Osram press release
Article from CarAndDriver.com

TL;DR: LED Laser based car headlights that consume 30% less energy, don't blind oncoming drivers and reach 600m/2000ft. ahead. (!)
Their pros are obvious. Any cons? Possible other uses?

Laser headlight-might make an interesting portable light!After all HID car headlights are being used as portable lights-have a few!

There are LED headlights appearing on cars now - In many cars the parking light is LED, in a few the low beams as well

I cant say i like their light from a car that is coming in front of me. It is on the edge of blinding, for the same reason many other "efficient" LED designs are - The visible light source area is small, or worse, consisting of multiple dots (as are many parking lights). That is not the case with most Halogen headlights, including the older ones of the prismatic glass type (that maybe glare more in absolute quantities, but the light source in them is fairly large)

And this may pose danger when there is some danger after the car lighting at you - Like a car going without lights behind it, which you would still notice otherwise



The article indeed says that one of the design goals is to make headlights smaller. This is a case where appearance design is counted in before performance (to all sides involved, not onlu Lm/W and beam shaping). So i dont expect big difference from the LED headlights that allready are out there

Well, these high power and sharp focus things are aimed mainly for the glare free high beam. These are systems, which look at the scene using the onboard camera, identify the potential "victims" of the eventual glare and form a kind of "hole" in the beam pattern, so the lights illuminate all the area around, but not where they may cause the glare.
These systems have started as simple moving blinder stripes in the HID focal plane (the position, where the beam shape is formed and from where is then projected onto the road). These plinder stripes are flipped up and then moved horizontally by a small servo so, the formed dark gap follows the oncoming thing. When there are more of such targets, the headlight then switches to a standard low beam.
 I've seen even an implementation aimed for halogen high beam reflectors, using asymmetric beam patterns in each reflector - left one illuminating the left half, right the right half, with very sharp dividing plane between. Normally the beams just touch each other, so together form a continuous beam pattern like tradditional high beam. When a traffic appears, the servos move the beams apart, forming a dark gap (that applies only for the high beam part), where the gap follows the traffic. When the object is too far on the side, the corresponding reflector is just temporarily shut down till the traffic moves out of the high beam pattern.
Both systems above allow only one dark gap and that gap has to be present for the complete height of the beam. So with more cars, the high beam remains practically switched off.

Now with the LED's the fact a single chip can not generate enough light, so more of them are needed, the system is then made so, each individual chip is illuminating only into it's own part, or "pixel" of the overall beam pattern and then the ballast allows individual control of each of these LED's. By that it may form how many and how wide gaps as just necessary, so still allows big parts of the area illuminated.

And TI had even proposed the use of their DLP chip concept to make all the headlight really a high resolution things, on demonstrations even presenting the ability to mask out individual drops of the artificial rain, so it is advertised to even suppress the glare from reflected light in the rain. Well, to be honest I do not believe this will work in the real life - the demonstrations had used just a rain "curtain", where the projections from the camera towards the headlight control is relatively easy computation task (when the distance from the car is the same for all drops). But I don't think it would be feasible to locate all the drops when each is in different distance - it would require to process all drops in front of the driver fully in very accurate 3D space, with latencies in 10's of ms.

Both of above have one drawback: Rather low efficiency of the optical system, so the LED power is in higher 10's of W.

Now with the laser as the primary excitation source it is quite easy to "draw" the beam pattern with just the single laser and an ultrasonic scanning deflection mirror (not that difficult, as it may be just a simple resonant mechanical system), turning the laser ON and OFF and so make the final beam shape (similar as the picture is formed in a CRT). The assumption is, it will be able to achieve way better resolution than the LED pixels, but with way higher efficiency.

Laser headlight-might make an interesting portable light!After all HID car headlights are being used as portable lights-have a few!

Yeah, but rather sorta portable. They're quite greedy so you need a bulky battery to run them longer than a few minutes.

@Ash:
The No. 2 link says:
_{These lasers were designed to prevent blindness—specifically when it comes to oncoming drivers and high-beam headlights.}
...
_{A camera-based Selective Beam system detects vehicles ahead of the car—either in the oncoming lane or those traveling in the same direction as the laser-lighted Bimmer—dimming the portion of the beam shining on the other vehicle. No more blinded drivers, and no more angry gesticulations from the traffic around you.That’s not the only laser trick: BMW says the active headlights can use the car’s GPS coordinates to intelligently light the curves ahead, even before the driver turns the wheel.}

So they're anti-blinding by design. But...  GPS may fail. Oncoming car might not be identified correctly. Or:
_{And a sci-fi sounding “Spotlight” feature uses an infrared camera to detect humans or animals more than 300 feet away, illuminating them to prevent, for example, surprise encounters with skittish roadside deer.}

So the poor animal, pedestrian or cyclist gets full load of "laser into the eye" and that could really be dangerous.
I'm not surprised these are banned in the U.S.A. (read somewhere)

I just hate it when any car behind me manages to obliterate my night sensitivity in my rear-view-mirror with anything more than halogen lamps. Hi-beam is hi-beam no matter what setting you have in your death car.

I just hate it when any car behind me manages to obliterate my night sensitivity in my rear-view-mirror with anything more than halogen lamps. Hi-beam is hi-beam no matter what setting you have in your death car.

That should not happen with the advanced beam control. However I see other mechanism: A driver normally uses new car, with this automatic beam shaping. There he does not have to care about the high beam at all, it just does not glare the others. But then some time he has to swwitch to some other car without that feature. Because his own car had "teaches" him to not care, he will forget to switch to low beam way more frequently than usually. Who or what to blame? Not that straight forward...

