Something about Fog Lights….

Effects of Weather

The weather has a amazing effect on our every day lives. It can have an impact on what type of clothing we wear and how we spend our free time particularly holidays. Weather also affects agriculture, transportation, and industry. But harsh weather, such as tornadoes, hurricanes, and blizzards, can brutally damage property and can take lives. Freezing temperatures can damage crops particularly in citrus-growing regions. Winter snows often generate hazardous driving conditions. The buildup of heavy fog may slow traffic on the roads and cause delays at important destinations like hospitals, railway terminals and airports. Thick fog can also cause deadly road accidents. It was in outlook of the highly dangerous road conditions during fog that the ‘Fog Lights’ were made-up. In this article we’ll talk about the new technology and latest innovations engaged in the automotive fog lights.

Safety and Visibility

Safety has always been a major issue in automotives. This is why auto manufacturers keep adopting newest technologies and placing the best and ground-breaking features on their cars to craft them safer. One of these is the fog light. The most significant facet in driving is your visibility. You should be able to see in front where you’re going in order to avoid striking anyone or anything approaching in your way. However if you can’t see where you are going, the chances are very elevated that you or somebody else is going to get damage. That is why it is strongly recommended to use fog lights on rainy days, foggy days, or during night driving. High beams, which only reflect back on fog and rain, generate the entire extra blinding outcome on your eyes. Fog lights are so designed as to penetrate through the fog to offer you better visibility. They also complement the low beams of your headlights, and working together, they make best use of your vision on the road. The fog lights thus provide accuracy for a highly controlled light pattern to improve the driver’s visibility in snow, rain, sleet, thick fog, and even in blizzards.

How Automotive Fog Lights Work

 

In order to assist visibility in foggy and misty conditions fog lights which are fixed on the front of a car or truck, are now widely used in nearly all the modern cars. The fog lights come in selection of colors and intensities and provide extraordinary assistance in navigating poor weather. A scientific principle of cutting through the fog with the help of extra low-level light helps solve visibility problem especially in foggy driving conditions..

Leaving apart red which is the color already used for both stop lights and brake lights most fog lights are yellow in color because of the need for a single color light rather than white light, to reduce dispersion as the light hits the water vapor and scatters in different directions. Another reason to use yellow color is because it has the longest wavelength next to the red. But the size of water molecules has a definite impact on dispersion. The problem arises when the size of water vapor molecules in fog are large enough causing limited dispersion building the wavelength of the light worthless. So in choosing the yellow lights which was supposed to be minimizing the blur the fog lights cast, the first car companies did not take into account the impact of the water vapor size on dispersion. Also because yellow color was used to point out various cautions to a driver.

So many modern fog lights are halogen light that let them to burn at much hotter temperatures than traditional lights. Halogen fog lights tend to have a tighter beam than incandescent fog lights, which yields an extra advantage. A particular category of fog lights, seen on some newer cars, is high-intensity discharge lamps. These lights may well use a number of different minerals to function, together with mercury, sodium and halide. These fog lights are often notable by a purplish shade of color, rather than the traditional yellow color.

Although some vehicles arrive with factory installed fog lights, there are some that don’t. But you needn’t be anxious as aftermarket fog lights are accessible on the market, and come in different shapes and sizes. You can always choose to upgrade the factory-fitted fog lights to higher-output halogen , HID (xenon) or projector style lamps Not only do fog lights make your driving safer, they also add to the aesthetics, drive safely in style.

Updates on Rear Fog Lights

There had been recurring turmoil over the installation of rear fog lights for relatively some time in the past. But the recent decision to add the safety feature (rear fog light) was in response to an online petition by more than 700 U.S. Mini owners requesting that Mini parent company BMW AG activate the rear fog lights on their cars. Many owners say they want the feature because they fear trucks won’t see their small cars in bad weather.