By Chip Walker, president, CFI Design Management Inc.
Part one of a two-part series
The Basics of Lot Lighting
It was a dark and stormy night. No really, it was a dark and stormy night.
How does your lot look? How does the front row look on a dark night, or a gloomy afternoon? Can you see all of the differences in the silvers vs. the grays? Does your front row “pop” with that new highline trade you just took in? Do you have dark areas surrounded by hot spots, or areas with no light coverage at all?
Recently, there has been a huge focus on exterior lighting for dealership construction and remodels. The reason for this is twofold: First, the continued development of LED fixtures and heads has given dealers more cost effective options. Everybody and their brother has been into your stores telling you to, “Update your lighting! We can save you tons of money on your operating costs! The payback is quick, and the lighting performance is superior!”
Second, a dealership’s most valuable assets are the cars in the front lot. Since our shelf space really is our display lots, why do we take lighting our inventory so lightly? Let your lot do the selling when employees go home for the night, by keeping the cars well-lit for those prospective customers driving by after hours. The value in all-LED and controllable exterior lighting directly corresponds to a dealership’s bottom line.
Keep in mind, however, that the devil in in the details.
First, let’s review some basic facts:
Utility Expenses: This one of the single largest costs contained in operational overhead behind payroll. Any impact you can make in this area is significant, long term, and can greatly enhance the customer experience. Most dealership exterior lighting systems are not only outdated, but extremely inefficient.
Fixture Types: The most common fixture type on dealer lots is a combination of metal halide bulbs and ballasts, usually in 400 to 1000 watt bulbs and ballasts, with dual, triple, or even quad head poles. These types of fixtures are either on or off, there is no capacity to dim, reduce, or control the amount of light these systems emit. The maintenance requirements with these type of heads are expensive and frequent, and older style systems cannot be integrated with other systems at the dealership.
Older Style Heads and Fixtures: The output of these diminishes over time not only reducing the quantity of the output, but the quality as well.
Light Color: This is measured in temperature, it’s not the intensity, but how “white” the light being produced is. The higher the temperature the bulb is, the closer to “white” the light being produced is.
Automotive exterior lighting is a bit trickier to do correctly. LED products are measured in two ways:
Color Rendering Index (CRI): This is a scale from 0 to 100 percent indicating how accurate a “given” light source is at rendering color when compared to a “reference” light source. The higher the CRI, the better the color rendering ability.
This is a good thing right? Again be careful, here’s why. If your showroom or exterior lighting incorporates LED fixtures in a high ceiling or tall poles with a very high CRI index, the light landing on that pearl gray hood, will look different in sunlight that is naturally lower in temperature and CRI rating. This means the sunlight has a lot of yellow in it. If your customer picked out a blizzard pearl white unit in the showroom at night, and comes in the next day and the new car is sitting outside in the sun, the color may look different.
Foot-candles or Lux: This is a measurement of the quantity of light that actually lands on the surface, whether that be a hood, roof, or the surface of the parking lot itself.
The variables here are really simple, the farther the light source is away from the illuminated surface the weaker the intensity and wider the beam spread is. This is why we place our exterior lighting fixtures high on poles to produce an even, consistent light footprint so our lots look balanced and equal with the light distribution. This is the same reason we may use shorter poles in the front row so the cars and trucks parked there look brighter then rows behind. Or, we just use the same pole height with brighter (more powerful bulbs).
Ready to keep your old lights and forget the whole thing? No worries, this why with all remodels, groundups, and updating these systems, we partner with a reliable lighting manufactures, and reps, with competent electricians, to make sure we get the results we want, the performance we pay for, and greatly improved experience for your customers.
CFI Design Management Inc., based in Indianapolis, Ind., offers design/build, construction management, and general contracting services to dealerships nationwide and has more than 40 years of dealership-only experience. CFI can be reached at (317) 460-4444 or lcolle@cfidm.com
