Put the Brakes on New Eye-Level Brake Lights

Let’s put the brakes on eye-level brake lights.

What’s needed even more than the eye-level brake light is an automatic turn signal that anticipates changing lanes or left and right turns. While some psychic engineer works that out, back to the drawing board on the new eye-level brake light. If we must have it, let’s do a better job of it.

Left to the present design and installation, the eye-level brake light is little more than a tacky gimmick to make money for the manufacturer while offering little, if any, motorist safety according to my concentrated empirical findings, government testing notwithstanding.

Sitting in four lanes of slow-and-go traffic surrounded by eye-level slashes of red glaring in your face is tantamount to being strapped into a chair under the third-degree lamp at the police station.

Take the design of these new lights. What purpose does a 7-inch by 2-inch (roughly) shape serve that a fixture half that size couldn’t accomplish? (Rumors are that messages will be printed on them next--say it isn’t so.)

Why not set a smaller rectangle on end, thereby increasing its visibility and dimming the glare? A tall, narrow, or even a small round light would call attention to braking by better defining it from the shape of standard bumper lights that already swim before one’s eyes in heavy traffic.

Speaking of bumper lights, why do they have to be so large? So garish? It’s overkill to the point of causing driver fatigue, to say nothing of putting the vehicle in danger of being taken for a mobile bordello.

Usually, the more classic the design the smaller the red-light district on its tail. Minimizing that gaudy glass glitz along the bumper would better serve the purpose of the new eye-level brake light by reducing confusion.

Take installation. On some models the eye-level brake light is scarcely 6 inches above the conventional brake lights, rendering the light in the window virtually useless and adding clutter.

Mostly, a light mounted on the bottom sill of the rear window is hidden by the car directly following it whose driver can already see the bumper brake lights. Chances are greater of other motorists seeing the new brake light mounted at the top of the rear window. Top mountings can sometimes be seen several cars ahead; whereas, today’s glut of small trucks and vans on the road negate those lights mounted at the bottom of rear windows.

Shaping up this eye-level brake light system is the easy part; let’s get cracking on a real safety need, that of refining an automatic turn-signal system--a system that takes the option of signaling out of the hands of the driver.

ANN BERGER

Malibu