German automotive component specialists Robert Bosch and Fiat's Magneti Marelli.

The company spent more than $40 million last year improving gas discharge technology to the point where Bosch's dual-function Litronic Xenon system creates almost daylight conditions at night.

Townspeople in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in England would have broken out the cider barrels and Morris dancing kit at such a development.

The motor car, then very much a novelty, was a noisy critter and its headlights at best cast a dim glow. The headlights in the six-volt Volkswagen Beetle of the 1950s and 60s glowed like the Starship Enterprise in comparison.

Pedestrians in rural England could hear the new-fangled racket of the motor but not always where it was coming from.

Daytime was okay, when word of the car's progress seemed to somehow travel as fast as the car itself. But the evening was trickier. Was it on the old north-south coach road or the east-west one?

By the time pedestrians, or people travelling by horse and trap, saw the headlights the car was almost upon them. So magistrates in England ruled that motorists chugging along after dusk had to have a runner go ahead of the car when it neared a village.

There was no shortage of runners because the appearance of a car always attracted attention. The job carried a tip of a farthing or so from the mostly wealthy motorists and the runner got to carry a lamp through the village.

The lamp was about as useless as the car's headlights, but it served as a sort of deputy sheriff's badge. It gave the runner his 15 minutes of fame 50 years before Truman Capote made the phrase popular.

The lamp-carrier was the torch-bearer, heralding the arrival of a new age. Pedestrians couldn't shoo him away like they could the youngsters who ran ahead of every car they saw.

There were a lot of runners and pedestrians before proper roads were developed, but nobody was killed - at least, not in English villages.

The death of the first pedestrian was near New York's Central Park in 1899, when a man alighted from a horse-drawn tram late in the day and stepped into the path of one of the few cars in the city.

Now, a century on, the latest headlights have the technology to light up Central Park itself - and perhaps Broadway to boot.

The Bosch-Magneti Marelli merger makes the company the world's second biggest automotive lighting operation after Hella. Before, Bosch was the fifth biggest and Magneti Marelli the eighth.

Bosch is known for its hi-tech and high quality workmanship and Magneti Mirelli has a reputation for production skill.

Automotive Lighting's $40 million expenditure last year included developing headlights which adapt to different driving conditions and switch from high to low beam automatically.

Another project, part of what the company calls its "adaptive light distribution programme," goes even further, using special halogen lenses with the Bosch Litronic Xenon system to shine "around corners" and make night driving safer and more relaxed.

The Xenon system's control unit uses information in the car's computer - such as speed, steering angle and navigation - and then varies the illumination.

For example, on a wet surface the beam of light will fall further ahead on the side of the road to improve the driver's visibility.

The system can, at the turn of a switch, provide a wide "pool" of light to illuminate each side of the road, or project a strong beam in its own lane and a lower, less dazzling beam towards oncoming traffic.

It sure beats a jogger with a lamp.