It’s not broken. It’s indicating a left turn, but the left blinker looks like an arrow pointing to the right. That’s a mixed message. It’s meant to look like the Union Jack, but that caused mixed messaging so it’s a problem caused by mixed messaging.
Not trying to be a dick, just took me a minute going “how does one ‘have lacks,’ one can ‘have a lack of,’ one can ‘lack,’ but ‘have lacks?!’ OHHHH.” Lol
Yeah regardless of what the above guy says I’m pretty positive separate indicators are actually EU mandate that the UK still follows because it turns out most EU laws are actually sensible, who knew.
I thought it was an EU law but maybe not. All indicators have to be separate lights, you can’t flash the brake light like that. It must be a proper indicator light.
So here they have the same basic look for the lights, i.e. the union jack effect, but that LED panels and they kind of pulse in the direction of the indication so it’s much less confusing, they don’t just flash on and off.
I think you’re confused on who stopped them. Here’s a hint, it was America and Russia. Personally I agree with Patton however, we shouldn’t have stopped in Berlin. Oh well.
I’m just looking at the thumbnail, is it reversed in the video? The indicator is on the right side of the car in that picture. You’re right, it’s shaped like an arrow, which I can’t believe was missed during development.
If the light is positioned on the left of the vehicle and is blinking, they are turning left. Vice versa for right.
If you want to check whether they are signaling or tapping their brakes, look at the CHMSL. Yes, it’s stupid. Bad regulations allow for this, and this is cheaper for manufacturers, so they will do it.
Everyone is shitting on this but Im 46 years old and can’t remember a single time I’ve ever been confused by a turn signal.
I can see why the regulation makes sense, because if one is out it might look like someone tapping their breaks is turning. But in both cases it’s a warning someone is slowing down and I can’t come up with a situation where they would have right of way that this would make sense.
So it seems like something that matters so little.
It’s about cognitive load. When you’re driving you want reduced cognitive load so you want things to be as unambiguous as possible.
It’s a difference between reading a shop sign as you drive past as a passenger and reading a shop sign as you drive past as a driver. You’re focusing mostly on the driving so you don’t have extra brain capacity to read the sign.
Same thing here, you are focusing on driving so you don’t have extra brain capacity to work out what the person in front of you is doing. If you’re used to it it’s fine, but if you’re not used to it it’s dangerous.
focusing on driving so you don’t have extra brain capacity to work out what the person in front of you is doing
That’s a huge part of driving, people not paying attention to the cars in front of them has gotten a car totaled while I’m waiting at a red light, and a bumper bent while I was waiting at a turn without a light. In both cases I was stopped where I was supposed to be, the people behind me were not paying attention to the cars in front of them, and so they hit me.
Also, I lot of American cars do have amber turn signals. I don’t know why people are acting like they have to be red. But yeah, a blinking light is pretty noticable regardless of what color it is.
You know, I feel like it’s really easy to get someone to click a link in browser. I pretty much expect the browser to be secure enough to do most of the heavy lifting, and click on whatever.
Is it not valid to hang the Union Jack vertically, like a pennant? Mini could have just designed each light to be a complete flag, made the same reference, and not have everyone point and laugh at them.
I honestly think this qualifies you to be part of their design team. Clearly you have a smarter take on at least one design question, paper qualifications or no.
Fahrenheit isn’t too bad IMO. It’s more granular so it’s usually sufficient to use whole numbers for everything. 0F to 100F is a temperature range a person might be subjected to in day-to-day life, with 0F being pretty cold and 100F being pretty hot.
I never undertand the more granular, the scale is in 180 because that’s the most precision they could use to manufacture scientific thermometers, nowadays it’s completely irrelevant. Celsius thermometers have a granularity of 0.1°C and that is useful soley when you want to differentiate between “almost a slight fever” and “maybe a slight fever”. Do you find yourself needing to differentiate between 45 °F and 46 °F?
I’m 100% on board with the us moving to metric, and in almost all cases I think it’s far easier to use.
