Regardless of whether its day or night, being able to see where you're going is rather important to a truck driver when you could be in charge of over 80,000lbs. of equipment and freight. It's therefore not surprising that headlight technology is a constant focus of the trucking industry. One of the latest steps forward is the adaptive headlights that use lasers to augment traditional high beams without blinding everyone in their path.
If the secret to night driving was just more powerful illumination, things would be much simpler. Brighter illumination is fine if you're the one behind the wheel, less so if you're in font of that rig or passing by with incoming traffic. High beam abusers are always the ones you find yourself starring at while driving, in a car at least, in your rearview mirror or passing you by on the left. You want to think the driver doesn’t realize there on, they have an electrical/mechanical malfunction, or maybe the driver is impaired in some way. For those reasons you don’t turn yours on and tailgate him or give him a “friendly” physical/verbal gesture. But you will always have that wonder, “He has his high beams on, on purpose!” Laser-powered headlights aim to solve this problem.
Laser-powered headlights or “Laserbeams!” are made up of multiple blue LED lasers and prisms positioned at the rear of the assembly which fire onto a set of mirrors closer to the front. Those mirrors focus the laser energy into a lens filled with yellow phosphorus. The yellow phosphorus, when excited by the blue laser, emits an intense white light. That white light shines backward, onto a reflector. The reflector then bounces the more diffused white light forward, shining it out of the front of the headlight casing as a beam that is powerful, yet still able to be gazed upon.
They’ve been designed many different ways, but the most interesting part of the design is that they auto-adjust from low to high beam direction. By involving a camera seamlessly positioned behind the rear view mirror, or in that position for a truck, it performs like human eyes to a computer. It detects from a safe distance surrounding light change, traffic of all sorts, and weather differences. With that data, driver speed, direction of vehicle, and many other fraction of a second inputs, it decides best forward lighting for travel.
Laser-powered headlights have over twice the range distance of an average OEM LED high beam, with 1000 times the luminosity strength and uses half the power. Because laser-powered headlights can put out more brightness for their size, the headlamp units themselves can be much smaller too. Although, lasers are in use inside the headlight assembly, they transform into harmless beams of light by prisms and are tested to be safe on human and animals since the lasers are reflected at an engineered angle.
Unfortunately, they won't be seen on US roads, thanks to inflexible regulations written before humankind landed on the moon. That's a consequence of decades-old federal regulations that require car headlights to have high beams and low beams and nothing else, FMVSS 108. None the less, LED headlights have the interest of car buyers and are becoming the standard for new commercial vehicles to have or becoming retrofitted in vehicles on roads today. They have proven their efficiencies by the industries that use them and recently have taken over the consumer’s choice. Laser-powered headlights have some time to do that again, and have even more time to be federally regulated.