Hella expands market position for chip-based headlamp technologies
Operating under the Forvia umbrella brand, Hella has started the world’s first series production for its “Solid State Lighting | High Definition” headlamp at its home base in Lippstadt, Germany.
The company has also received further high-volume series orders for this technology from a German as well as an international premium car manufacturer. With this, Hella has acquired customer projects for SSL | HD technology with a total volume of around €1.5 billion.
“The market launch of our SSL | HD headlamps is a milestone in automotive lighting technology with which we are setting completely new standards in terms of performance, functionality and cost efficiency,” says Yves Andres, Managing Director Lighting at Hella. “Today, we benefit from the fact that we relied on this technology for high-resolution headlamps at an early stage and pushed ahead with its development. On this basis, we have established a market-leading position, which we are continuously expanding outward with further customer orders and the next product generation.”
The SSL | HD headlamp is an evolutionary further development of established LED matrix systems. With this headlamp technology, up to 25,000 pixels per LED can be intelligently and individually switched, depending on customer requirements, and thus a wide range of new, high-resolution lighting functionalities can be realized. These include lane markings, symbol projections, lane brightening and light carpets. Other safety-enhancing functions such as projections of safety distances or safety zones for cyclists or pedestrians are also conceivable.
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For this technology, the company has further miniaturized the light source. Thanks to its significantly reduced installation space requirements, it offers automotive manufacturers additional degrees of freedom in headlamp integration and vehicle design. At the same time, software-based control of the light points makes it possible to implement the “world headlamp principle” already successfully implemented by Hella. This means that all necessary adaptations to the headlamp, for example due to region-specific requirements such as right-hand and left-hand traffic, can be mapped purely digitally in an identical light module. The variety of up to twelve technically different variants of the headlamp that would otherwise be required to supply different market segments is thus eliminated. On the customer side, this can reduce development costs and capital expenditure by around half.
With the customer projects that have now been acquired, Hella is not only expanding its existing customer base for SSL | HD technology to include further automotive manufacturers. In addition to the initial start-up in Lippstadt, it will also go into series production at further Hella lighting plants in China, Mexico, the Czech Republic and Slovakia in the coming years. Hella thus aims to have this headlamp system on the road in all regions worldwide by 2025.
www.hella.com
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