Photo: bmw
BMW fought a hard war with Audi to bring the first car with laser lights into production but it seems like some countries don’t really care. What they do pretend to care about is road safety. Hm... Seems like something’s wrong here.
As you probably already know, there are a couple of countries out there that forbid companies to sell cars fitted with such lights. Amongst them you’ll two of the biggest in the world: the US and Australia, both with immense sizes.
In the US, the archaic headlight-brightness regulations make the new laser technology illegal. The reasons behind it are rather ridiculous though and officials claim that the problem will be solved sooner rather than later. It’s still perplexing though that a country that claims to be at the forefront of technology in every possible aspect is reluctant towards allowing such features to be used and sold.
In Australia, officials are already conducting tests and working on homologating such headlights: “We’re still in the approval process to get that through with the authorities, but I think we’re looking at that being a successful process, and we still have to wait a little bit for supply constraints to ease up,” said BMW Australia Director of Finance, Peter Buchauer for Car Advice.
However, even if it passes all the tests, in order to actually drive an i8 with such features you’d have to be quite wealthy. That’s because in the land below, the hybrid plug-in sports car starts at AUD299,000 ($282,000) and that doesn’t include the price of the new headlights. That’s right, they’ll be a standalone option.
Even so, the laser lights are crazy enough and do feel like they are from the future. Compared to LED lamps, they consume 30 percent less energy while illuminating to about 2,000 feet (600 meters), more than twice as far as the current top of the line models.
In the US, the archaic headlight-brightness regulations make the new laser technology illegal. The reasons behind it are rather ridiculous though and officials claim that the problem will be solved sooner rather than later. It’s still perplexing though that a country that claims to be at the forefront of technology in every possible aspect is reluctant towards allowing such features to be used and sold.
In Australia, officials are already conducting tests and working on homologating such headlights: “We’re still in the approval process to get that through with the authorities, but I think we’re looking at that being a successful process, and we still have to wait a little bit for supply constraints to ease up,” said BMW Australia Director of Finance, Peter Buchauer for Car Advice.
However, even if it passes all the tests, in order to actually drive an i8 with such features you’d have to be quite wealthy. That’s because in the land below, the hybrid plug-in sports car starts at AUD299,000 ($282,000) and that doesn’t include the price of the new headlights. That’s right, they’ll be a standalone option.
Even so, the laser lights are crazy enough and do feel like they are from the future. Compared to LED lamps, they consume 30 percent less energy while illuminating to about 2,000 feet (600 meters), more than twice as far as the current top of the line models.
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