Shedding light on taillamps
While perusing some old copies of Wheels recently (yes, some of us do keep them), I came across a rather heated discussion in Yourview about automotive lighting and its standards.
Some excellent points were made, some good questions asked.
It's interesting that despite efforts to implement global vehicle design standards (from as early as 1958), this is one area that can vary considerably from market to market.
And I don't mean just the need for unique headlight beam patterns for driving on the left and on the right (brighter/higher illumination for the shoulder must be provided and glare for oncoming traffic reduced).
For headlights alone, where the vehicle is sold affects light dispersion, glare, beam cut-off, even height and location requirements.
Since 1967, U.S. Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards – and, by default, our CMVSS – lighting standards have required amber and red side markers in addition to front and rear parking lights.
In Europe, however, red side markers are a no-no. So vehicles designed for the North American market that are sold over there often have amber lenses in their rear side markers.
On the other hand, amber turn signal repeaters, visible from the sides of the vehicle, are required in Europe and most global markets outside of the Americas.
Invaluable during lane changes – if the driver bothers to signal – they ought to be mandatory here, where a far greater percentage of our travel occurs on multi-lane roads. Some auto makers are now including them here as a "world car" styling device. Good idea.
One uniquely North American lighting feature is the rear "combination lamp." The same red lamp handles both braking and turn signal duty, either for styling purposes or, more commonly, cost savings (less wire, fewer bulbs).
Combo lamps often have only one bulb per side, and when it burns out, you've lost both functions at that corner. As the third brake light often fails first, these cars tend to end up with just one functioning brake lamp – unless it's being used as a turn signal, in which case the car effectively has no brake lamps at all.
Such lamps should join vacuum-operated windshield wipers on the scrap heap of outdated automotive technology.
Lamps using separate red bulbs for brake and signal functions are a slight improvement. But an orange light is clearly a turn indicator; virtually no confusion is possible.
It's inexplicable why so many manufacturers use all-red lenses on models sold here, when their foreign-market offerings use otherwise identical two-colour units.
One Wheels reader suggested that red should be the mandatory colour for rear signals, The letter cited the use of four-way flashers at night, making it difficult to ascertain whether one is looking at the front or rear of the vehicle, and therefore which side to pass on.
The other car's headlights or rear reflectors should be adequate to determine that, provided that one is driving at a speed appropriate for the conditions in the first place.
Other reader complaints included cases where clear-lensed signals flash white.
That could be due to an incorrectly replaced bulb, or – quite commonly – due to the amber coating flaking off the glass of a low- quality bulb.
The Hyundai Accent is not alone in this.
There's no quick solution to this problem.
To their credit, several auto makers have begun using LEDs (light-emitting diodes) in their brake lights, particularly in the third lamp (Hyundai, Ford, and General Motors come to mind).
While there are space and power consumption benefits, the biggest plus with LEDs is their near-instantaneous "on" time, compared to the approximately tenth of a second required by good old incandescent bulbs.
At highway speeds, this swiftness can give trailing drivers more than a car length's worth of extra braking reaction time. I'll happily pay a few bucks more to give the guy behind me that advantage.
Incidentally, the third brake lamp – technically known as the Centre High Mount Stop Lamp – is our gift to the rest of the world.
Mandated in the U.S. and Canada in late 1986, these extra brake lights have been more or less universally adopted in other major world markets in the years since. Who says we aren't trend-setters?
wheels@thestar.ca;
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