Fog Light Fury
June 11, 2007 by Paul Maric
I’ve had this boxed up inside me for some time now and it can’t remain any longer, I have to share with everyone my Fog Light Fury.
Most middle of the range cars now come with fog lights, along with a bucket load of DIY maestros who fit their own fog lights, caring little about their alignment and positioning.
During total daylight, without even an ounce of darkness, you are likely to find no less that one in five people driving with their fog lights on – that’s according to my personal day-to-day tally. Unbeknown to the driver, their fog lights are pissing me – and quite a few other road users – right off. Is there any logic whatsoever in using your fog lights during the day, or even during the night when there is absolutely NO fog around? Absolutely not.
Drivers that have mis-aligned fog lights manage to get at me the most, surely if they knew how bloody annoying and dangerous their showboating attempt was, they would realise that there is absolutely no logic in the use of their fog lights. Earlier model Subaru WRXs, along with VT-VZ Commodores must be the worst offenders, every single one of them – with fog lights on – seems to have their fog lights aligned directly at oncoming traffic.
And then there are rear fog lights…Hyundai Excels anyone? Rear fog lights are the bane of all evil and should not – under any circumstances – be operated during conditions where there is no fog! Surely drivers of these offending vehicles wonder what the little red fog light symbol on their dashboard means?! Unbeknown to them, they are irritating the absolute crap out of everyone else. They are subtle enough not to stand out at first, but the second you notice them, your eyes don’t drift away until they’re gone.
My rant does serve a purpose. It is in fact illegal to operate fog lights and rear fog lights during conditions where there is no fog. Unfortunately, Police are always too busy doing other things, opposed to booking serial offenders who think their fog lights somehow impress other drivers.
So next time your finger goes for that fog light switch – STOP. Because you are annoying the crap out of every other motorist on the road.
- Paul Maric
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NacaYoda, fog lights don’t dazzle because they are pointed at the ground, which is how they work through fog as its less dense on the ground. However when a car with fog lights on either crests a hill or hits a bump and the fog light flicks up, it can be dazzling, as they are higher intensity than normal headlights.
There seems to be plenty of Police on the road to issue tickets for using a hand held mobile phone or not wearing a seat belt but they are not interested in enforcing the improper use of fog light law. Maybe if the fine was increased to a realistic level plus loss of points we may see some action.
Scherman says:’Thats a shame because when driving, don’t you just hate those tailgaters jerk-offs that sit right up your ass on the freeway at 120 kph, specially in wet water spray, low visibility weather!’
So you travel at 120kph in low visibility, that’s safe and within the speed limit where?
Please, enough about how you are a safe driver etc.
We have your bully and antisemtic comments thrown in as well, as soon as oafish cretons such as yourself are forced off the road and perhaps out of this country(you are a disgrace) the better.
I have submitted a complaint to the site about you, and hopefully this post and all the drivel from Scherman will be removed when i next visit.
At long last people feel the same as I do about these useless bloody lights. I live in the country with fog from around 9pm to nearly noon the next day on occassions. My car has foglights and I didn’t void the warranty I would remove them. Not only are they blinding others, they don’t work in the damn fog anyway! Why manufacturers produce this crap is beyond me. The sooner the police start acting on this illegal practice of using the light without fog around the better. Although I have found that they do light up the sides of the road a bit more while watching out for roos at night, but not enough to make them worth while having, let alone using.
BAN THEM!
What a load. Foglights are nowhwere near as bright as headlights and are facing towards the ground. They blind no one who is driving as they should. if 4 glowing objects excites you that much that you have to stare into them then being blinded is not your problem… idiots. if you have any clue whats going on you will find its not the foglights but the headlights you are affected by.
Totally agree with Matt. I do a lot of night driving and see a lot of cars with foglights on and they don’t annoy me one bit. It’s only a minority of vehicles that have them mis-aligned that could cause some glare (not enough to annoy or be dangerous), but nowhere near as glaring as mis-aligned headlights. FYI, I do not have foglights on my car but would use them if I had them. Foglights are positioned too low and only cast a beam within about 10m of the vehicle, so how can they be blinding? (unless you’re only 1 foot tall and standing directly in front of the vehicle) There seems to be a lot of whingers in this country. It could be due to the “tall poppy syndrome”. The rest of the world does not complain about something as petty as this.
Did you know that fog lights are now illegal in SA now just like many of the other states have been for ages.
many other countries have similar laws.
But I see more people using them??????
Well they tick me off! like rear fog lights!!!!!
I see bucket load of misaligned foggies
I drive most of the time in darkness to and from work for 1.5 hours each way, i have spotties but I dont use foggies.
I often drive in foggy conditions but never need to use foggies.
