Charge of the Light Brigade - the rise of the LED

Something I’ve started to notice as I travel around the roads of the UK in my car, on my bike, running or walking. What has happened to car design?  Car designers seem to have given up, downed tools almost.  Put their sketch pads down and stopped ordering any more clay to make nice models of their designs.  Gone are the days it seems where you could look at a car and know what it was, the make and more than likely the model.  Where manufacturers went to great lengths to distinguish their brands and its models through unique design and features.

Instead, as we en enter the dawn of the electric/hybrid era, cars just seem to have become so very dull and bland and more than ever all look very similar, to the point where you struggle to make out what it is you are looking at…..is that a Jaecoo, or a BYD, maybe its an OMADA, no surely its a Chery…..no its a Leapmotor.  Its as if the design department  has had its budget stopped, so they’ve packed up and left the building.  No longer required to design great looking motors that would become posters on kids bedroom walls.

Instead, the budget has been split between two departments.  A small amount was allocated to the creation of a new department, call it AI design, where a room full of computers sit alone, day and night, churning out new car designs that look like they have been designed by, well, AI.

So what about the rest of the budget I hear you ask?  Those same travels in my car, on my bike, during my runs and walks have given me the answer I think.  The budget went into the lighting department.  The lighting department it seems now has carte blanche to take over the mantle of trying to make their particular brand of cars different and more distinguishable, like the old design department did, but now, using nothing more than the humble LED.  Lighting departments have been working overtime, burning the diode at both ends, as the head of lighting sets the objective to get as many LEDs in as many places as possible and make them as bright as possible.

And it seems like the head of lighting's message has got through.  We now have illuminating manufacturers name badges front and rear, because now you have no idea what car you are following or looking at so an illuminated badge might help.  We have illuminated grill surrounds, rear lights replaced with a rear LED strip that stretches the whole width of the car.  A white LED strip that stretches the whole width of the front of the car.  Headlights that dance and make patterns when the car starts up and are ‘intelligent’ so that they can light up different parts of the road at different brightnesses depending on what traffic is coming toward them.  Except when they are aren’t so ‘intelligent’  and you have your retinas burned by glaring LEDs such that all you can see for the next mile is green dots in front of your eyes.

And that’s before we open the car door and take a glance at your new ambient lighting, where you can spend an eternity selecting different palettes of interior hues to suit your mood or any one of the 100 new driving modes you can select from.  I must confess at this point, that my son recently brought a ‘new’ Mercedes A35.  I think Mercedes seem to be the king of the ambient light and on a late night drive with him, I found myself actually starting to like the warmth provided by the ambient lighting.  Until that was I noticed that the dashboard and air vents were reflected all around me in the windscreen and front windows, like an immersive heads up display.  As a driver, I’d find that highly irritating.

Going back to those dancing headlights.  What is it with these anyway?  They add no functionality at all as far as I can fathom.  What they do add is an almost certain insurance write-off the moment you are hit by someone trying to adjust their ambient lighting or being distracted by the reflection of their dashboard in their windscreen and you find out that just a new set of dancing headlights will set you back more than your car is currently worth.

Perhaps just as worrying as the standardisation of all things LED into new cars, is the rise of the ‘aftermarket’ add on LED’s that seem to have filled a gap for owners of older cars that don’t want to miss out on the new LED craze.  I’ve seen a car with illuminated centre caps on the wheels and a family hatch back that had its rear spoiler adorned with a full length LED set up that acted as additional indicators to the perfectly functional ones that come as standard with the car originally.

We can only but hope that the design department gets its budget back soon and the current fad for LED’s starts to wane.  Perhaps we could go back to being able to recognise cars by their unique design instead of their illuminating badges and grills.  Lights could just be functional again, used to light the way and indicate a change in direction rather than being the defining features of a cars identity.

Until such time, we will have to accept that lighting is in charge and be prepared to be blinded by intelligent lighting systems that aren’t always so intelligent and lights that just seen to be far more brighter than they really need to be.