What are high-resolution headlights?

Car manufacturers are competing all the time to ensure that their vehicles have the latest technological innovations.

Sometimes this competition produces game-changing inventions that reshape the next generation of vehicles. Other times it creates outlandish and impractical features that are swiftly forgotten and left behind on old concepts.

One of the most exciting new technologies on the automotive scene are high-resolution headlights. These headlights use projections to ensure drivers keep their eyes on the road when reading important head-up display updates.

Head-up displays, positioned behind the steering wheel, present important facts and figures to the driver when they’re travelling. High-resolution headlights will be able to project some of this data onto the road ahead so that motorists no longer have to avert their eyes toward the dash when in motion.

The headlights could be used to display important information such as traffic updates, weather warnings, speed limits, and directions. The projections could also be used to inform motorists how much distance they should give cyclists when overtaking by mapping out pathways onto the road in front.

If successfully implemented, this technology could be a very valuable safety feature for nighttime driving. In the UK, 40% of collisions occur in darkness despite the fact that there are far fewer drivers on the roads during these hours.

The risk of a collision greatly increases when drivers look away from the road. A vehicle travelling at 90 km/h covers 25 metres per second and quick glances towards a screen can mean “driving blind” for substantial distances which is especially dangerous in the dark.

Headlight projection technology has been explored in the past with Mercedes-Benz’s Digital Light. More recently, Ford has been leading the way, coining the name high-resolution headlights earlier this year.

The press release from Ford revealed that they are still in the process of trialling the technology and it is not known how long it will take for this creation to land on a production vehicle. For now, judgement on whether high-resolution headlights are the real deal or merely a sales gimmick will have to wait.