Future Ford Vehicles Could Feature Lamps With LiDAR

Ford Motor Company has filed a patent for lamps with LiDAR that may be used in future Ford vehicles, Ford Authority has learned.

The patent was filed on April 25^th, 2023, published on October 31^st, 2024, and assigned serial number 0360972.

The Ford Authority Take

Many modern days vehicles have begun to incorporate more and more technology in their headlights and taillights, including sensors and various other things. Trouble is, this bevy of tech has also made those lighting elements far more expensive than they used to be – with replacement costs in the thousands of dollars, in fact, which is also why thieves are increasingly targeting headlights and taillights rather than stealing entire vehicles. Trouble is, this trend doesn’t seem likely to change anytime soon, and this newly published patent proposes that we add even more tech into the headlamps of future Ford vehicles, too.

That tech is LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), which is used in advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicles and relies on laser pulses for detection and ranging purposes. In recent times, we’ve seen a number of prototypes with giant LiDAR rigs on their roofs, but in the future, Ford imagines this tech being packaged far more neatly inside of one’s headlamps, as we can see here.

If LiDAR does in fact become common in future vehicles, such an idea makes a ton of sense, as it would be essentially invisible to the average onlooker. Nobody wants to drive around with a massive rig of sensors and cameras on their roof, after all, and in this case, the LiDAR module would be neatly sandwiched inside of a headlight, facing outward, so that it could capture information pertaining to the distance between a vehicle and another vehicle or object. As such, it certainly stands to reason that we could one day see such a thing in a production vehicle, though it may make headlights far more expensive than they already are.