Next up in automobile awesomeness – lasers used as headlights

First it was just the standard old lightbulb, then along came halogen headlamps, and finally the current favorite is LED lights to shine your way down the road at night.

However BMW isn’t satisfied with stopping there as they have their researchers working to bring laser powered headlights to their cars, and we’re not talking about sometime in the future but rather in some models very soon.

What is driving this work forward is two factors. The first is that laser headlights are more energy efficient that even the LED ones and for electric vehicles every volt counts. While LED headlights only generate 100 lumens per watt the lasers will generate 170 lumens per watt.

The second driving factor is of course the design factor. In contrast to the 1-millimeter-square size LEDs used in car headlights today the laser diode used is only 10 microns in width. As Wayne Cunningham at Cnet notes this opens all kinds of possibilities.

But the tiny size of the lasers open up a lot of possibilities. Instead of a large, round piece of glass, a laser headlight could shine through the cross pieces of the car’s grille, and so remain hidden when not in use. The traditional dual-headlight configuration would also no longer be necessary, as a row of laser diodes could peek out from the front edge of the hood.

As laser light is a coherent beam, it can be precisely shaped, and also changed at will. Instead of a separate high-beam lamp, lasers can be computer controlled to form a low-beam or high-beam pattern.

While this technology is still a couple of years out talk is that we will see them first in BMW’s i8 hybrid brand of cars.

image courtesy of Cnet