Porsche Designs ‘Next-Generation’ Headlights That Turn Night Into Day

Drivers will one day be able to spot a Porsche from afar, even at night.

The German automaker has created what it has billed as the “light technology of the generation,” featuring an energy-saving cluster of more than 16,000 “individually controllable micro-LEDs” onto a chip with the surface area “the size of a thumbnail,” explains Hermann-Josef Stappen of the communications team for Porsche’s research and development and technology division.

The invention brings uniformed illumination that’s twice the brightness of high-resolution light distribution built for “top-notch” vehicles, says Porsche. Two units of the ‘HD matrix’, as the technology is termed, are assigned to each headlamp, amounting to four of the innovative modules per car.

The beams are so brilliant, they’re capable of simulating daytime at night for a distance of up to 600 meters (nearly 2,000 feet).

More than 25 painstaking patents have led to the creation of a new status symbol in the dark where Porsche’s four-point headlight graphics are visible at night, with low and high beams activated.

At the same time, the new headlamps are energy-efficient, only tapping on the necessary pixels at any given moment. This means less power is utilized than with similar high-resolution systems “while the amount of light remains the same,” Stappen details.

Porsche acknowledges that there are ways to further crank up the lighting, but it has also considered the requirements for its own cars, which will best benefit from an HD matrix LED configuration of 16,384 pixels per module, creating a total of “32,768 individually controllable pixels per headlight.”

 Image via Porsche

“The new technology must unite different, and sometimes contradictory, requirements in a single system,” explains Stappen, who elaborates: “Only the light that is actually required is generated. This is why it is known as active matrix light generation.”

[via Interesting Engineering and Tech Times, images via Porsche]