Despite US dominance in so many different areas of technology, weâre sadly somewhat of a backwater when it comes to car headlamps. Itâs been this way for many decades, a result of restrictive federal vehicle regulations that get updated rarely. The latest lights to try to work their way through red tape and onto the road are active-matrix LED lamps, which can shape their beams to avoid blinding oncoming drivers.
From the 1960s, Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards allowed for only sealed high- and low-beam headlamps, and as a result, automakers like Mercedes-Benz would sell cars with less capable lighting in North America than it offered to European customers.
A decade ago, this was still the case. In 2014, Audi tried unsuccessfully to bring its new laser high-beam technology to US roads. Developed in the racing crucible that is the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the laser lights illuminate much farther down the road than the high beams of the time, but in this case, the lighting tech had to satisfy both the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Food and Drug Administration, which has regulatory oversight for any laser products.
The good news is that by 2019, laser high beams were finally an available option on US roads, albeit once the power got turned down to reduce their range.
NHTSAâs opposition to advanced lighting tech is not entirely misplaced. Obviously, being able to see far down the road at night is a good thing for a driver. On the other hand, being dazzled or blinded by the bright headlights of an approaching driver is categorically not a good thing. Nor is losing your night vision to the glare of a car (itâs always a pickup) behind you with too-bright lights that fill your mirrors.
This is where active-matrix LED high beams come in, which use clusters of controllable LED pixels. Think of it like a more advanced version of the âauto high beamâ function found on many newer cars, which uses a carâs forward-looking sensors to know when to dim the lights and when to leave the high beams on.
Here, sensor data is used much more granularly. Instead of turning off the entire high beam, the car only turns off individual pixels, so the roadway is still illuminated, but a car a few hundred feet up the road wonât be.
Rather than design entirely new headlight clusters for the US, most OEMsâ solution was to offer the hardware here but disable the beam-shaping functionâeasy to do when itâs just software. But in 2022, NHTSA relentedânine years after Toyota first asked the regulator to reconsider its stance.
It sounds like describing Ngâs tank from Snow Crash.
âŚI want to drive Ngâs tank from Snow Crash.
Ng drove his vehicle from a VR interface:
Ng himself, or at least, Ngâs avatar, is a small, very dapper Vietnamese man in his fifties, hair plastered to his head, wearing military-style khakis. At the time Y.T. comes into his office, he is leaning forward in his chair, getting his shoulders rubbed by a geisha.
But it is a very strange thing to do, for one reason: The geisha is just a picture on Ngâs goggles, and on Y.T.'s. And you canât get a massage from a picture. So why bother?
Ng sits back down and the geisha goes right back to it. Ngâs desk is a nice French antique with a row of small television monitors along the back edge, facing toward him. He spends most of his time watching the monitors, even when he is talking.
Y.T. gets up and walks around behind his desk to look.
Each of the little TV monitors is showing a different view out his van: windshield, left window, right window, rearview. Another one has an electronic map showing his position: inbound on the San Bernardino, not far away.
âThe van is under voice command,â he explains. âI removed the steering-wheel-and-pedal interface because I found verbal commands more convenient. This is why I will sometimes make unfamiliar sounds with my voice â I am controlling the vehicleâs systems.â
Recognizing his van is easy enough. It is enormous. It is eight feet high and wider than it is high, which would have made it a wide load in the old days when they had laws. The construction is boxy and angular. it has been welded together out of the type of flat, dimpled steel plate usually used to make manhole lids and stair treads. The tires are huge, like tractor tires with a more subtle tread, and there are six of them: two axles in back and one in front. The engine is so big that, like an evil spaceship in a movie, Y.T. feels its rumbling in her ribs before she can see it; it is kicking out diesel exhaust through a pair of squat vertical red smokestacks that project from the roof, toward the rear. The windshield is a perfectly flat rectangle of glass about three by eight feet, smoked so black that Y.T. canât make out an outline of anything inside. The snout of the van is festooned with every type of high-powered light known to science, like this guy hit a New South Africa franchise on a Saturday night and stole every light off every roll bar, and a grille has been constructed across the front, welded together out of rails torn out of an abandoned railroad somewhere. The grille alone probably weighs more than a small car.
âI tried prostheses for a while â some of them are very good. But nothing is as good as a motorized wheelchair. And then I got to thinking, why do motorized wheelchairs always have to be tiny pathetic things that strain to go up a little teeny ramp? So I bought this â it is an airport firetruck from Germany â and converted it into my new motorized wheelchair.â
âAmerica is wonderful because you can get anything on a drive-through basis. Oil change, liquor, banking, car wash, funerals, anything you want â drive through! So this vehicle is much better than a tiny pathetic wheelchair. It is an extension of my body.â
âWhen the geisha rubs your back?â
Ng mumbles something and his pouch begins to throb and undulate around his body. âShe is a daemon, of course. As for the massage, my body is suspended in an electrocontractive gel that massages me when I need it. I also have a Swedish girl and an African woman, but those daemons are not as well rendered.â
âAnd the mint julep?â
âThrough a feeding tube. Nonalcoholic, ha ha.â
That might be a bit of a jump past where we are today technologically, since heâs got a tactile-feedback rig for VR and the car driving under voice control. But, yeah, itâd be a pretty capable vehicle.