My previous car had 750w of light on high beam, so I have no issue with high beam activated lights.
Rob, they are illegal in some Australian states so that the authorities can have an excuse to raise revenue. Only mis-informed people like yourself believe that because they’re illegal, they must be dangerous. You see more people using them, most of them probably harmless, yet they tick you off! Why is that? Tall Poppy Syndrome! You claim you see bucket loads of misaligned foggies, probably because you can’t stop staring at them due to your attitude towards them. The fact is most OEM foggies are aligned correctly and cast a beam too low and too short to be dangerous.
Jonothan and Matt, it would pay to do some research on the beams of fog lights, I did spell it out above, but seems you couldnt be bothered reading that far back?
Fog lights project a wide beam of light, to both sides of the car and more importantly in the direction of uncoming traffic. Properly setup low beam headlights have a beam cut off and dont direct significant amounts of light onto the right side of the road. Properly setup foglights will, otherwise they would be quite useless for use in the conditions where fog lights are needed, which for those that care to know are in white out conditions and given the low forward reach of the beam would mean at speeds of less than 40km/h.
20 years ago there wasnt a need for this law. People who drove who went to the trouble of fitting fog lights, fitted them because they needed them in Alpine areas and realised when their use was appropriate and didnt feel the need to drive with them on in suburbia for whatever lame reason.
Unfortunately a law has had to be now introduced due to manufacturers loading up cars with options that are then used by some cretons that dont realise or dont care what they are doing is highly dangerous and not in the interest of others in the community.
Yes, and we have the creton view, if you dont understand the law, it must be there to raise taxes…….
Well said Izaak.
How can the road toll be so low with so many idiots actually believing that their fog lights make either them or anyone else safer.
Only hope I can see is market forces, if enough have insurance claims denied due to running car in illegal mode the fassion will change.
Izaak, Paul and Steve are right, fog lights can be extremely obnoxious, though they vary a lot from model to model. I find the ones on late ’90s – early ’00s Subarus and Ford Explorers to be the most annoying, the ones on European cars are generally the least. I’ve only found them useful in heavy snowfall and in rain on highways, where spray from other cars and trucks is a problem. Though marginally useful, the truth is that they serve mainly as a white-trash fashion statement in the US. There was an effort to require that US vehicles with fog lights be wired so that they could not be “left on” between trips, requiring the driver to manually activate them each time the car was started; this will prevent negligent use of them and might discourage “showboating”, if it ever gets approved. The money spent on fogs would be much better used for cornering lights, which are far more useful, they could even include a manual switch and serve double duty in fog and snow. But cornering lights aren’t seen as shouting “look at me” to the rest of the world the way fog lights do, so they’re relatively rare.
PCL, Australia follows the Global Technical Rules for vehicle construction administered by the UNECE, as “ADR’s”, somewhat different in regards ‘lighting’ as those of the US FMVSS108 and the recommended practice under SAE.
Though our front fog photometrics are pretty much harmonized now.
Use of the front and rear fog lamps in Australia is held at ARR 217 (AUS Road Rules) and that rule is now mostly harmonized with the “UN Convention on Road Traffic, Road Signs & Signals” on the matter.
Related:- Australia does not yet have a mandatory DRL ADR requirement, and that may not happen here, or in the UNECE Regs, therefore such an item may be left ‘optional’. I note more recent NHTSA studies are not so favourable of the item.
In time Australia will;
* Adopt a mandatory ‘rear fog function’ for most categories of new-market vehicles.
* Adopt safety vests for cars, a la EU for breakdowns and crash scenes.
* Adopt the UNECE 27R Spec hazard-warning triangle for cars, vans and 4WD’s.
http://www.nbntv.com.au/index......de-safety/
* Will likely encourage fire extinguishers in certain vehicles.
The each state as usual is to increase enforcement of ‘use’.
Good post Keepleft. The problem with these lights is that once they have been turned on once, they come on every time you turn the headlights on. I wrote to Department of Transport, asking why we did not have an ADR requirement for “default off” wiring, and they also quoted UNECE as their basis for the current law. Peugeot and BMW and maybe others are fitting this to their cars already so that you have to turn these lights on EVERY time you want to use them. Most of the people driving around with their fog lights on think that the warning light is just part of the dashboard decoration.
Interestingly, UNECE also mentions that the emission implications of lighting have to be considered. As fog lights contribute an extra 3g/km to emissions we may see default off wiring become compulsory to reduce emissions. Always good to see a Prius running around with the fog lights on. Obviously Toyota doesn’t care enough about emissions to remove them from the spec.
