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Thursday, January 23, 2025

Rivian’s Heated Headlights May Be A Winter Driving Sport-Changer


  • Rivian has utilized for a patent to warmth the headlight lens to make winter driving safer.
  • The patent drawings present a resistive outer ingredient utilizing carbon nanotubes to warmth the lens.
  • There are at the moment no manufacturing autos with heated headlight lenses.

Each winter, Rivian house owners take to the boards and Reddit to complain about ice buildup on their vehicles’ headlights that drastically reduces effectiveness. LEDs don’t emit sufficient warmth to soften snow and ice, so it stays on the lens till you scrape it off. In some situations it’s important to do that each few miles. Rivian has an answer for that downside, although: heated headlight lenses.

Rivian filed a patent for heated headlight lenses in June 2023. The patent was made public in December final yr. The doc reveals that Rivian is contemplating including a heating ingredient that sends warmth throughout all the lens because of embedded carbon nanotubes. This answer was chosen in order to not impede gentle going by means of the lens. Conventional digital defrosters—just like the one you most likely have in your rear window—layer heating components in opaque strains, barely reducing visibility.



Photograph by: USPTO

You should buy aftermarket headlights with a heating perform, however they’re often spherical, making them exhausting to combine with most fashionable, angular housings. We don’t think about Rivian house owners can be prepared to combine a further set of headlights, although, they usually need those on the truck to stay efficient in all climate situations.

Rivian may have solved the issue the old school manner by putting in heated nozzles to spray the headlight clear, however the heated lenses look like a extra elegant answer. Utilizing conventional resistive heating components embedded within the lens can be a extra simple, cheaper answer, so will probably be attention-grabbing to see what Rivian really places into manufacturing.

The issue isn’t restricted to Rivian, although. All new vehicles with LED headlights endure from comparable points, in addition to fogging on the within of the headlights that doesn’t go away. Halogen or xenon lights run a lot hotter, so in the event you depart them on lengthy sufficient, they are going to start to soften snow and ice on the outside and eradicate condensation inside.

LEDs are the go-to alternative for many fashionable vehicles as a result of they use significantly much less electrical energy than different varieties of lighting, emit simply as a lot gentle and provides producers extra management over the place the sunshine goes and the way it’s dispersed. For electrical autos, the massive draw is LEDs’ decrease electrical energy consumption, which doesn’t considerably have an effect on vary.

The patent drawings submitted by Rivian to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Workplace uncovered by Motor Authority present a headlight with the standard Rivian design, so it’s unclear if it’s meant for an R1, R2 or R3. If it places this in a manufacturing automobile, will probably be the second producer to supply this in a sequence mannequin, though rivals will probably catch up. We all know no autos with factory-fitted heated headlights, however you will get aftermarket Oculus projector headlights with heated lenses for the Jeep Wrangler and Gladiator. Let’s hope they’re out there quickly on one other set of boxy, off-road merchandise.

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