THE LIGHT BRIGADE

How does a new car get its headlights? Jim Holder meets Hella's Mr Brightside

So £20 million? £25m? £30m? Audi A8? BMW 7 Series? Mercedes S-Class? We're winding up our interview and I'm at the cheeky stage of questioning, trying to find out the biggest development budget for a (not so humble) headlight.

I've done my homework, but as befits a man with a black book of customers as big as the industry itself, there's not even a flicker of acknowledgement on the face of Spencer Grinham, a 25-year stalwart of Hella.

Client confidentiality is sacrosanct, but thankfully there's much Grinham has been willing to discuss in the world of headlight development. To you and me, they may just turn on and off, and illuminate the road ahead (while being irritatingly complex and expensive to replace), but to Grinham and his colleagues, they are nurtured projects that can take years to come to life. There's development, new tech and tooling and much, much more - as you might imagine, given some of those rumoured development budgets.

"There's no such thing as a typical project, but we'll get involved somewhere between two and five years before a car goes into production," says Grinham. "A completely new light arrangement that starts life on a concept will be at the top end of that, a mid-life facelift at the lower end - and as an average I'd say that we work to a three-year cycle." Bear in mind, too, that it's not unusual for car makers to work with different suppliers for the front and back light arrangements, according to whose pitches they favour.