Humans have evolved over centuries to become a fairly sophisticated being. The renaissance was huge in terms of evolution of the human mind and its intelligence. The renaissance period led to the industrial revolution which led to the rise of technology. And for most of mankind the evolution has been one that has taken our breed forward in every way.
In the midst of all that the automobile was born. The automobile is a giant scene in the industrial world. Which is all very well and good, because, well, I have a job as a result. Anyway, someone realised that a car is going to need lights for safety reasons. Big and powerful ones at the front to let you see where you are going and lots of little ones at the back to stop things from crashing into the back of a car at night. And everything was fine really, until just over a decade ago.
You see the red lights at the back of a car, called the brake lights were happily doing their job very well until someone came along and said’ ‘we should make them brighter’. For what? We can see them glowing in the dark, and everything has been fine for decades! But, no! No one seems to have bothered with the sensible option and as a result the bright brake lights caught on.
The left tail light has LEDs while the right one has an incandescent bulb
The end result are cars with brake lights that manage to damn nearly make you blind at night. I’ am sure if you fix one of those on a space station you could see it all the way from here. But the automobile industry for some reason thinks it’s a good idea to fix the blinding LED bulbs or multi-reflectors in their cars, and my God do they fix a considerable number of them in a tail light. They must have like a vending machine for the same. And that’s just the start of it. Have you seen what happens when the driver hits the brake pedal at night? The whole thing lights up like a Diwali celebration. I bet even Lord Ram never had as many diyas to welcome him home.
When the brakes come on in a modern car, everything behind it goes red and all driver in cars behind it can do is blindly hit the brakes till the car in front continues to do so. I was behind a new Audi the other day and that thing had really bright LEDs, and to make matters worse these cars have automatic gearboxes which means at a traffic signal the driver simply stands on the brakes till he wants to move forward instead of putting the car in ‘park’ mode. In moments like those all you can do is sit in your car and pray for the red horror to get over as soon as possible.
Someone told me the bright lights help other drivers identify a car in front on a foggy night. I’ am sorry, but if the human race can invent an automatic flush toilet I’ am pretty sure we can make a decent tail light that can be spotted on a foggy night and for the rest of the time do the job of a tail light and not of a million watt search light.
So, this is an appeal to car makers across the world really. Stop making us blind and please go back to those normal tail lamps that you lot used on the back of cars till about 2002 in India and get rid of the new rubbish ones which are much too bright to serve any purpose at all.