The idea of the laser lit headlights is to REDUCE power consumption over other light sources such as halogen,HID and even LED.So if you used the laser headlight as a portable light-the battery could run the light even longer!and the portable light would be more compact,lighter weight for its light output.The optics of the laser lamp won't allow the laser to shine out of the fixture.The laser headlight works by focusing the blue laser beam into a phosphor lens converting the blue laser to brilliant white,focused light.Much like that used in laser lamphouses for projectors.You could also vary the focus and light output of the laser device.Indeed would make a GREAT portable lamp!And,the long life of the laser---30,000 to 50,000 hrs!!I WANT one!The efficiency factor of the laser lit lights could go up to 170 lumen per watt!

Well, the efficacy of the headlights alone is not directly that important. What does matter is the performance (fixed beam switched manually, vs some automatic glare prevention control) and the overall fuel consumption of the car.

The first needs accurate beam shaping, so the laser with it's ability to focus to really small spot makes the automatic beam pattern not that difficult without loosing too much light (as it happens with classic sources with the blinders and LED's).

For achieving the lowest fuel consumption while keeping the lighting just on the minimum required performance, nothing can beat the halogens. The main reason is, all other systems are just plain heavier and that "cost" more fuel to carry than generating the electricity for the rather inefficient halogens. WIth electric vehicles the difference is even greater, as the electricity for the halogens is available with way lower losses (alternator in a classical car vs a DCDC converter in the EV), while the engine/motor output power to carry the extra weight is essentially the same with both "classic", as well as EV.


When speaking about a compact torch, there the laser may indeed outperform the LED's with a long throw, narrow beam. But the drawback is, the laser system occupies way greater space than the LED. That means with the smaller LED you may put there larger battery, so have more "brute force" energy available. Of course, with the really narrow, long throw beam and really huge battery (sized for 10's of hours operation), the laser efficiency may likely gain more than it cost on the reduced battery size.
But if speaking about mainly wide beam usage with compact size and required burn time of just half hour or so, I'm afraid the extra efficiency won't pay off compare to the reduced battery size due to the occupied space.

Well, the efficacy of the headlights alone is not directly that important. What does matter is the performance (fixed beam switched manually, vs some automatic glare prevention control) and the overall fuel consumption of the car.

The first needs accurate beam shaping, so the laser with it's ability to focus to really small spot makes the automatic beam pattern not that difficult without loosing too much light (as it happens with classic sources with the blinders and LED's).

For achieving the lowest fuel consumption while keeping the lighting just on the minimum required performance, nothing can beat the halogens. The main reason is, all other systems are just plain heavier and that "cost" more fuel to carry than generating the electricity for the rather inefficient halogens. WIth electric vehicles the difference is even greater, as the electricity for the halogens is available with way lower losses (alternator in a classical car vs a DCDC converter in the EV), while the engine/motor output power to carry the extra weight is essentially the same with both "classic", as well as EV.


When speaking about a compact torch, there the laser may indeed outperform the LED's with a long throw, narrow beam. But the drawback is, the laser system occupies way greater space than the LED. That means with the smaller LED you may put there larger battery, so have more "brute force" energy available. Of course, with the really narrow, long throw beam and really huge battery (sized for 10's of hours operation), the laser efficiency may likely gain more than it cost on the reduced battery size.
But if speaking about mainly wide beam usage with compact size and required burn time of just half hour or so, I'm afraid the extra efficiency won't pay off compare to the reduced battery size due to the occupied space.

But how much heavier? On a 1500kg car how much fuel consumption increases if you add 2kg of electronics/optical beam control?
A standard car with 200W of light consumes about 2-4% more fuel with ligth on. If you half the power consumption of the light you can gain 1-2% of fuel consumption with ligth on. Then it clearly depends how much you drive with light on...

But how much heavier? On a 1500kg car how much fuel consumption increases if you add 2kg of electronics/optical beam control?
A standard car with 200W of light consumes about 2-4% more fuel with ligth on. If you half the power consumption of the light you can gain 1-2% of fuel consumption with ligth on. Then it clearly depends how much you drive with light on...

2kg vs 200W: The 200W does not consume 2-4% more. It is a corresponding percentage of the complete alternator consumption, but the main consumer on an alternator is it's cooling fan (either separated, or recently in the form of fins integrated into the rotor shape). And it's consumption does not depend on electrical load.
But even when it would be so, the lights are ON barely 20..30% of the driving time, so you have to dvide the consumption by 3 to 5. But the weight is carried by the car all the time.
Other factor is the headlight profile - because it's position, it has quite strong impact on aerodynamics, what has fuel economy consequences in the range of 10% or above...

But most important: Either of these is at least an order of magnitude below (so practically negligible) what variation is caused by the driving style differences and environmental factors (air temperature => air density at winter vs summer could be easily responsible for 20% aerodynamic drag difference, tyres have different drag,...). And mainly with the driving style, the better visibility allows way greater possibilities to drive smoother, so with less fuel requirements and so on.

Another example of frequent misjudgement:
An airco compressor may easily consume kW's, which is in the range of 5..10% of the fuel consumption.
Yet it is way more efficient than using open windows with consequent destruction of the car aerodynamics, easily costing 10..20% extra fuel (even a relatively small gap)...
And with an airco OFF and closed windows "to get the best economy", the consequent driver exhaustion will easily double the fuel consumption (just because of the resulting driving style), not yet speaking about the safety...