Night driving

If it's an offence to drive with your back fog light on in clear weather ( one of my friends got pulled 2 weeks ago for this ,had been driving in fog ,fog cleared but he forgot about the back fog lamp,he was warned and told if he was caught again it would be a £60 fine ) why is it not an offence when someone coming past you with front fog lamps full on???This point was put to a local police man, but could not tell him why.

 

No I think its modern lighting that is the problem.
A couple of years ago they replaced all the old traffic light bulbs with LEDs.
They are totally blinding and very distracting.
On many crossing lights you now get a blast of the green and also the red from the pedestrian, "do not cross" sign lower down, its very distracting.

 

Does anyone actually have trouble seeing with their standard fitted head lights?

To me, the only problem is the bloke coming the other way with what appears to be a search lights.
Are people actually fitting non standard bulbs?
If they are, then I can now see why I'm having problems.

 

If you cant see with the standard bulbs its questionable that you should actually be driving at all.

 

I must have had more than 15 cars since I started driving.
I've never felt the need to change the head lights.
Must be a modern fad.

Its fine allowing yourself to see better, but if it blinds all on coming traffic

 

Sorry to have to disagree, but the law meant to protect other drivers from being blinded by your lights is wrong and ineffective.

A HID kit, with all the regulation self levelling etc is great, unless it so happens that when its level and perfectly aligned, another car is directly in the beam, as happens on some bends and coming over the brow of hills.

In other words, its fine as long as the road is straight and flat, but not so when the road has curves and lumps and bumps in it. Like the road I have to drive every day.

What makes matters worse is that it is exactly when approaching a bend or slight hill that you need most to not be blinded. If your going perfectly straight and you get dazzled and are blind for a couple of seconds, its not great but its not the end of the world. All you have to do is hold the car straight until your vision comes back after a couple of seconds, but if you're approaching a bend, you need your eyes most, because you need to follow the line of the road as it bends, and navigating for 2 seconds blind is pretty impossible if its not a straight line.

Then there's when you get one behind you. Even with the lights correctly adjusted, if they can aim at the road, they can aim into the back window and mirrors of the car in front. especially if the car is like mine, quite old with much lower windows than modern cars.

 

Due to my car I am on a Saxo Clio Forum, excellent for free manuals and information

95% Of members are the ones you see on every Sat/Sun morning papers front page of hit a tree and deed
Most of them are fitting illegal lamps extra bright blue tint, along with under floor neons, along with their boom boxes
It could be them you are seeing in front and behind, they are a menace

Jack McH

 

Quite often, the laser cannons that bother me the most are on new cars. But here's the thing. I found something out quite by chance just recently, after someone whined on another forum that their car failed its first MOT due to misaligned headlights.

This other forum is full of both regular drivers and proper mechanics. 2 things came out of that discussion. 1) Lots of new cars fail their first MOT for the same reason, because the manufacturers, keen to ship the new cars out as quickly and cheaply as possible, and knowing that 3 years is a long time for a car, often don't 'waste time' checking headlight alignment, and 2) the regulations are a bit more complicated than many MOT testers realise, so often they apply a one size fits all policy when testing the lights, when in fact the alignment has to be different depending on how high on the vehicle the lights are mounted. Cars with lights mounted over a certain height have to point slightly down at a steeper angle than those with lights below that threshold, but apparently many testers don't realise, and just check the same angle on all. Also, apparently many don't realise that with lights brighter than a given threshold, the light distribution pattern has stricter rules, so whereas my oil lamps would pass even with a lot of diffused light, some HID ones have to have a very sharp cut-off. So in summary, new cars roll out with badly adjusted lights that don't stand a chance of being identified as such for at least 3 years, and even when they are required to go for an MOT, the testers often let stuff through that they should not.