We have imagined the car of the future conditioned by the TV and cinema industry. Thus, in the 80s, we were excited to see how Michael Knight, protagonist of the series “The Fantastic Car”, faced injustice by driving a high-tech car, the so-called KITT (Knight Industries Two Thousand), whose artificial intelligence turned this autonomous vehicle into the ideal copilot. For its part, the batmobile claimed our attention with aerodynamics that imitated nature (a bat) and enhanced its speeds of vertigo. Nature also inspires the gull-wing doors of the Delorean DMC-12; however, it was not his design that fascinated us, but the function he exercised in “Returning to the future” as a time machine capable of disappearing in a cloud of particles and appearing between flashes of blue.

Science fiction has shaped our collective imagination, so that the real revolution of the automotive industry seems to be represented by flying vehicles travelling over the sky of our cities. And even though the necessary technology already exists, regulation is the great obstacle for this innovation to be implemented; therefore the near future of this industry is aimed at providing efficient electric cars, autonomous and permanently connected.

Park or land, the vehicle of the future is intrinsically linked to photonics, so the development strategies of automotive companies go through the incorporation of increasingly advanced sensors that help in autonomous driving, sophisticated laser systems and vision cameras that improve production, evolved communication systems that constantly connect traffic and infrastructure, among other innovative light technologies.

This new issue of light! drives you to the leading experts in Spain in photonics applied to the automotive industry. Let them guide and inspire you.

You can check-out the Light! 004 here.