By Daniel Stern, DVN General Editor
Last week there was another horrendous pileup, this time on a foggy stretch of American highway near the border between North Carolina and Virginia states. Ninety-five cars and trucks were involved. Three people lost their lives and twenty-five were injured. The public and private property damage doubtless runs into the millions of dollars. Take a look at the pile of burnt and twisted metal and it is readily apparent that the death and injury tolls could have been much worse. That they were not is a credit to the crashworthiness and post-crash survivability wrought by modern car design, construction, and regulation. But three deaths are three too many—same with twenty-five serious injuries—and this keeps happening again and again: many drivers enter a fog bank or snowburst or whiteout rain, and some don’t emerge intact or alive. Signs are posted warning of the danger, but the cars pile up anyhow.
Could better lighting have prevented or mitigated this pileup (or the recent ones in Michigan, Ohio, Ontario, Wisconsin, Texas, Louisiana…)?
It’s natural for us in the lighting community to want to answer “yes”, and not without reason: the American regulations for vehicle rear lighting systems are not very stringent. Compliance requires just four bulbs: a red one at the left and right to serve the rear position, stop, and turn signal functions; another red one for the central stop light, and a white one somewhere on the back of the vehicle for the reversing lamp. Among other laxities relative to international practice, rear fog lamps are permitted but not required. Pileups like these are precisely why the rear fog lamp was invented, given a safety award in the early 1960s, and mandated for all vehicles by ECE (now UN) Regulation 48 in the 1970s.
In North America few cars and no trucks or trailers are equipped, most drivers are wholly unaware of their existence or proper use, and they are most often seen either permanently dark or occasionally permanently lit (the latter seemingly a case of “I don’t know what this switch does, but I must have paid for it, so I’m going to use it!”). It is very safe to assume none of the vehicles in this most recent pileup had a rear fog lamp lit.
So there are multiple suppositions to make here before we can meaningfully ponder the question of whether rear fog lights would have helped. We have to assume all cars are equipped, and that all drivers know how to use them correctly, and when. If those are sturdy assumptions, then it is probably reasonable to say the awful pileup might have been at least smaller and less severe with rear fog lamps. But these suppositions we’ve made are really very steep. Even if American regulators could change the laws tonight, it would be a long time before there would be enough vehicles with rear fog lamps to make a difference. And American drivers are not notoriously fastidious in their maintenance and proper use of vehicle lighting, so even a sweeping, big educational advertising campaign would not likely bring about proper usage; more American drivers use their front fog lamps in dry weather than in weather bad enough to actually warrant them.
So, difficult though it be to swallow, a realistic look at the world as it is (and not as we wish it were) suggests that rear fog lamps as we presently know them probably would not have fulfilled their safety benefit potential.
Then…what?
Audi’s laser-based rear fog lamp certainly looks like a probable improvement, with its rolling stop-line and big red triangular visual signature, increasing in apparent brightness as the density of the fog/snow/rain increases. But it still has to be activated by the driver, and that’s the worst and weakest link in the chain.