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EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Sunday, October 28, 2007

That one is a.....

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Just done one of my periodic night-time treks across the UK’s motorway network and as I have frequently done for some time now, I was playing the game of “spot the make of car” in my rear-view mirror. If something screams up to pass in the outside lane, with its lights blinding you in the mirror, you can say with almost total certainty - BMW or Mercedes. Other marques have the same problem, but don’t seem to be quite so bad.

The offending technology is discharge-lamp headlights. As we know, these can’t be dipped by switching filaments like a conventional headlight, but must have complicated moving-part reflectors and shutters in an attempt to mimic a proper dipped light. Which they conspicuously fail to do. Nice for the drivers of those cars, of course – more light should mean safer, but it’s not safer if it destroys the night-vision of the other drivers around them.

Later model years are better (early Merc SLKs are particularly bad) but are still not very good. Discharge lamps are just a poor product for the job, and the car makers should devote a lot more effort to sorting out their beamforming, or to training their dealers to set them up correctly. Really, if you can’t see where you are going on the light output of a traditional halogen filament bulb, you shouldn’t be driving anyway. Certainly not cruising past me at 160kph-plus in the outside lane of the M6.

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