But fahrenheit is more intuitive: 100 too hot to work outside, 0 too cold to work outside. It’s just garbage for scientific use. I couldn’t care less if we switched to Celsius, but it’s problem is certainly not intuitiveness.
I would say intuitiveness is more for all of the other measurements. Like 5280 feet in a mile? WTF is that BS.
This paper contains data relating to the effectiveness of amber turn signals by comparing striking and struck cars with the same configuration (amber or red), and the odds of not getting struck with an amber turn signal equipped vehicle is always about 4-8% better than otherwise.
Now imagine it in, say, fog, or a storm, or any other low-visibility condition. You can see the vague outline of a car 20 feet ahead, and a blinking arrow pointing to the right, but not in line with where a right blinker should be.
Yeah, I could see it being an issue for some less-common type of indicator, but everyone who drives knows what a blinker looks like. Nobody would mistake it for anything other than the right hand turn signal.
Hell, I wouldn’t even notice the shape of the light; all you need to notice while driving is the presence of a flashing light on the right side of the vehicle - if you’re looking intently enough to notice the shape of the light, you’re not paying enough attention to everything else on the road.
In the dark, with the other side obscured (or just broken), you don’t want the blinker to actively prompt you to come to a wrong conclusion.
It’s better to see a blinking light and think “I don’t see enough, gotta slow down” than see a blinking arrow and potentially not even realize it’s a turn signal.
If you’re driving in the dark with someone whose entire taillight system is out to the point where you can’t immediately tell if his blinker is on the left or the right, you need to hit the brakes and put as much distance between you and them as you can… Then get better headlights, because even in that situation you should still be able to see them pretty well just with your own lights.
Frequently, only a single bulb needs to be out for an entire side of the car to be dark.
Brakelights are only active while braking. A dark bodied car is difficult to see and a tail light being out is sufficient .
Blaming it on someone else’s headlights isn’t reasonable- and “better headlights”=brighter has caused significant problems on the other direction.
It’s a mild issue that could have been solved by a designer spending 30 seconds thinking about what they were designing. Or somebody in that design chain spending 30 seconds thinking about it.
Dude, if your headlights aren’t enough to illuminate what’s in front of you, then it’s not that an upgrade would be too much, it’s that an upgrade would get you to the bare minimum… You literally NEED to be able to see what else is on the road with you at ALL TIMES. You’re complaining about the risk that a vaguely arrow-shaped blinker causes in the specific case where you literally can’t see the car it’s attached to. There’s a much bigger risk there, and while it’s not your fault, it’s definitely something your vehicle needs to have the tools to deal with.
There have been times where I was driving near someone who forgot to turn their headlights on at night. But that’s the thing - I knew they were there; I could see their car with the light from my headlights, and even in that dangerously-low vision, I could easy tell which side of their car a blinker came on from. Yes, I got off the road and waited a bit to make sure they weren’t near me anymore, but even in the time that I had to drive with them, I had the tools to resolve the situation safely for me.
Dude, if your headlights aren’t enough to illuminate what’s in front of you, then it’s not that an upgrade would be too much, it’s that an upgrade would get you to the bare minimum… You literally NEED to be able to see what else is on the road with you at ALL TIMES. You’re complaining about the risk that a vaguely arrow-shaped blinker causes in the specific case where you literally can’t see the car it’s attached to. There’s a much bigger risk there, and while it’s not your fault, it’s definitely something your vehicle needs to have the tools to deal with.
duuudeeee… you realize, of course, that it’s a least as much a question of alignment… and with a car in front of you you shouldn’t be using floodlights; which is blinding everyone in front of you. Which is as likely to cause problems as not.
Further, dark colors on cars are inherently harder to see, lights or no.
There have been times where I was driving near someone who forgot to turn their headlights on at night. But that’s the thing - I knew they were there; I could see their car with the light from my headlights, and even in that dangerously-low vision, I could easy tell which side of their car a blinker came on from. Yes, I got off the road and waited a bit to make sure they weren’t near me anymore, but even in the time that I had to drive with them, I had the tools to resolve the situation safely for me.
