What does it say about car culture, when the biggest development that automakers work on for new vehicles is how fancy their decorative LEDs are?
That really seem like a narrow perspective of current automotive development. There is so much going on. After the car company has done everything else, I'm the first to admit that I like a nicely styled car. If not, well, I would just buy a Nissan Cube.
Why are people against the flashing 3rd brake light? Any additional attention I can draw to the fact I am stopped the better to avoid being rear ended.
My complaint with the flashing 3rd brake light is that they really don't do what they are supposed to do. The belief is that by flashing, they get more attention from the driver behind you, in hopes that they will react quicker, to brake. But from what I've read, there is no evidence that they do that.
They cycle at 3 Hz, and are off as much as they are on during that 1 second period. They go off as quick as they come on, and don't come back on for as long as they were on. Thus, they only create uncertainty if the car in front is braking or not, until they come back on the second time. By then, any quick response opportunity has came and gone.
I believe the first application of sequential rear turn signals was on the mid-sixties T-bird. It was cool when it was unique and became less so with more common use. They're everywhere these days.
The problem with the blinking center high mount stop lamp is first, it is not permissible under federal standards, and no state can override that and that the whole notion of some low-level employee hacking into a vehicle's wiring to install the enabling device would disqualify any vehicle from my consideration.
Dang! According to Google, you are right. MY 1965 T-bird. My recollection was the same as
@gman2304. But hey, that was a very long time ago.
I remember the mid sixties Mercury Cougars having the first sequential turn signals I had ever seen. The Cougar TV commercials at the time likened it to the Cougar twitching its tail. Sequential, red, amber doesn’t bother me at all. What does bother me is seeing the brake lights light up 5 seconds and the driver half way through their turn before the turn signal starts to blink.
Agreed. To me, the cool part was how it worked. No simple programming in the BCU like today. It took some clever ingenuity back then, to build a black box that did the job.
I personally do enjoy looking at the different sequential turn signals, to see how each model does it, and at the same time comply with federal regulations for a turn signal. Some of them are meh, while others are cool.
