“Look into my eyes, Darling!”

Light – We can’t live without it, or drive a car without it.

In rare cases, however, we can’t drive with it either. Mainly when another car comes on to us from an unfortunate angle, or when our own headlights reach their physical limits due to corners, fog or rain.

LED-technology, active cornering lights and other innovations have brought much needed improvements over the last years. And every time we think that there is nothing more to be invented, engineers and experts roll out yet another novelty, proving that they haven’t reached the limit of their intellectual and technical capacity.

After all, there are no conventional light bulbs in the BMW i8, or LEDs for that matter.

Still, the concept car shines a very bright light, thanks to laser technology. The advantage of this new development is efficiency. It is also significantly brighter, while being harmless and undisturbing to the human eye at the same time. Feel free to test it yourself at the BMW show stand. You will be pleased to find that you can actually stare into the eyes of the i8, without experiencing glare.

170 lumen – that’s the brightness of its light, roughly 70 lumen brighter than the best headlights on the market right now. Designers are very happy about laser technology as well. Laser diodes are 100 times smaller than LEDs, which makes them supremely suitable for sophisticated design schemes.

The only bad news is that it will take five more years until the first car will get to use laser lights. In the meantime BMW i3 and i8 will be using LEDs.