Good for you. Doesn’t mean the situation can’t arise where it is a problem. Stop defending idiots that put cool-factor before functionality on something that’s fundamentally meant as a safety feature. save the cool-factor for the union jack roof paint or something.
You think that headlights that can illuminate cars ahead of you are the equivalent to those shitty aftermarket LED floodlights? Really? If your car can’t see a dark car on the road with its lights off, you’re a much, MUCH bigger idiot than someone with a union jack blinker…
oh yes. I’m an idiot for recognizing that there are circumstances in which “ideal” does not apply.
Also define “ahead” of you? 30 feet? 100 feet? maybe 2,640 feet? Sorry. but you’re failing to understand my point: THAT CIRCUMSTANCES AREN’T ALWAYS PERFECT. And when someone designes a critical SAFETY FEATURE they need to consider the non-ideal. 30 seconds of thought about what the fuck they were designing, or the designs that were undoubtedly submitted for approval could have prevented this. Instead, Mini Cooper elected to put “cool” before anything else.
You’re absolutely right that circumstances aren’t always perfect… Which is exactly why you need a vehicle that can maximize safety in all situations. A union jack blinker is dumb, but if you’re EVER in a situation where you can’t tell what side of a car a blinker is going off on, you’re in a situation where you need to pull off to the side of the road, turn off your car, and call for someone to pick you up.
I’ve driven for tens of thousands of hours in my lifetime so far, and I’ve never even been close to a situation like what you’ve described. Even in a snow squall or dense fog I’ve always been able to see where other nearby cars on the road are, and where their blinkers are. Not being able to do so goes well beyond “not ideal;” that’s well past the line of too dangerous. And the fact that THAT is how extreme your scenario has to get before the union jack becomes a considerable issue shows how much more concerning your scenario is than that one.
I’ve driven for tens of thousands of hours in my lifetime so far, and I’ve never even been close to a situation like what you’ve described. Even in a snow squall or dense fog I’ve always been able to see where other nearby cars on the road are, and where their blinkers are.
Good for you. I’m so glad you’re able to so confidently assert your moral superiority.
shit happens outside our control, so it’s asininely stupid for a car manufacturer to design safety equipment with the expectation of everything always being “normal”. it’s an asshole move blaming other people for things being abnormal. I doubt very much that’s an accurate assertion on your part, however, and even if it is, isn’t true for everyone. In fact, it’s probably far more reasonable to assume you’re the exception.
and by the way, getting brighter lights (or angling your lights higher than they ought to be), actually decreases your visibility while driving in fog and snow. which is why fog lights are both dimmer and mounted low.
I’m not saying to get overly bright lights. I have no idea why you keep talking about overly bright lights. When I’m not driving for work, I drive a '94 corolla with stock headlights. But even with those, I can see dark obstacles that are way ahead of me on the road. I’ve encountered deer, turtles, pedestrians, and all sorts of random stuff that fell off of people’s cars. There’s so much on the road that needs to be illuminated, even if all the other cars have working lights. The fact that you can so nonchalantly bring up a scenario in which you can’t even see another car, much less all the other stuff that might show up on the roads, makes me highly concerned for the state of your vehicle. That scenario is so insanely rare and dangerous that I can’t understand how you can just throw it out there like it’s no big deal.
It’s NOT NORMAL to be unable to see a car on the road that’s close enough to you where you need to see where their blinker are. Please, if you drive in that scenario often enough to bring it up like it’s a realistic thing that someone could reasonably encounter more than once in a lifetime, bring your car to a mechanic before you cause a huge accident.
Have you seen the idiots out on the road these days?
However, as far as turn signals go, this is one of the less egregious designs. Car manufacturers are given too much leeway in what is allowed for such systems, like putting them between headlights or making them use the same circuits as the brake lights instead of a dedicated light.
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