A video on sealed beam headlights

Yeah, it's all the fancy 'signature' bands of LEDs etc which ramp up the costs

Robin Capper

Yeah, unless you're doing fancy stuff like beam-forming for the headlights or stupid shit like animations of the tail light, there's no reason the various indicators couldn't use a lens over a large LED bulb, analogous to replaceable halogen bulbs.

Jerrad Pierce

You have truly captured the frustration from using crappy headlights in the 70's! The first thing I bought for my first car was a set of Marchal Zbeam H4 headlights. They were fantastic!!!

Mr. Hunter Jones

Experienced, thankfully not first hand, your point regarding the cost of composite LED lights. Although I have elderly Fiats 'my' mechanic' has elderly BMW loan cars as that is what he mostly services. While I had a 1990s 3 series loaner the rear indicator failed. Fixed it with a few dollars worth of bulb from the next parts shop I passed. When I returned it he showed me a modern 5 series which had the indicator portion of the rear taillight fail. The replacement cost was eye-watering in comparison to 'old tech'.

Robin Capper

Very true Robin. Thanks for keeping me honest!

Big Car

Believe it is pedestrian injury requirements which has killed off pop-up lights along with the way modern lighting can be built into nearly any body form.

Robin Capper

How fantastic was this video! Awesome stuff. Ironically the day after I watched I got an email from an Aussie company with 7" LED replacements! https://www.stedi.com.au/stedi-7-inch-homage-led-headlight-pair.html?utm_source=Customers%20-%20Wholesale&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Homage%20%2801GF2ADJ0CVV317YWTDWTKV8XJ%29&_kx=shc7m_uO5fnMMvHD-cmMOp703elOT2o05BKKUc7An1E%3D.Pibt3v

Jim Hooke

Sorry Dan, I don't know if it's still a legal requirement. I just know that it's almost never done today.

Big Car

😀 No, they were mainly to get around height restrictions. Once that wasn't an issue, they were dropped (late 80s, early 90s). But that was a time when aero was super important, so that also helped. The only reason the Miata gen 1 got them was it was easier to use the RX-7 mechanism than make something new. They were going to go for a fixed design.

Big Car

Oh, sorry, I just meant pop-ups

Technology Connections

Lozenge-shaped headlights were purely a style thing, and had nothing to do with aero.

Big Car

You can get do-it-yourself polishing kits as well. I've done it and it's a lot of tedious work, but the results were quite good.

John Vestrum

Thanks for the reply. I would agree that the regulation should have enough room to allow for innovation with beam pattern and emission source (plain incandescent -> halogen -> led), but having a standardized form factor and electrical connection on an essential consumable item is such a clear win for the consumer. Even if the exact SKU you want isn't available, you'd at least be able to plug something in and have it work. I like your idea of a standardized module inside the manufacturer's housing.

voussoir

Ok, thanks, I’ll adjust it there.

Zach Elwyn

You'll need to adjust it in your Patreon profile. Right now, as I read your comment, that's how it's formatted.

Technology Connections

That's still fundamentally an aero and styling thing, though, right? Like, maybe calling it a "gimmick" is too harsh, but it's a way of sidestepping the limitations that sealed beams (or any standardized headlight) present with sporty car designs.

Technology Connections

That's understandable. For a lot of it, I'm just being silly. The quip about clamoring for a new selling point is true nut it's also true that the quad setup was generally better. Really, this is a nuanced topic! And you're gonna find a lot of people who think sealed beams just... suck. I'm already seeing that a *lot,* and honestly some of my poking fun at them is to appease those who feel that way. But my central point is that sealed beams *the concept* aren't bad. However, the way we went about it was fairly ridiculous. Not allowing halogen lamps until 1979 was nuts, and also restricting use of aero covers was quite limiting. If there's something here that really grinds my gears, it's how slowly our regulators move. That's still the case (see: red rear indicators). I didn't go so far as to say it in the script, but my holy grail would be standardizing a sort of mini-sealed beam with LEDs and projector lenses. You see that a lot in new cars, but those headlight enclosures are usually (always?) not serviceable. If we had a middle-ground where the little LED pods in there become standardized and serviceable, it would be the best of both worlds in my eyes. If I were to give the video a thesis, it would be this; sealed beams are an ancient way to do this, and have a lot of disadvantages - but they also have plenty of advantages, too. Not everything has a clear answer.

Technology Connections

We still buy and put stickers on our headlights when we head over to France/NL. Its still needed, right?

Dan Abel

Hey Alec, love your channel but the first half of this video has kind of an odd tone. You say that the sealed beams aren't "an entirely bad idea" (2:52) implying that they're... only mostly bad. That using them until 1984 is "embarrassing" (11:12) and you're glad they finally "saw the light" (12:26). You sound like you've got quite a grudge against these, which turns out to be... aerodynamics and style? I would have thought that long-term compatibility, manufacturer interoperability, price, and real glass construction would be higher priorities for a practical person like you. And you even say that the move away from these lights was due to "executives clamoring for a new selling point" (7:23) and gimmicks (9:24). I can't figure out what your point is, sorry. I would be glad if my next car had a standardized component like this. Then there'd be no dubious aftermarket.

voussoir

Pop-up lights were mainly due to height restrictions (lights needed to be so many inches above the road). The Citroën Ami (based on the 2CV) & Ford Taunus P3 were the first cars in Europe to move away from round designs to a losenge shape in 1961. In the UK in the 70s & 80s you could buy stickers to put on your headlights so when you drove onto the continent you wouldn't dazzle other drivers (in fact it was the law to do so). With France dictating yellow headlights, you also had to buy a little bottle of clear yellow paint to paint the headlights as well!

Big Car

Odd request. My name (Zach Elwyn) shows up in the patron list as (zachelwyn). Can it be fixed to appear as a first last name?

Zach Elwyn

Tesla has cars with matrix LED lights (as if the entire light show wasn't amusing enough). I don't have them, but I do like the additional headlight to the side when turning.

Very interesting! I didn't know a lot of this. I love the LED headlights on my 2019 Volt. I can see so much better with them than my previous cars.

The 8-Bit Guy

Once it's over 25 years old, yes. At that point rules essentially don't matter, but it doesn't mean it's a good idea to drive it at night unmodified. If I wanted to drive it at night I'd probably do something about it but frankly I hardly drive it at all - only when the weather's nice and I have an errand to run which doesn't need trunk space! I realized that since I've bought it I haven't even put 5,000 miles on it.

Technology Connections

I have an old car that had very oxidized and cloudy lenses on the front, but I just took it to a polishing shop and now they look as good as new for a quarter the price. I'd recommend to try cleaning and polishing instead of replacing them if you can find somebody to do it

TheEdgeOfRage

One advantage of circular lights in the UK was that you could rotate the bulb so more light went to the kerb and less to the oncoming traffic. I hadn't realised US cars didn't do that.

Jim Hewlett

I remember those kits well from when we used to go on holiday by car to mainland Europe when I was a child. I was just thinking he could probably import a set of them from the UK (they're like £7 from Halford).

Chris Crowther

Headlump!

C.J. Smith

Is it legal to drive a car with japanese headlights in the USA? If you drive a UK car in Europe, most countries demand that you do something to the beam pattern because it points the wrong way. For old headlights you could put black stickers over part of the headlight to blank out part of the beam or Fresnel lenses to bend the beam back in the correct direction (known as "beam benders")

Richard Bevan