Lighting up the dark - improving road safety with intelligent lighting

I've just been reading a very interesting article published by Audi about the latest developments in car lighting.

I have just spent 2 weeks driving in Austria where all vehicles now drive with the headlights on at all times.

The article can be found at car.kak.net

Yes for the very reasons given in the article. Some of the same applies in Austria where, because of the high mountains you can spend a lot of time in and out of the shadows. This I believe is why the Austrain government has run the campaign to get all drivers to drive with their lights on during the day.

I must say the auto headlights were great on my drive through Germany. Part of the route I use is a relatively new autobahn that has quite a lot of tunnels and unlike the UK everyone puts their headlights on when going through tunnels. It was nice to sit back and concentrate on the driving and let the lights look after themselves. As there is generally a speed limit of 50 mph through the tunnels I set the cruise control to 50 and just clicked the lever as I approched the tunnel and went back up to about 120mph after the tunnel by pressing the accelerator. A few years ago I got stopped by a police motorcycle patrol in Austria for going to fast in a tunnel. Mind you when I worked out how much the on-the-spot fine was I couldn't believe it - about £10.