On the February 2 at the headquarters of the Motor Transport Institute there was a meeting organized of the experts of the international Headlight Testing working group of the International Motor Vehicle Inspection Committee - CITA.

Chairman of the working group is a representative of Poland - Tomasz Targosiński, PhD, the scientist from ITS.

The aim of the group’s work is to develop European recommendations regarding testing of headlights as part of the periodic technical inspection of vehicles at the vehicle inspection station.

Examining lights is an important safety element of the periodic inspection and as practice shows (including research carried out by ITS) the vehicles’ lighting leaves much to be desired. It is also the result of imperfect methods and equipment used for testing and adjusting the lights.

The Working Group in its previous work has examined the requirements and recommendations applied in different countries and came to the conclusion that they are not identical, despite the use of similar devices. The construction and operation of the instruments were based on the historical construction of lamps from before approx. 60 years ago and do not necessarily fulfil their tasks in the case of the modern headlamps’ design.

During the meeting at ITS the records of type-approval regulations were analyzed, which give only very general requirements for the cut-off. But these are not sufficient for an unambiguous diagnostic evaluation and precise adjustment of the headlights. Therefore, manufacturers of the devices are trying to adapt their solutions to the headlights available on the market, although it does not guarantee the accuracy of measurement in the event of new solutions, different from the existing ones occurring.

Therefore, CITA group prepared a report setting out the ambiguous elements of the requirements and the reasons for the current problems of the field of headlights testing. Great interest and recognition of international experts was aroused by the, presented at a meeting, original methodology of testing and evaluating the headlights by the Motor Transport Institute, implemented in innovative computer headlights analyzer developed by ITS. This methodology and the device have a good chance to become the foundation for the recommendations to be developed in the course of group’s future work. This gives a chance, after the implementation into the systems of individual countries, to improve the lighting and reducing glare, which now is considered to be very tiresome and dangerous.

Meetings of the two groups, i.e. CITA and GRE UN-ECE (were organized on the subsequent  days) were an opportunity to exchange experiences and good practices in the field of quality of the vehicles’ lighting that are carried out, among the others, in Western Europe and Asia.