However, not all cars type approved and factory fitted with HID or LED headlamps have self-levelling or wash systems - the MOT rules have had to take this into account and a vehicle can fail for such systems not working, but cannot fail for them not being present. If such lights were an option for your vehicle, you can retrofit them.
Which is why retrofitting LED lamps into existing housings does not meet type approval. Wheareas fitting complete E-marked lamp assemblies can.
Think you'll find all HID equipped cars have headlight washers. And if not self levelling headlights, self levelling rear suspension. And since the latter may not be fitted across the range, changing to E-marked non self levelling headlamps to a vehicle without it could be against the regs.
The whole thing is badly thought out.
No, they definitely do not. It was (and may still be) a problem for MOTs. Under EU rules, any vehicle given type approval by any other EU country has to be accepted in all others and some were approved without self-levelling or washing. It was also accepted that some (sports) cars with very stiff suspension would not require self-levelling either. To allow for that, here the rules specify that not being fitted with self-levelling or washing is not a reason for failure, but in Northern Ireland, the same exemption was not written in and caused failures of some type approved vehicles. I don't know if NI has changed the rules there since.
But not where other vehicles in the range were approved without self-levelling and washing.
I can agree with that.
If it was heading towards you (assuming it wasn't reversing!) you would see its two *white* lights - either sidelights, headlights or front fog lights - at the front.
I was talking about having two *red* lights at the back - in pairs, as for all other lights such as tail lights and brake lights (OK, there's usually a third central high-level brake light).
No-one complains about having two tail lights, and fog lights are (to my mind) just extra-bright tail lights which allow your car to be seen (and an estimate made of its distance away, from the separation of the lights) from further away than tail lights allow through fog. They do the same job as tail lights - "I'm here and this is how wide I am, so you can judge how close you are to me". They just need to be brighter than tail lights - firstly because the fog scatters light and secondly because you want to maintain a greater distance from the car in front than you would in clear conditions.
My mum's 1960 Morris Minor had orange (not red/white) indicators, at least when mum bought it second-hand in 1966. They may have been fitted after-sale, because it also had trafficators that still worked. I wonder if Mum had them fitted when she bought the car.
My dad's C-reg Austin Cambridge and his E-reg Ford Corsair had them.
Older cars (eg 1950s Ford Zephyrs, and very early pre-Aeroflow 1962 Ford Cortinas) had flashing white indicators at the front, but I'm not sure about the indicators at the back.
So it looks as if new cars got them from the early 60s. I'm not sure when flashing white/red on older cars actually became illegal and needed modification to amber.
How widespread is an interlock between lights switch and foglights, such the turning off the sidelights resets the fogligh swithc to the off position.
Why do you need to see the reflective triangle during the day, apart from in poor visibility (fog, heavy rain)? I presume it still reflects properly (in order to comply with the law) so is there a reason that you need to distinguish it from other parts of the rear of the trailer?
Is it to allow you to distinguish between the back of the trailer and the back of the towing car? If so, I can't say I've ever thought of it meaning "this is a trailer", just that its the standard reflector that all vehicles have in addition to tail lights.
Yes that works even better than mine, in that it puts a light that is rarely used (or a reflector) between the ones that need to be distinguished: indicator and brake.
I wonder why the normal grouping puts tail and brake in one housing and fog in another, when tail/fog and separate brake is much better, since tail and fog do the same job in different types of visibility - I think of foglights as brighter-than-normal tail lights for use in fog.
They should have had amber bulbs - my Cortina did from new.
My brain probably works differently from many people's. I find it easier to interpret a foreign word than a symbol - I quickly learn that a certain German word means "brake" etc.
Symbols are fine - and they are language-independent, but there is an extra stage where your brain has to work out "what does this symbol depict - WTF is it?", which is a much harder task than the trivially easy follow-on step of "what action do I take if I see it".
Standard symbols like < << (square) >> > || (round red dot) are widely understood from tape recorders and all similar playing/recording devices. Likewise road signs - and they are drawn to a standard: every British "bend" sign is the same as every other one. But less common, more esoteric symbols are a lot harder.
I was once driving my Dad's Ford Sierra which had a panel of warning lights in the centre of the dashboard. Suddenly an amber one with an undecypherable symbol started flashing insistently.
Amber: warning, not an emergency "you must stop ASAP" Flashing: "you really need to take note of this" On the centre panel, not the dashboard: "It's not critical for driving"
But WTF was that symbol supposed to be a picture of? I stopped and looked at the manual. First find the page for the warning lights, then try to match the symbol on the light to the various ones in the manual, given that one was not an exact copy of the other.
