Audi wins laser light race

It will be laser-light sabers at 10 paces in Bavaria tonight after Audi sneakily usurped BMW, confirming it will be the first car-maker to bring laser-powered headlights into production.

While BMW has led the development, marketing and PR push behind laser lights, it has held off introducing the laser-powered headlights to coincide with the on-sale date of its high-tech i8 plug-in hybrid sports car.

Audi has had no such qualms, though, producing a limited-edition version of the outgoing R8 sports car just to stake a historical claim as the first to offer production laser lights.

This afternoon in Europe (overnight in Australia), Audi announced the R8 LMX, which also brings modest increases in power and performance, will go on sale in Europe from early this summer, so around June-July.

First deliveries of the BMW i8, meantime, don’t take place until August in Europe and early next year in Australia, where BMW last month said it already had names on 15 of the 50 as-yet-unpriced i8s it plans to sell in 2015.

Just 99 LMXs will be produced in total and Audi Australia has confirmed it will make available “a very limited number” here, probably by the end of this year.

Even though Audi will build less than 100, it’s enough for it to lay claim to the world’s first laser-equipped production car.

Now BMW is likely to take the consolation prize, instead claiming its system will be the first on a full-time series production car.

The R8 LMX is priced at €210,000 ($A309,000) in Germany – around 20 per cent more than the top-shelf R8 V10 plus Coupe, which costs $408,200 here.

Audi says the 419kW mid-engined coupe can hit 100km/h in just 3.4 seconds (making it 15kW more powerful than the V10 plus and one-tenth quicker to 100km/h), but the real reason it exists is as a low-development, fast-delivery platform for the laser-powered high-beam lights, which turn night into day at up to 600 metres.

The R8 was the first car to introduce full LED headlights in 2008 and it also introduced progressive LED indicator lighting with its facelift in 2012. Audi also claimed a breakthrough with the Matrix LED system in the A8 in 2013.

Its laser light victory will cut deep at BMW, which has been working on laser lighting for years and, when Audi announced during January’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that it was also working on laser lighting, it drew a rapid response from BMW’s marketing team.

BMW even ran a tongue-in-cheek print ad congratulating Audi but insisting that only delivering a production laser light counted as a win.

It was so confident it would be first that it allowed selected journalists to drive a 7 Series fitted with laser lights more than two months ago.

Audi will show its laser-light technology during the June 14-15 Le Mans 24 Hour race, where its R18 e-tron quattro will use similar laser-powered headlights instead of the blistering full LED systems it has used in the recent past.

Sitting on the modified chassis architecture of the superseded Lamborghini Gallardo, the R8 LMX uses a mid-mounted, 5.2-litre V10 engine to deliver a 320km/h top speed while delivering an NEDC combined consumption figure of 12.9L/100km.

“Audi has long dominated the most important 24-hour race. In addition to the outstanding TDI drive technology, a maximum light yield gives our pilots a major advantage and with night racing in particular this is a key factor to our success,” Audi’s Board Member in charge of Engineering and Development, Professor Doctor Ulrich Hackenberg, claimed.

“The transfer of the laser headlight to the Audi R8 LMX underscores our leading position in lighting technology. The safety benefit this provides to the customer truly represents Vorsprung durch Technik.”
While the R8 LMX won’t use a pure laser-powered light, it will use a combination of LED and laser-powered high beams. The so-called Laser Lights actually shine back towards the car and never leak onto the road and are used to excite a phosphor converter to create a brilliant, white light source.

With the R8 LMX system, each headlight has twice the range of a full LED headlight at high beam by using four high-powered laser diodes (the i8 uses three). Producing a blue laser light just 450 micrometres wide, these pass through the converter to deliver a bright white light at a colour temperature of 5500 Kelvin.

The laser component of the light is functional from 60km/h upwards to supplement the work already being done by the LED light system. It’s also paired to a camera-based sensor system to detect other cars, going either way, and the car then adjusts the light pattern so they are not dazzled.

The R8 LMX comes in just one colour, Ara Blue, and uses a large rear spoiler and a larger front splitter to increase downforce. It sits on 19-inch wheels with 235/35 R19 front and 305/30 R19 rear tyres and uses carbon-ceramic brakes as standard.

It is also the last gasp of a junior supercar, due to be replaced early next year, that uses a seven-speed dual-clutch transmission and all-wheel drive with a relatively old-fashioned viscous-coupling centre differential to deliver it power.

Whatever else the R8 LMX delivers, it will always be known as the car that usurped a position BMW had probably earned with its laser lighting. Both manufacturers use Osram as the laser-light technical supplier and BMW already has rollout plans this year to fit the lights to the 7 Series and the next X6 as well.

The lights are so powerful that they exceed the maximum production-car lighting regulations in the United States by a factor of three and the only more powerful production light in the world is bolted to the Leopard tank and is taller than a man.

The i8’s production laser light will produce 344 Lumens, though it’s pre-engineered for 400 Lumens and is limited to comply with EU law.

The lights are designed to deliver two exceptionally bright oval spots that search out well beyond the standard LEDs, but which then arc away from other cars to provide enormous vision without impacting other road users.

The lights not only track around corners on swivels, but they also move vertically and horizontally around other road users, from cars to motorcycles to bicycles, leaving a black spot where the other road user is.

The system fires up in high beam with two intense bright lights, which seem a little like long rabbit ears, nearly joining, but leaving a slightly darker patch between them.

Ideal for a country like Australia, with its potential for hours of barely interrupted high beam driving, the system lights up the trees, grass and scrub on the roadside like nothing before it.

“You never see the actual laser part of the laser light. The laser just excites the phosphorous and the photons from the phosphorous create the light and that comes back towards the car and is reflected out the front of the unit,” BMW’s Manager of Pre-Development for Exterior Lighting, Thomas Hausmann, said.