https://hackers.town/@earthshine/112174209944026016
Attached: 1 image A series of decisions were made at Mini which resulted in what is unambiguously the worst indicator design of all time. It is so bad that after seeing it on the street, I just had to post about it here.
You had one job...
They are required to be in other countries. At some point we decided red was ok and there's so many problems with that!
yeah, I had to get used with the lack of regulations here and there when I moved to the US
land of the free corporations
Can you explain because I'm 46 years old and have driven plenty and can't recall a single time I've ever been confused by a turn signal.
This video is better at it than I could be. But I'm short: ambiguity in driving is bad.
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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.
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?
Amber has been scientifically proven to be easier to notice, and mildly safer than using the same bulb as the brake light to indicate a turn.
Here's a paper on it. https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/811115
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.
Thanks for this. I see so many people here talking like it's obvious, but I've never been confused by a turn signal. I'm curious to read this.
Unless you have some kind of color blindness, orange is among the most noticeable colors to the human eyes, especially in an urban background
it more just the training, from 20 plus years of driving, and looking out for red and orange but yellow colors.
Don't blame us, Mini has been owned by BMW for decades.
Good thing we stopped them in WW2. That flag in the indicator would have been even more confusing.
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.
*Shows up late, almost in the wrong jersey*
*Team is finally whole, barely wins because of enemy blunder*
”Look at us win this for the team!”
Personally I agree with Patton however, we shouldn’t have stopped in Berlin.
Yeah, not enough draftees had died yet.
The bigger issue is that the US still alows Blinkers to be the same color as break lights. Just weird to me.
Actually, Us law/regulations require them to be amber or yellow.
But like with super-bright headlamps; manufacturers decided to ignore it because USDoT is pretty useless in that regard.
That's not correct. FMVSS 108, Table I-a, specifically allows rear turn signals to be amber or red. Front turn signals must be amber only.
I guess... It's still a big blinking light on either side of the car I hardly think it's going to confuse anyone
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.
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.
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.
If visibility was that low then you wouldn't even see an arrow. It would just look like a red blinking blob up ahead.
Multiple wrong. The brake light double as a turn signal, the signal colour itself being red, and the arrow pointing at different direction.
In a saner world, signal and brake light will always be separated and must be the colour of amber.
But that's just a US issue, right? Most other countries already require amber signal lights.
Yeah, possibly also Mexico but I can't quite recall
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I think you two are too European to understand this.
The US and Canada allows blinking a brake light to act as a turn signal. It's absolutely stupid, I know.
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It's the exact pace of a turn signal, it's how they work over here.
It's also not a bulb, but an LED tail light.
A lot of countries require indicators to be amber. The fact that they can be red in the USA is weird.
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.
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.
I just like to tell the Americans that this is your fault. You have lacks traffic laws that allow this kind of thing. This isn't be legal in the UK.
They look like this here in Germany, sure there was the brexit but do you really have s different version?
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 think they just meant that the rear tail lights have the union jack and didn't realize they were talking about the amber indicators.
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.
Lax* short for "relaxed."
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
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.
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 that dumb?
Right, I didn't even realise what the problem was supposed to be. But it's still a bit of a shit indicator.
I actually think it's left. The blinking light is on the side turned into, even if it just happens to be shaped like an arrow pointing right.
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.
You could say that about anything that's broken though. .. this isn't a deflect caused by prioritising style to something else
Ok ok. .. i think that I understand the issue now .. people recognize an arrow instead of just looking at the lights.
It's just confusing, especially with the split second decision making involved in driving 2 ton objects at high speeds. It's terrible design.
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.
