2015 Ford F-150 First Truck with LED Headlights

The 2015 Ford F-150 offers a lot of new features, but one of the most noticeable ones is the headlight configuration in its grill.
The newly designed F-150 will be the first truck of its class to offer LED lights in all models. They can last as much as five times longer than the previous headlights.

Ford also engineered the lamps to be extremely tough, putting them through a series of torture tests.
“We fire stones at this headlamp, expose it to extreme sun, soak it in saltwater, shoot rocks, rock salt and ice — this thing is very tough to crack,” Ford lighting expert John Teodecki said in a release.

Ford partnered with Osram and Flex-N-Gate to develop the cutting-edge headlamp technology, which uses semiconductor chips to control the light and make the lamps more durable and longer-lasting.

The lens is unique, with 16 precision-carved optical surfaces and 80 facets on the lens face to spread the light evenly. The design magnifies the light, allowing for better illumination and using only one LED per lamp.
Each LED headlamp is outlined with a thin LED tube, designed to create a signature appearance for the new truck that can be spotted from great distances at night.

“Remember the craze in the 1980s with truck light bars?” Teodecki said in the release. “It looks so cool. I’m telling you, this LED light tube is going to be the next big thing. Our new F-150 owners will be longing for dusk every day just to show off their trucks in dramatic lighting.”

Copyright James Dornbrook Reporter - Kansas City Business Journal

LED Street Lighting Delivers Up To 85% Energy Savings In Global Trial

©Copyright Forbes.com - Author Justin Gerdes Results from a global trial of light-emitting diode (LED) street lights confirm that the fixtures can deliver electricity savings of up to 85% over incumbent technologies. The two-and-a-half-year pilot, called LightSavers, tested 533 LED lamps in 15 trials in 12 cities, including New York, London, Hong Kong, Toronto, and Sydney. Findings from the trials are presented in a report co-released by The Climate Group, electronics giant Philips, and HSBC earlier this month on the sidelines of the Rio+20 summit. The Climate Group launched LightSavers in 2009, supported by the HSBC Climate Partnership, with the goal to accelerate the market adoption of outdoor LED lighting and smart-lighting controls. Key findings from the report, Lighting the Clean Revolution: The Rise of LED Street Lighting and What it Means for Cities, include: . LEDs achieve the expected 50 to 70% energy savings, and reach up to 80% savings when coupled with smart controls. [Energy savings in the trials vary from 18% to 85%, with 20 out of 27 products achieving savings of 50% or more, and ten showing savings of 70% or more.] . Surveys in Kolkata, London, Sydney, and Toronto indicated that between 68% to 90% of respondents endorsed LEDs city-wide rollout. Benefits highlighted included improved safety and visibility. . LED lighting trialed lifespan ranges from 50,000 to 100,000 hours indicating a high return on investment. . The ‘catastrophic’ failure rate of LED products over 6,000 hours is around 1%, compared, for example, up to 10% for ceramic metal halide fixtures over a similar time period. . The Climate Group and Philips are calling for an international low carbon lighting standard to be created and implemented ensuring that citizens worldwide have access to energy efficient outdoor lighting.
	We conclude that LEDs are ready to be brought to scale in outdoor applications. The independent and verifi­able results from the LightSavers trials and accompanying public surveys give compelling evidence that many commercially-available, outdoor LED products offer high quality light, durability, and significant electricity savings in the range of 50 to 70%, wrote Climate Group CEO Mark Kenber in the report’s foreword. “High capital cost and a dearth of effective financing approaches continue to be barriers to market maturity. But these will diminish as investment flows into companies making quality products; as LED and smart control device prices continue to fall; and as innovations spread in project financing and procurement in cities like Birmingham, Guangzhou and Los Angeles.”
In California, to cite another example, support for LED street lights project financing has come from the California Energy Commission (CEC) and the U.S. Department of Energy. In January, I reported at this blog that 10 California cities, several of them quite small, had used funding provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) to undertake LED street lighting retrofit projects. Since I published that post, the CEC has announced that about a dozen more California cities have launched LED street lighting retrofit projects courtesy of the same ARRA-funded Energy Efficiency Conservation Block Grant (EECBG) program. So confident are the report partners in the potential of LED lighting they want LEDs to become the global lighting standard. “All new public lighting – both street lighting and in public buildings – should be LED by 2015, with the aim of all public lighting being LED by 2020,” said the Climate Group’s Kenber in a statement. The authors conclude: “LED outdoor luminaires have reached maturity in terms of their performance. City lighting managers from across the world have independently verified that LEDs can live up to their promise of exceptional perfor­mance, energy efficiency, and public approval, with indicators pointing towards stabilization in light output in many products after an initial period of volatility.”