![]() What you want your fog lamp to do is light up the road in front of you without lighting up the fog that's higher up, right in front of your eyes. That's why you want a wide, flat beam from your fog lights. The amount of glare from the airborne moisture is affected by the relationship of angles between your line of sight and the angle of your car's lights. We may never deliver any of these, but you can start sending deposits in now (big ones). One solution would be to buy heated blowers like giant hair driers to dry the air in front of your car - works great, costs a lot and uses a ton of energy. Similar experiences occur in rain, snow, dust, etc. You're being blinded by the glare of your own lights reflected off the water vapor in front of you. Your high beam headlights produce a wall of glare - a whiteout - from the light bouncing off these droplets of water. You see in foggy weather by lighting up the road under the fog, illuminating as little of the fog as possible to avoid producing glare.įog is defined as a thick cloud of water droplets, 0.00039 to 0.00156 inches in diameter, suspended in the atmosphere at or near the earth's surface and reducing visibility to below half a mile. Mainly when you think of fog lights, you think of fog. While fog lights are beneficial in fog or any other glare-producing conditions, they can also help you see better when you drive on a clear night. And fog lights have many other functions besides fog, such as other types of bad weather and increasing side light for cornering. There are also driving lights, midbeams (passing lights) and spotlights for other purposes. They would make it harder to see.įog lights, of course, are just one kind of auxiliary light. There are lots of lights being marketed as fog lamps - some very low priced, some hundreds of dollars a pair - that, if I were driving in extreme weather, I would not turn on. So beyond that, not all "fog lights" are created equal. A real fog light - one that will do you good when you're trying to see in the fog - has a wide beam pattern (70 degrees to 120 degrees) with a sharp, flat cutoff on top. What makes a fog light is the light pattern, regardless of the type of lamp or color of the light. There are amber driving lights, amber spotlights, and, in France, there are amber headlights. When someone is thinking about installing fog lights, I start with questions: First of all, do you know what fog lights are? Secondly, what do you drive, where do you drive, what kinds of roads do you drive on? What kind of weather do you drive in? What do you want the fog lights for - do you live in a real foggy area? Are they for pea soup fog or light fog, for snow, rain? Or just to look cool when you're cruising?įog lights aren't necessarily amber lights, nor are amber lights always fog lights. Here is a good article I ran across regarding the color of lights.įog lights are yellow and driving lights are white. Nothing like cresting a hill and getting nailed by them. My biggest gripe are the folks (who we call flat-landers) who seem to feel a need to drive with their fog lights on in clear weather on mountainous roads. (If nothing else, according to the tests, about 25% of the people on the road will agree with you. I say, if yellow makes you feel safer, then go that direction. Of those who thought they helped, the groups were split as to think yellow or clear was best.Īll agree that the lower and wider the lights (futher apart), the better the light on the road. Virtually all the non-biased tests that I have read for 20-30 years show that there is an almost 50/50 split between drivers as to whether they really think fog lights help or not under the test conditions. If you review the test data from a number of tests (both law enforcement and private organizations), you will find that fog lights really turn out to be a personal preference, whether yellow or clear. ![]()
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