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The 2025 Ford Expedition features flood lighting designed for tailgating or camping, and Ford tells us the engineers behind it set a unique metric for success.
The flood lighting is made up of four zones—front, back, and either side—to provide wrap-around illumination.
According to Ford, the engineers behind the SUV set a goal of making sure the lighting was bright enough to easily carry out a game of cards.
Engineers in charge of developing cars have all sorts of target metrics. They may want to achieve lofty fuel economy figures, or they could be targeting top safety ratings. Oftentimes, those metrics are guided by regulations or driven by sales goals, but sometimes engineers think in more practical terms. According to Ford, the engineering team behind the recent Expedition refresh was concerned with the latter.
If you haven't heard, the 2025 Expedition lineup comes with exterior zone lighting that can illuminate the ground surrounding the SUV. It's made up of four zones that flood the ground around the car with enough light for a tailgate or a campsite.
The automaker told us that rather than come up with an abstract lumens figure to decide on how bright the zonal lights needed to be, the engineers went for a more practical metric. Their goal was simple: If the engineers couldn't easily play a game of cards using just the zone lights for illumination, the lighting needed to be brighter.
While the goal itself isn't all that interesting, it does serve as a peek behind the curtain into the huge number of decisions automakers have to make when designing a car. It would have been just as easy to slap any light bulbs around the car they could find, but sometimes added development time and cost result in genuinely useful features.
Zooming out, that same line of thinking can be applied to a huge number of features we've come to expect in our cars. Anything from automated cruise control to rain-sensing windshield wipers, to power steering was made not out of necessity but in order to make cars just a little bit better. That's the sort of development we appreciate.
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