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Re: Fog Lights
Posted by Stottler (more from Stottler) on Fri, 3 Jan 2003 19:42:20
In Reply to: , Kok Chen, Sat, 17 Dec 1988 12:00:00

I would agree in most regards that the so-called 'fog lights' on most cars
are 'window dressing', and not very useful for driving in fog. That said,
driving in fog at night will always be nasty business resulting in the need
for slowing down dramatically to stay safe. The main problem in fog is that
the light from your lights reflects off the water droplets in the air in
front of you rather than other objects down the road. Fog does a great job
of reflecting white light. The one advantage we have is that the fog tends
to form a little above the ground, giving us a chance perhaps to look
underneath it.

With these things understood, how would we design the best possible fog
light? First, we would want to choose a color of light which reflects as
little as possible off of the water droplets. This color turns out to be
yellow or amber. Use of an amber light allows us to illuminate the fog as
little as possible while illuminating other objects as much as possible. We
also want optics with a very sharp cut-off so that the light stays low,
hopefully under the fog. Unfortunately, this gets us into hanging very
expensive equipement made of glass at raccoon/curb level, but... Finally,
we need to shut off the regular headlights while we have the fog lights on
so that we don't have all that white light high up to reflect off the fog.

As you can see, the white lights on the air dam of a Saab (or any other car)
are not designed to be fog lights. Unfortunately, it will take some wiring
changes and some fairly expensive lights to get 'good' fog lights in any
case (while you're at it, don't forget about the rear fog light/lights - all
those other people staring at the white fog need to be able to see the back
of your car). In my opinion, the white lights most automakers are
installing aren't good driving lights either (a good driving light will
throw a powerful narrow beam far ahead); mainly what they do is cover up
poor headlamp optics by splashing a lot of white light on road right in
front of the car. So, I mostly end up with the low mounted lamps turned
off - it seems that they mainly serve to annoy other drivers.

Have fun!

Gary Stottler
'78 99 Turbo
'64 96 GT850

>I drove for over an hour in thick fog at night recently. It was not a
>pleasant experience. My stomach was tied in knots and my knuckles were
>quite white (much like when I take off in a plane). The stock foglights on
>my 93 9000CSET are little more than window dressing. I'm wondering if there
>are any decent aftermarket foglights that can be fitted to the 9000 without
>major surgery and without requiring a loan. Thanks.
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