Modern car rear lights!

LEDs are great but with fault finding flicker they bugger up my eyes big time ....

That is because the manufacturers don't want joe public doing any job, instead they want over priced specialists to do it. However the current drain of modern lights is one heck of a lot less than a bulb and arguably, less likely to fail without the driver being alerted via a snazzy dasboard icon.

Brian

The other thing is that the solid state LEDs essentially last pretty much forever so you can dispense with sockets in many cases.

There is a slight problem with some of them producing a too collimated beam of light so that they dim as you get closer but further off axis. This is actually a benefit for motorway signs at night since it makes them visible from further away without dazzling close up. But in bright sunlight on cars it can work against being able to see them close up.

That is actually a damn good idea now that the flashing is no longer determined by the vaguaries of a bimetallic strip and heater or simple astable. dot-dash-dot-dash would be the most unambiguous.

But the sound of the flasher unit lives on, presumably as a .wav file?

On some cars, the same position is used for front running light and indicator, with the running light being turned off when the indicator is in use. I have also seen running rabbit style indicators, where the yellow LEDS light in sequence, moving towards the direction of turn.

A failed LED in an array won't make much difference to the function of the light, but a failed bulb, which is far more probable, will.

I bought my car with manufacturer fitted fold-away tow bar and electrics.

Brian Gaff formulated the question :

More than just snazzy, the system can be very practical, very useful. I can plug the caravan in and know all the car and all the caravan's road lighting is functioning. If there were a failure on route, I would know immediately and know precisely which lamp had failed.

They don't even have to completely fail, a poor connection or flickering lamp is enough to trigger a fault condition.

That's what I meant by the "moving pulse" I think Audi call them "dynamic indicators"

I think that's fairly common. Our Honda CRV does that, both for DRL (during day) and for sidelights (at night). I've seen quite a few other cars that do it - in fact with today's poor indicators, it's often the first thing I spot that tells me a car is about to turn.

Glad it is not just me!

Perhaps what we need is some sort of European Union where collective benefits (like USB charging on phones) can be worked out

:-)

Just wondering - which car has that on? Im aware of the ones that register a failed indicator bulb but not ones that show that trailer/ caravan road lighting/reversing/fog lights are working.

As an aside I watched a 17 plate Volvo tractor/trailer unit having its lights checked at a service station the other day. Driver stood at the back with a remote control and then went through the checks for all the trailer lights. Fascinating to watch them all going off and on in sequence including the side marker lights.

Good luck finding a specialist who can do anything other than just fit a new bit. Which joe public could do if he wanted.

Thing is most these days think everything can be done in software. Fixing hardware doesn't come into it.

One thing that I'd like. A small cheap computer with lots of 12v inputs, each one of which would produce a user choice noise and or allow you to generate your own. So you could integrate flasher warning, lights on warning, reversing sensors, etc all to one speaker (or even into the ICE)

Depends how they are wired. You may well have several in series.

At recent MOT got an advisory for faded rear indicators, I asked whether that meant the plastics of the lens cluster would need replacing, he said "no, they'll just dip them in orange paint" mentioned it to garage next time and they wanted £70 per side to replace them.

AFAIK all the stop/tail/turn lights are LED, so do they really fit painted white LEDs rather than yellow LEDs?

And do the French require you to carry spares for them?

The first wave of buses with LED brake lights seemed to suffer quite badly, but it always seemed to be the individual LEDs in the matrix failing, rather than whole rows/columns of them, I suppose someone could have been clever and distributed strings in a chaotic pattern.

I haven't noticed the same problem on the next wave of buses that have replaced them.

When a car drove into the back of me, it was only a single LED that failed to light. Also, unlike incandescent light bulbs, even with the red lens broken, the LEDs still showed a red light.