Lexus BladeScan Headlights promise better performance and increased safety

Lexus launches BladeScan lighting technology on the RX, delivering extended illumination and more accurate lighting control.

Long gone are the days when car headlight were a bit of glass enclosing a single bulb to help you see when it got dark or murky. 

Now we’ve got LED lighting proliferating, and clever adaptive systems which can not only auto dip your headlights but can ‘remove’ elements of lighting which could blind oncoming motorists.

They’ve made driving much safer – at the cost of expensive replacements – and you can now actually see where you’re going at night and in bad weather, instead of hunching over the steering wheel, peering through a misted-up windscreen at the feeble light pattern cast by the light filament.

Lexus was at the forefront of the new lighting technology, introducing LED headlights on the LS back in 2007 – and adaptive headlights in 2012 – before any other car maker.

Now Lexus are back with a new lighting technology – BladeScan – heading for the new RX SUV, and promising to be better than anything so far for seeing where you’re going.

BladeScan delivers more precise photochromatic control of the illuminated area – more than twice as accurate as current technology – and pedestrian detection can be made at greater distance than current lighting technology allows.

The BladeScan system actually uses fewer LEDs – 10 each side – than many other systems, but it aims those across two blade-shaped mirrors which rotate at high speed and cast the light in to a lens which aims the beam more accurately, with individual LEDs switched on and off to create a pattern that doesn’t blind oncoming drivers.

The new BladeScan light technology will be available on the new Lexus RX when it hits showrooms later this year.