Safe Speed Forums

I recently bought some 100 watt bulbs for navigational rallies, and have fallen in love - Dipped beam they are no problem for traffic coming the other way, pedestrians, or anyone else.

They should be made compulsory on new cars. I cannot think of any reason for keeping their use illegal - I'm convinced that they would have a significant impact on KSIs at night.

The only problem I can think of is inappropriate use of full beam in villages at night - the driver sees that there is no one else around, so uses full beam and lights up people trying to sleep in their house. A law against using full beam in town could perhaps be introduced to compensate for this.

I have been temped to do a "driving lights" conversion where the front foglights are replaced with rally style high-intensity driving lights - they are an offical dealer fit option for Imprezas and come from Prodrive who run the Subaru WRC cars.

http://www.prodrive.com/default2.asp?M=429

These are wired up to the dip switch, so they come on with the main beams, and provide a lot more light. See the photos on this page which discusses fitting them to an older Impreza http://www.iwoc.co.uk/iwocmods.html.

Should get the message across to anybody that insists on blinding me...

I have however decided that the normal lights are more than adequate - the newer model has much better lights fitted as standard, so don't start about me blinding poeple.

100W lamps ( Bulbs - we plant them) - sorry- we (DFt) ARE ON AN ECONOMY DRIVE - AL LAMPS ARE SWITCHED OFF

I can't remember the date but pre a certain date vehicles were allowed to have 80/100w bulbs after were limited to 55/60w bulbs.

Frankly having worked in the theatre as a lampy I could never understand this fixation on wattage, whilst our bulbs were wattage rated we worked on the lamp assembly as a whole and looked at the the light output (lux or lumens) as a 60w bulb can produce a 'brighter' more usable light in a lamp with good reflectors and clean lenses than a 130w bulb with no reflector and dirty lenses.

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Date was roughly around Cavalier MK 2 (first front wheel version) intro date - remember headlamps were a bit poor,especially as car got older and i looked at putting 100w halogen lamps in as a cheap alternative to new headlamps on an old car.Possibly also the fixation on wattage was more on light output vs cost of new light unit on older car??

I'm with Safety Engineer on this one - the overall design of the headlamp has far more effect than the wattage of the bulb. The worst idea ever was the eighties fashion for rectangular headlamps - talk about form over function! Car designers chose to ignore the fact that headlamps were always round for a reason and gave us cars with dreadful illumination.

100/80 or 100/55 lamps do give a good improvement, but if you are serious about doing a lot of night driving down the lanes there's nothing comes close to a decent pair of driving lamps. This again illustrates the differences in reflector design, as I remember when we started out night rallying we were on a tight budget and tried a pair of cheapo driving lamps whose name I'd best not mention. Despite fitting 100w bulbs you could barely tell whether or not they were switched on next to the standard headlamps!

When we managed to stump up for an upgrade to a pair of the de rigeur clear lensed Cibie Super Oscars the difference was astounding. Since then I've also had the privelege of sitting in with Cooperman and being treated to the light provided by his set of "reassuringly expensive" PIAAs, and they go a quantum leap better again, yet all three use the same wattage filaments.

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Ah maybe so - i agree, as way back i had a cibie driving lamp matched with a fog lamp , underbumper both of them.Found that the fog was superior to headlamps, especially on my ancient A40
In the early days, and the mk2 cav was no exception, headlamps were diabolical.
But at the time i was looking at 100w lamps - cost of rectangular headlamp replacement from scrappie was about £40 for pair( and then would they be any better), car worth about £150( so not worth new ones) and pair of 100w lamps cost less than a tenner.

I had a pair of Oscar + on one of my old cars. These things would light up the road at least half a mile ahead. The supers were supposedly good for nearly twice that but wouldn't fit (only an alfasud). If the PIAAs are a 'quantum leap' ahead it must be like carrying your own sun around.