Unless you’re a Bond villain or a member of Cobra, your car probably doesn’t shoot lasers, but BMW wants to change that. Their new laser headlights promise to be brighter than any other headlight on the market. That has obvious safety benefits, but you’ll also get to brag that your car has frickin’ laserbeams attached to its frickin’ headlights.
These new headlights work with up to four blue-laser diodes, but if a car shooting lasers into the faces of oncoming traffic sounds dangerous (it is!) fear not. The light from the diodes won’t be focused tightly enough to qualify as an actual laser beam, and instead will go out as a much safer cone of white light.
The laser headlights will be built into the 2014 BMW i8 in Europe, but the technology could also soon find its way into IMAX projectors since a bright focused beam of white light is as useful in movie projection as in car headlights.
(via IEEE Spectrum, image via Jason Pier)
- BMW announced this plan back when the i8 was just a concept vehicle
- A 115-year-old electric car goes 40 miles on a single charge
- Man turns his plane into a car instead of his car into a plane
