How about this next situation? There’s stopped traffic on I-95, and you’re the last car in the backup. In the rearview, you see a car approaching at a rather high velocity. They’ll stop, right? Or do I need to punch it and get onto the shoulder RIGHT NOW?
source: Wikipedia and topsize20 The simple answer is that, unless the car in question is a softly sprung thing that buries its nose in the asphalt on hard braking, you just can’t tell. Unless the car has those moving eyes like Jason has reported on, but that doesn’t mean the thing is stopping. What about front brake lights? Yes, that’s right. Something on the front of the car that can tell people in the path of a vehicle that yes, the driver/car is in fact slowing down. The idea for this is hardly new, the earliest example I see being from the late sixties. There is a plastics manufacturer called Rohm and Haas, and in the late sixties they were pushing to get their plexiglass technology applied to automobiles. Ultimately, the idea was only implemented (with great difficulty) to one car- the Bricklin SV-1. However, to promote this technology Rohm and Haas made show cars that featured not just their innovative plastics, but futuristic design features as well. Note the lighting on this thing: WARNING: The following images could cause extreme arousal if your name is Jason Torchinsky source: flickr Note the blue front brake lights next to the (equally high visibility) turn signals above the windshield. A later show car (below) had the blue brake lights above the headlights. This one even had a green light in the back to show that the car was accelerating! If you scroll though the link to the brochure..it has a bunch of other insane features like a roll out trunk:
source: flickr More recently the great design Godfather (or is that Golf-father…HA!) Giorgetto Giugiaro has been a proponent of these. Note his comments on one of his concept cars that he designed not that long ago: “See the brake lights at the front? It means pedestrians know when you’re slowing down at crossings!”
source: Rutdger Van Der Maar/Flickr There’s even a website devoted to front brake lights (which seems to suggest a green color on the grille). [Editor’s Note: This appears to be some kind of German research organization assessing the feature’s value and its regulatory viability; just look at all these Germans talking about front brake lights (“Vordere Bremsleuchte”) at a conference in Belgium: The organization introduces the technology’s purpose on the website’s home page, writing: The home page continues, discussing the main potential benefits of the tech: The site even includes a research paper written by some of the people in the photo above. Titled “Potential safety effects of a frontal brake light for motor vehicles,” it begins with an abstract highlighting the point of this whole discussion: Main benefits of a Front Brake Light are expected to be
Prevention of collisions in specific situations Reduction of the severity of accidents by its warning function Road user communication issues (esp. with electric and / or highly automated vehicles) Reduction in stress whilst driving
The paper includes some kind of video-based research that concluded, with a number of caveats about the setup, that the light helps pedestrians more quickly determine when a car is slowing down: Here’s a plot from that paper:
The German front brake light advocates mention on their website a 1971 study by the Highway Safety Research Institute at the University of Michigan. Titled “SUBJECTIVE EVALUATION OF THE FRONT-MOUNTED BRAKING SIGNAL,” the paper includes the following conclusion based on surveys conducted of laypeople and of people who had driven for a month cars equipped with experimental front brake lights: There’s even discussion about the right color and location of a front brake light: 2. The findings of this preliminary investigation suggest that a more comprehensive evaluation is warranted. 3. Objective evidence should be provided that a front brake signal will provide a greater margin of vehicular safety. 4. A study should be conducted using test vehicles to determine how this added signal will affect the performance of other drivers and pedestrians. For example, a driver whose vehicle is not slowing down may tap the brake pedal when approaching an intersection and find cars pulling out dangerously close in front of him, because the other drivers assumed that he would make a right turn. 5. If such a signal should be found to be valuable it would probably be necessary to conduct a public education campaign to explain its function. And there are notes on what the subjects who used the lights for a month thought about the light’s purpose, its brightness, its flaws, and more:
Anyway, back to our daydreaming designer, The Bishop. -DT]
source: Front Brake Lights So what do I propose? I don’t think this light should be mounted among the other lighting at the front of the car. You might not see it (I barely see the one on the BMW above) and it will be obscured by daytime running lights. So, basically I’m imagining a CHMSL (Center High Mounted Stop Light) at the front of the car. Actually, it would probably have to be two, since in many cases the center of the windshield is filled with rear view mirror and driving assist cameras. I’d like to see red, but are there laws against that? Likely, but laws can change, and red really does mean stop. Having it high up and aimed at sort of an angle would keep your hood from getting a red glow from the lights.
