Ford Testing High-Tech Headlights That Highlight Humans, Animals

2015 is a year that Ford is putting an emphasis on performance, debuting an EcoBoost-powered Raptor, the all-new Shelby GT350, and capping it all off with a revived Ford GT. With so much exciting news from our favorite Fords, it can be easy to overlook some of the many innovations the Blue Oval is concurrently working on, the sort of things that make the daily driving experience easier and safer.

Two of these new technologies are the Camera-Based Advanced Front Lighting System and Spot Lighting System, which together can illuminate more of the road while identifying pedestrians, cyclists, and large animals for the driver. While it looks and sounds like science-fiction, these two systems may be closer to entering production cars than any of us realized.

The Camera-Based Advanced Front Lighting System takes the general idea behind headlights, and expands on it exponentially. Building on the technologies found in the Adaptive Front Lighting System and Traffic Sign Recognition, the Camera-Based system will automatically widen the headlight beams when coming to road junctions and roundabouts. Using GPS data, the fancy headlights will also widen at certain corners and dips in the road, giving drivers the best view in the lowest light.

Yet headlights can only do so much alone, which is where the Spot Lighting System comes into play. Using a nose-mounted infrared camera, the system can identify up to eight individual pedestrians, cyclists, or large animals for the driver, even in low light conditions. It’s the sort of things we’ve only seen in moves like Bladerunner and I, Robot, but according to Ford, this technology is just a few years from being integrated into production cars.

It’s the kind of technology that isn’t as sexy as a 600-horsepower GT supercar, and most of us will probably take it for granted, right up until the moment it saves our (or someone else’s) life.

About the author

Chris Demorro

Christopher DeMorro is a freelance writer and journalist from Connecticut with two passions in life; writing and anything with an engine.
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