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posted by CoolHand on Tuesday July 21 2015, @06:24PM   Printer-friendly
from the one-more-step-to-sharks-with-lasers dept.

The supplemental laser spotlight—powerful enough to double the 300-meter range of the R8's standard LED high beams—offered a crucial performance edge at the Autodromo do Algarve, a 4.69-km road circuit and Formula One test facility in Portimao known for devilish blind corners and gut-check downhill plummets. It's a place where it's nice to see where you're going. Especially at night, in a street car, sans roll cage, that effortlessly tops 210 km/h—even with the track's longest straightaway denied to us for safety's sake.
...
In the Audi, each spotlight module houses four powerful, compact laser diodes, each just 300 micrometers in diameter. (The R8's standard headlamps feature 37 LED's in each unit to manage both low- and high-beam functions). Those diodes pump blue laser beams, at a wavelength of 450 nanometers, through phosphorus, which converts part of it to a warmer color. That phosphorescence (to state it with etymological exactitude), together with the remaining blue, creates white light at a color temperature of 5,500 Kelvin—an eye-pleasing, daylight-mimicking color temperature unmatched by even the best LED's.

Hooray, headlights that are even more blinding in your rearview mirror than the LED sort.


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2015, @07:42PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2015, @07:42PM (#212071)

    Is still bad, when the angle of the road is just so, or bumps cause the modern luxury car lights to 'flash'. Or those annoying ones that, "look around the corner" can be anoying when approaching on a bend of a country road.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2015, @10:27PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2015, @10:27PM (#212110)

    I dim my headlights when approaching a corner that's sufficiently tight that I can't see around it because that lets me see if there's another vehicle approaching: I leave them dim after I'm around the corner. Unfortunately, it's usually assholes going the other way who think they don't need to dim their headlights when they see another vehicle.

    Also, fuck those assholes who turn their high beams on before they've passed me, so they blind me for a second as they drive by...