INTRODUCTION

The joint CIE Technical Committee (TC 4-45) and GTB (Brussels Working Party on Vehicle Lighting) Front Lighting Working Group activity was established in August 2005 as a continuation of the GTB NCAP (New Car Assessment Programme) Taskforce that had been working for two years with the objective of developing a headlight performance rating system to be proposed to the European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP). When Euro NCAP decided not to continue to introduce a headlight rating system, the work undertaken by GTB was transferred into the CIE structure with a view to completing the study, publishing the conclusions and establishing a technical standard.

During the GTB NCAP taskforce activity a total of 48 organisations from the GTB global national delegations had contributed and 18 meetings had been held between August 2003 and April 2005. A week-long testing event had taken place in Spain in May 2005 with the successful validation of a number of the performance parameters but further work was indicated with regard to the algorithms for the assessment of range and glare.

The CIE TC 4-45 Technical Committee working in conjunction with GTB continued to work on the refinement of the assessment of range and glare. A second validation test event took place in Germany in March 2006 and this contributed to a revised algorithm for the calculation of passing beam and driving beam range. A test event to concentrate on the validation of the glare assessment algorithms took place in Belgium in February 2007 and a further event to validate the range calculations took place in Italy in May 2007.

This report is the result of a requirement from car manufacturers and headlighting manufacturers to develop a common approach toward the performance assessment of vehicle lighting systems. Although this has been a long-standing requirement, the intentions to introduce procedures to publish the results of headlighting system assessments (rating systems) by government agencies in Europe, Japan and North America provided an incentive for all the leading global manufacturers to work together to develop an industry standard.

During the work to develop this report contributions have been received from 52 manufacturers, institutions and testing services providing a unique global representation. In total 33 meetings have taken place with the discussions and conclusions being recorded in reports and minutes of meetings archived for reference of all TC members but no attempt has been made to include the detail in this report. Although some references to published papers are included, in general the report is the combination of the knowledge and technical expertise of specialists in the field of automotive lighting. The proposed standardised assessment method has been validated by experiments and practical "on-road" assessments to ensure that the results of any calculations are representative of what a vehicle user will actually experience.