Speaking of crappy products lately...

[Bill]

Add one more thing to products which no longer last...

My 1996 car has plastic headlights and these "yellow" with age so you can barely see at night! I thought I was going night blind...

Anyway in the past headlights were glass and you would just replace the light when it went out. Now you need to get a "headlight restorer" product which attaches to your drill and you "sand off" the yellowed surface of the plastic, then buff the scratches out with finer and finer sandpaper. Then the lens is clear again and you can see at night!

I'm spending all my time "fixing" things like this lately!

[Limp Arbor]

Is this Bill Maher?

[Joe]

Couldn't be. The OP shows a glimmer of intelligence.

Joe

[George]

The only cars I have noticed that on are those of US manufacturers. I had to clean up the cheap plastic lenses in order to see at night on a car that I later sold. It was really only a temporary fix. Other manufacturers seem to use a quality polycarbonate that doesn't yellow. You can see the same thing on other items. A common one is big box quality fluorescent fixtures that have a lens or diffuser. A quality polycarbonate diffuser will still look good after 20 years of use.

[Frank]

That's what you get for buying a Yugo ;)

[gpsman]

They "yellow" due to exposure to ultraviolet light, and, if you'll notice, you don't see these plastic lenses so often cracked, broken, or with "BB holes" in them.

My '96 headlights look like brand new, because it has always been garaged.

Only if you can't ID the 25 cents worth of material contained in your first one. A sliver of 600 grit and a mouthful of buffing compound will do the job nicely. The "sealer" is completely unnecessary.

A body shop might provide these for a 6 pack, or five bucks. If you offered $10, you'd still be $10 ahead.

And, the lenses are better (and easily) buffed out by hand. Carefully, if you don't want to scratch your paint. A little masking tape will help with that. -----

- gpsman

[David Nebenzahl]

On 3/6/2009 8:32 AM Joe spake thus:

And Bill Maher doesn't?

I especially recommend his recent film /Religulous/.

[Eric in North TX]

And we wonder why the USA car companies are in trouble (sigh). The European and Japanese seem to understand the need to include at least $50 worth of materials in a $30,000 car.

[tom g.]

I bought a hp computer with vista last summer. Double crap.

[WW]

[Rick Brandt]

Fogging and yellowing of plastic headlight lenses is not restricted to American made autos. They all do it and all had more problems with it earlier than they do on newer models. The UV protective coatings have gotten better is the only difference.

[Ulysses]

I've been looking for a used Ford Ranger. I had my eye on an '04 but then I saw the $500 '87 had regular replacable headlights and now I'm thinking it might be worth the paint job, new engine and transmission, chassis work, new upholstery, and many hours fixing all the little things that don't work just to get the old headlights. I think I'll keep my '78 Ford truck too. It has round headlights. They don't even cost very much.

[sligoNoSPAMjoe]

Yea those fancy lights demanded by the designers are a real step down. With the sealed beams you could buy an new light for a few dollars, use a screwdriver to install it in a couple of minutes and it was as good as new. Now ........

Why did you let the designers convince the regulators to allow this? OK I know about the false argument of lower profile lights allow better lighting, but if you look at cars today, few are taking advantage of that possibility. It is time to re-establish the old specifications.

[HeyBub]

In my state, 6% of accidents are attributed to bad road conditions (road out, sudden sinkholes, etc.), 6% to mechanical malfunction (brake failure, blowouts, etc.) and the remainder to driver error.

With about 14 million vehicles in my state, at about $40 per pop for a safety inspection each year, that's $560 million to keep the accident rate down to 6%. Maybe if we let the accident rate due to mechanical malfunction double, we could use the money to cut in half the driver-error rate.

[h]

???Must be a US car. My 1998 Subaru still has glass headlights.

[George]

I don't know but it is possible they are polycarbonate. A good quality polycarbonate is clear and hard and looks a lot like glass. From what I can tell the US manufacturers choose to use a cheap quality acrylic instead of a polycarbonate. A good quality polycarbonate will not yellow under such use.

[Ed Pawlowski]

It was the late '90 that car makers, both foreign and US started using the polycarbonate lenses.