UNECE 38, the global land transport regulation regarding rear fog lamps, and its inter-relationship with UNECE 48 is always an ongoing work in progress as technical advances are made, and working party discussion takes place. That your all on top of it seems!
So, I do know that in relation to the rear fog lamp function, we will soon see the requirement that the lamp is to extinguish, each-time – the car is switched off! Done,- to prevent the ’stray’ mis-use of the lamp function, in much the manner you highlight.
Another change on the way by updated UNECE 38, is what is best described as ‘automatic’ rear fog lights, here,- using newer LED and ’sensor’ technologies, the worse the visibility; the brighter the regular tail-portion of the lamp will become.
Stop-lamp separation from the rear fog lamp function will remain at 100mm minimum – as a separate function, naturally.
UNECE changes to front fog lamp regulation has been made in relation to newer LED technologies too:- LED front fog lamp compliance codes will bear the letter “F” and a number. Halogen compliance marking continues with the usual age-old letter “B”.
Australia simply updates the ADR version of the UNECE regs as often as it can, so the later EU made cars – do have some of those function-modifications sooner, legally – because we simply adopt it anyhow, albiet slower, and for harmonisation:-)
You might find this Singaporean government FAQ weblink interesting, see ‘penalties’ for mis-using front and rear fog lamps at Question 5, some readers here in Australia can be thankful:-)
http://ask.lta.gov.sg/home/lta.....52#2289838
NSW Government is to seek a compulsory rear fog lamp ADR:-
http://www.boostcruising.com/f.....pic=450922
I posted here some time ago, but still what some dont get for starters is that especially in Fog conditions using foglights while your low or high beam is still on is USELESS. The light from your headlights gets reflected back by the moister droplets that are hanging in the air that is the Fog. Light from foglights work because the are low and their ‘upwards’ going beams are reflected back towards the ground and as Fog usually ‘hovers’ a little distance above the ground , allow to see through the fog in a manner of speaking. This is why on a Mercedes for example when you turn on the fog lights, automatically your headlights revert to parkers. Foglights on during non fog conditions are DANGEROUS as well as Illegal. And rear foglight should not come on as soon as you have the front once on, again on a Mercedes you have to pull the switch a further step to turn it on aswell. Those of you that think and use fog and driving lights as a ‘fashion statement’ I can only hope that for your and others sake you dont cause a fatal accident with your fashion statement and then find out that your insurance company wont pay up because they get informed by the police that you illegally used those lights (just like a drink driver not being covered by their insurance if they have a prang).
Getting off the subject a bit but has anyone reading this blog ever taken a traffic
infringement to court? And how did you get on?
Here is one item from the Singapore website.
Q Why is the use of fog lamps allowed only during adverse weather conditions?
A Under normal weather conditions, be it in the day or at night, there is no need to switch on the fog lamps. This is because the light emitted from vehicle headlamps is sufficient to illuminate the road ahead. Switching on front fog lamps will not further improve forward vision under clear weather conditions. Some drivers have provided feedback that front fog lamps, when switched on indiscriminately, are intimidating and cause added stress to the driver in front. Switching on rear fog lamps unnecessarily may also cause confusion to motorists travelling behind you as the intense red light emitted could be mistaken as the brake light.
Izaak I work in a dealership and deal with parts dept, I know all about their beams and the way they are cut.
They do not blind oncoming drivers. Its that simple. They aim wide and to the ground. Do not go on about misaligned foglights as that is irrelevant to this topic.. misaligned can be headlights, taillights, even mirrors.
Headlights have a harsher effect on your eyes than foggies. I will happily accept that they annoy you, no problem with me – thats yours. But to say they are dangerous and ‘blinding’ – Untrue.
When you stare at a vehicle with foggies on you are being blinded by the headlights! and your own stupidity. NOT the foggies.
The new Fog light laws are ridiculous. I remember people installing Fog lights on their cars back in the Seventies. These lights were yellow. The so-called fog lights on most modern vehicles are really ditch lights. They serve to illuminate the sides of the road to watch out for kangaroos, other wildlife, late night pedestrians, bicycle riders and many other hazards. To say that they affect other drivers, particularly Semi Drivers is wrong. They are a safety feature and should be allowed to be used as such. What about the hazard of Semi’s with more lights on them than a 20 foot Christmas tree. Is there a law against these vehicles and the amount of lights that they are allowed to have. What a joke.
Matt said that FOG lights are not blinding. To him maybe.
If I poked him in the arm with a sharp stick I could say that does not hurt.
The fine in Singapore for improper use of fog lights is $1000, bring it on here I say.
Tony
what a bunch of crap if you think fog lights are bright then bloody hell stop being a bunch of pussys be a man deal with it
Paul Maric wears a skirt and a bra