Good headlights mean good vision

By Barry Lake

STATISTICS show that more single-car road fatalities occur at night than during the daytime and that lack of vision is one of the major factors; good reason, surely, to ensure you have good headlights.

Road safety research has shown that, despite the fact that only one-third as many kilometers are traveled by cars at night compared to daytime travel, there are more single-car road fatalities at night than during daylight hours.

Certainly there are other factors at play. Drink drivers are more likely to be driving at night than during the day, for example. But lack of vision remains the major reason for most fatal one-car crashes.

Good headlights are a necessity for improved safety when driving at night -- and there is a lot more to it than simply providing lots of candlepower.

Modern-day headlights are extremely sophisticated and well- engineered pieces of equipment.

This is partly to do with government legislation, mostly to do with intensive research and development by companies like Hella, which supply original equipment headlights to carmakers.

Speak to representatives of these companies and they express frustration that they manufacture headlights to ever-more stringent engineering standards, yet suppliers of after-market headlights, usually fitted to cars during crash repair work, are not forced to comply with the same high standards.

How many times do you see a car -- approaching from the opposite direction, or looming in the rear-vision mirrors -- which has one or both headlights scattering light in such a way that you are dazzled and distracted?

Chances are, on a busy Jakarta road, it is every few minutes.

The roads are full of cars with imprecisely manufactured after-market headlights.

A car with poorly aimed and/or focussed headlights is a car to be treated with caution.

New, undamaged cars don't have lights that dazzle in this way.

The lights that dazzle are almost certainly on a vehicle which has been involved in a crash.

That car with the dazzling lights is driven by someone who is possibly crash-prone, and who almost certainly is not getting as good a view of the road ahead as he or she would be with two well-engineered headlights.

In the absence of more strict legislation on after-market headlights, safety conscious drivers should insist on having genuine branded units identical to the original equipment fitted to their car.

Apart from providing you with better vision at night and not dazzling oncoming drivers, lights that point where they should will keep your car looking like new.

Even the smartest looking car in the world looks shonky at night if its headlamps scatter light all over the place.

Headlamp technology has undergone an incredible amount of development since the very first electrical incandescent globes replaced the acetylene gas and carbide headlamp systems that preceded them.

Halogen bulbs for headlamps, using a tungsten filament in a globe filled with halogen gas, create a whiter and brighter light.

In the mid-1980s, these began to replace the long-standing all-glass, sealed-beam headlamps.

By the 1990s, halogen lighting had taken over in the automotive business, but it hasn't stopped there.

In 1992, Hella began volume production of its DE halogen headlights with a D1 gas-discharge bulb, which produced double the light of the early halogen lights.

Now, we have High Intensity Discharge -- or xenon -- lighting which has become the accepted standard for car headlights in the late 1990s.

Along with increased light, these new headlamps come with superior optical engineering, which allows the light to be aimed so accurately that it provides better vision for the driver, without dazzling oncoming drivers.

So, it is now even more important not only to replace broken headlights with genuine replacement units, but to ensure they are fitted and aimed accurately by experts.

Modern, high-tech plastics now are used in headlight manufacture, with advantages in areas such as weight reduction and resistance to stone damage.

Ongoing development has produced lighting technology that allows headlights to be made in all shapes and sizes without losing their lighting quality, so that stylists can use the headlights as styling tools in ways never before possible -- large, small, round, oval, or almost anything else you desire. And the end isn't in sight yet.

On the horizon are "intelligent" lighting systems that adjust the light according to prevailing conditions, automatically level regardless of load or attitude of the car during acceleration, braking and cornering, and which even automatically clean themselves when required.