Earlier this month, preeminent automotive supplier powerhouse Magna unveiled the Breakthrough Lighting system. Unimaginative name aside, this is the first true exterior styling breakthrough since the end of the sealed beam headlight era in the 1980s. So what is it? 

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While Magna is understandably coy on how it works, the result is lighting that shines through body panels and disappears completely when unlit. The holy grail of lighting. Why? Because designers have been trying to hide lights for decades. Often purely for aesthetic reasons, sometimes for aerodynamics and occasionally to protect the lights themselves. There's just something....intriguing about a car without large headlights.

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Designers have have long been constrained by the need to integrate lighting into body panels. This has led to some interesting design solutions, but it has also limited the potential for creativity. Pop-up headlights, light covers, tinted glass and embedding them in the grill have all been tested as ways to integrate lights into the bodywork in ways that fool the viewer into thinking there's no lights there at all. But all have been constrained by the fact that the lights need to appear SOME TIME, so when engaged their location is obvious.

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Put into a historical context, this hasn't been among the most pressing of technical challenges for the progression of the automobile. Designers may angrily rip off their turtlenecks and aerodynamicists  break their pencils, but the tried-and-true format of positioning lights clearly and obviously on each corner kept us going. Until now.

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Magna's announcement should bring these same designers and wind technicians back out of hiding, because their prayers have finally been answered. Hiding lights under the body panels turns the design into a blank slate on the front and back ends. Completely uninterrupted lines and panels are now possible where a cutout was needed before. Lights can be positioned for maximum visibility, not to make a cohesive face for the car. And forget about broken fog lamp lenses!

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True "light-free" designs are possible for the first time. Cover the whole back of the car in lights, if you want. It'll still look great, and really people are less concerned with the lighting design of a car when you're behind it in traffic (except for me). Reversing lights can now truly illuminate the world behind you when reversing, not paying lip service like so many designs today.

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Now while designers wipe the drool off their styluses, three concerns must be addressed.

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The first is the potential for confusion amidst split second decision-making when interacting with a car using this setup. Drivers have been accustomed to seeing lights in the same place on cars since the middle of last century. The lights may still be in the same place, but a car appearing to have none at all until lit may add milliseconds of concentration time to a person's reaction time.

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"Is that car braking? Shit, does it even have brake lights? Where are they???"

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The simple solution is to continue having the lights in separate clusters on each corner of the car, even under the bodywork. Perhaps this is combined with always visible elements to maintain continuity with current trends, at least until we fully transition into this new frontier of illumination. Not the end of the world by any stretch.

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The second concern is repair costs. In many cars, the lights (mostly on the rear) are high enough that minor fender benders don't break them. While this may seem like a laughable comment given the absurdity of modern repair culture and the fact that you need a second mortgage to fix a set of Audi LED headlamps, lights over a greater surface area opens up more opportunities to get broken. Hopefully ever-decreasing LED panel costs would alleviate this concern, but I'm sure automakers will ensure that the entire body panel and lighting assembly must be replaced together. And are dents even able to be fixed if there's a light behind it? Wouldn't minor dings sever critical cables and electrical connections? If Magna knows, they're not saying yet.

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"I'm sorry, Porsche only sells them as a package."

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But the third concern is the one that should scare enthusiasts the most: ghost police cars.

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Car-obsessed weirdos like myself are exceptionally skilled at spotting slick tops and undercover cars. After all, with current technology those lights have to go somewhere (and we know where, thankfully). But with these? One of the critical, telltale signs to slow the hell down has vanished.

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Yes, we'll still be able to spot the base steel wheels, black plastic grilles and turned down exhaust pipes. Same with the whip antennas and prisoner partition.

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But in the thick of the freeway full of cars, those can all be missed.

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This is what Carbon Motors previewed over a decade ago with the E7. Remember these guys, with the diesel-powered police car concept? Yeah, nobody does. But they were ahead of the game with hidden cop lighting, even if it was simply integrated into the panels rather than behind them.

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Concerns now out of the way, let's celebrate Magna's achievement. Should these prove to be the real deal, and they swear they'll be in production in early 2023, then this is truly the beginning of a new era of automotive design. And given Magna's incredible sway on the industry, there's no reason to doubt they can't pull these off.

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Say a thankful goodbye to the current crop of pathetic split headlight "headlight-less" faces. We can see the main beams, Hyundai. You aren't fooling anybody.

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Think absolutely wild DRL signatures that span the whole of each end. Audis that light up all over when you approach them with the keys. Off-road spotlights built into base model Corolla bumpers. Fantastical new design languages that we can't even dream about.

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It's going to be lit.

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Sorry. I'll see myself out.

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