If my Google skills are up to par, it appears that there are exactly 0 mentions of distributed lighting systems for vehicles on this forum, ever. Not even Wikipedia mentions distributed lighting in the context of vehicle lighting.
It appears that in the 90s, with the advent of vehicle HID bulbs, distributed lighting was considered. I don't have access to SAE papers like this one, https://www.sae.org/publications/technical-papers/content/950904/, but it seems like a promising technology, with stuff like this in the various abstracts to papers about distributed lighting:
So, what happened to distributed lighting systems? Why aren't there cars with a few centrally located HID bulbs instead of what we get today, which are cars with like a dozen bulbs of different types? Is the technology dead in the water, or is it still being actively studied?
It appears that in the 90s, with the advent of vehicle HID bulbs, distributed lighting was considered. I don't have access to SAE papers like this one, https://www.sae.org/publications/technical-papers/content/950904/, but it seems like a promising technology, with stuff like this in the various abstracts to papers about distributed lighting:
Enough light is generated by one HID to power a red stop, an amber turn, and a white backup with light left over to power functions in the interior.
So, what happened to distributed lighting systems? Why aren't there cars with a few centrally located HID bulbs instead of what we get today, which are cars with like a dozen bulbs of different types? Is the technology dead in the water, or is it still being actively studied?