source: Tesla One other thing. I don’t know if this should be wired directly to the brake lights in back, and here is why. The idea is to show pedestrians and other cars that you are stopping. When at a standstill or, worse yet, sitting in bumper to bumper traffic with everyone on the brake pedal, that’s a lot of red light (or blue light or whatever) to be shining in your rear view mirror or camera. [Editor’s Note: It’s worth mentioning that the German organization running “Frontbrakelights.com” addresses both why it thinks green would make for the right color, and how the system would wire into a current vehicle’s electrical system: -DT] For the conception of a new LSF on motor vehicles, there is always the question of the appropriate light colour to be used – as well from a legal as a factual point of view. As other colours are legally assigned already to special situations and / or special types of vehicles, choice is left between green and white. Given the already existing high number and range of variation in forward-acting white light signals (dipped beam, high beam, fog lights, etc.), the use of a white Front Brake Light could result in ambiguous information being received, thus nullifying its benefit for traffic safety. The colour green, however, is not used for LSF on motor vehicles yet, but therefore offers the advantage of unambiguousness and fast signal identification. Furthermore it is well known in road environment (i.e. traffic signals) and for purpose of a Front Brake Light will also be supported by psychological points of view against other colours, especially red. It is assumed that the Front Brake Light is linked directly to the rear brake lights and thus only one more device must be connected to otherwise identical circuits in the control unit(s). With regard to the design of a Front Brake Light, a number of variants are conceivable, depending on the type of vehicle and its vehicle design. Therefore implementing a Front Brake Light within existing technical conceptions of vehicles is most easy from a technical point of view. I think the light itself could work similar to something BMW has done (and others likely as well) called Brake Force Lights. What this involves is essentially taking the red lights that are used as rear fog lights overseas and wire them up so they illuminate when heavy brake pressure is applied (probably when ABS is engaged). They then turn off and do not light up in normal braking.
source: BimmerForums These front lights would illuminate only on moderate to major deceleration (remember, EVs can stop without brakes) but then turn off after five to ten seconds of the car stopping. [Editor’s Note: Or you could wire them up to an accelerometer, and have them illuminate when there’s a certain rate of change of velocity. -DT].
source: Tesla and The Bishop Do we REALLY need more lights on a car? I would argue that we do, especially with the advent of self driving cars and virtually everyone wondering if these will work or if they are gonna go Maximum Overdrive on us (terrible movie). What do you Autopians think? So if this was implemented tomorrow, in 2035 it would still be 50-50 whether or not a car coming up behind you with no front brake light lit was about to rear-end you, or just too old to have front brake lights. It would be meaningless. Even a full human generation later, you’d have people freaking out and doing emergency evasive maneuvers when approached from behind by someone in a classic car from before the time of front brake lights. That would be downright dangerous. The only solution would be to require that they be retrofitted to all existing cars, which is something I don’t think has ever really been done for a new safety feature. I guess it wouldn’t be impossible, but it sure would be weird. or that WHOOSH WHOOSH that KITT made A FMSL (see what I did there?) would be a whole new signal, whose absence meant either that the car wasn’t stopping or that the FMSL was absent/broken. A solution that I just thought of would be to have one light for not-braking and a different one for braking. Say, a green light if the car’s brakes are not applied, and a red one for if they are. In that case, no light at all could only mean a missing or broken FMSL system.
Is that last year’s grill treatment, or just the base trim level? Did they offer that shade of gray two years ago? Wait, when did that car get front brake lights anyway? WHAM! I’m still amazed that we’ve had hybrids for as long as we have and there’s no requirement that cars make some sort of external noise. I can see fine and it still creeps me out when I hear only the crunch of tires on the road behind me as I’m walking along…I can only imagine how unnerving it is for the visually-impaired as we head toward mass, mostly silent EVs on the roads. Also, this concept is wonderfully Blade Runner, so yes please on that alone! Like that drug dealer in the show ‘Weeds’ said when he borrowed a Prius- “I like that it’s quiet- easy to sneak up on mutthafukkas’. Oscar: “if he stays under 5 mph, Dwight won’t hear him coming…that’s smart.” https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2018/02/26/2018-03721/federal-motor-vehicle-safety-standard-no-141-minimum-sound-requirements-for-hybrid-and-electric It drives me crazy when I am coming up on an intersection and I cannot tell if a car coming from the side street is actually going to stop. If people would not wait until the last moment to slow down for stop signs it would help, but I don’t suppose we are going to get people to stop that. But more seriously, what if there was a way to combine front brake lights with the “line-of-sight” concept that was tested with the eyes? The way I can imagine it is like a KITT style scanner bar on the front of the car that lights up when the vehicle is braking, but concentrates the light where ever the sensors are detecting movement or pedestrians. I’m not a designer, but it’s just a thought. Driving in Italy for five days aged my father twenty years. He vowed not to drive in Italy ever again. But since nobody seems to care about lights these days – not using indicators, forgetting to turn the (rear) lights lights on when it’s dark, blinding others with their high mounted “automatic” LED lights on thir SUVs – it’s not going to get high priority and be requested by customers, like cup holders. Some security oriented brand like Volvo could probably make some positive press on it. We could hope for it being implemented on the next Mercedes S-class, so we regular peasants will get it in 2045.. Green is the “go ahead” colour in traffic, so if someone cuts in right in front of you and you have to brake hard, you’re automaticly giving them the go ahead light, which could encourage ruthless motorists to do it even more often. Would take a lot to get this changed for U.S. law probably, seems too similar to what regulations would consider emergency vehicle lighting. They’re not even illegal in the USA, just very rare since they’re not required. Don’t know how true it is, but I once read a Twitter exchange where someone wondered about a better way to “thank” someone for letting you merge in front of them and someone said in Europe/some areas, people do that with hitting the 4-way flashers – but that also wouldn’t work in the U.S. with the number of red signals or combined signal/stop lamps, it would more like a brake check. /s I wonder how many Americans have needlessly died over the years in accidents that could have been prevented if only their car didn’t have a stupid blinking brake light. What gets me is there’s all this experimental lighting but it still has red freakin’ rear turn signals. Possibly combined with the rear brake lights.