It turned out to mean "windscreen washer level is low". Useful to know. I stopped at a garage to fill it up with water (it was before the days of ready-made or concentrated screenwash being used in non-freezing conditions). But a flashing light? Did it need to grab my attention like that?
The best of both worlds is a symbol *and* the word in English, given that English is probably the most common second language outside the UK market.
I find that the greatest offenders are not those who accidentally leave foglights on the morning after a foggy night before, but those who consciously turn them on in inappropriate conditions such as rain (*) or when there is no fog, just normal darkness.
I try to switch my foglights on/off as conditions vary, and to turn them off once I can see the headlights of the car behind (if I can see him, he is probably close enough to be dazzled by my fog lights). But a lot of people just turn them on in the slightest mist and leave them on (or turn them one whenever it's dark).
(*) Very heavy, cat-sand-dogs cloudburst rain may warrant fog lights, given that the tail lights of a car may be difficult to see, but not normal rain or drizzle, when the bigger hazard is smearing of the rain on the windscreen, or because of the lens action of raindrops before the wiper blade has cleared them. Or on a motorcyclists's helmet visor - which rarely has a wiper! I presume the anti-wetting coating that you can get for windscreens is very important on helmet visors so raindrops are blown off quickly instead of leaving a film that can cause glare around lights.
My impression is that whenever I saw a car with white flashing lights, it was an old one with white indicator glass. Maybe this is because the amber coating had worn off the bulb (which it does very quickly) or the bulb has been replaced with a standard white one when the original amber one blew.
I keep a bit of orange sweet wrapper in with my spare bulbs to convert a white bulb (or an amber one where all the paint has flaked off) into an amber one until I can buy a proper amber bulb.
Why do modern car designers think it looks trendy to have clear indicator plastic (requiring amber bulbs) rather than using amber plastic in the cluster as they used to? They don't do it for the side/tail lights - those are always red plastic, not clear plastic that require red bulbs.
Indeed they are. I reckon the most misunderstood pair of signs are "Oncoming vehicles have priority" and "You have priority over oncoming vehicles", especially amongst workers deploying signs around road works.
I have seen works protected by identical pairs of signs of either the above types. This is an example:
On chatting with the men, at a location (not the one above) which was signed so as to advise drivers approaching from both directions that they had priority, they were convinced that they had done it right, and showed me the comprehensive printout of a
3D layout showing them exactly what they had to do.Unfortunately, they had failed to appreciate how important it was to have _precisely_ what the sheet showed, not merely something similar, because that was all they had on their wagon.
Circles give orders, triangles warn and rectangles inform. There is, sadly, little understanding of these important distinctions.
"Oncoming vehicles have priority" is circular, "You have priority over oncoming vehicles" is rectangular. When used correctly, there should be one of each. They may not be inverted in an attempt to reverse their meaning.
This reminds me about MOTO service stations. Whilst under Granada ownership, they decided that they would like to apply their own house style to their traffic signs, and asked the relevant Department is this was OK. It seems that they got the thumbs up.
The result is a rag-bag of signs which in most cases differ considerably from the obligatory designs for road use. For instance, the "Give Way" signs are circular. Service stations can be quite stressful places, and the layouts are not intuitive, so it is important that signs are clear and unambiguous.
The Department, too late, realised the error of their ways. The specification for new service stations IIRC clearly requires traffic signing to be compliant with the same standards that apply on the roads.
It would be interesting to see what action could be taken against somebody disregarding one of Moto's traffic signs.
Chris
It is normal on modern cars, but not older ones. Some are electronic and some are simply by using the same switch for sidelights/headlights and fog lights.
My Vauxhall Zafira has clear lenses, with amber bulbs for the indicators and red bulbs for the tail and brake lights - but also with coloured plastic covers inside the main housing, close up to the bulbs.
Exactly the way my mk2 Sierra was wired from the factory (although others were the other way around) and the way I wired both of my trailers (2 because the first one was stolen).
It is not particularly important on a trailer or caravan towed by a car, as following drivers can distinguish easily, but it is helpful to distinguish between and 7.5 tonner and an artic or a truck towing a trailer.
Does that include the Scots ? :-)
Very
Watched a you tube film, on TSR2 recently. Apparently they had a committee for cockpit design and they took days to agree lettering on one particular switch. They had to change it in practice because the pilots could never figure out wtf it meant.
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