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Mini’s statement only highlights the absurdity (emphasis mine): >With regard to the turn indicator light pattern, there should be no trouble at all for a drive
by mthoms 5y ago
Mini’s statement only highlights the absurdity (emphasis mine):
>With regard to the turn indicator light pattern, there should be no trouble at all for a driver to understand, when seeing the full rear of the car, which direction is being indicated
So what about when you can only see half of the car? Like when it’s changing lanes or pulling out of a parking spot? You know, like those times when a signal is MOST useful?
Absolute idiocy.
- philsnow 5y agoor when the back of the car is covered in snow or a million other reasons
- WaitWaitWha 5y agoOr at night, in the dark, unlit two-lane roads of most of Europe?
- wirthjason 5y agoAt night both tail lamps are lit.
- ashtonkem 5y agoIf they’re working, and if there isn’t something obstructing their view, like another vehicle or fog. Generally it’s best to design vehicle signaling with an assumption that situations are not ideal, just in case.
- giardini 5y agoResult: night-time accidents, especially in fog. Drivers will see a single flashing taillight arrow and make incorrect assumptions. Very severe and fatal collisions and consequential lawsuits will ensue. Cooper will pay, pay, pay. They will issue recalls and beg for leniency. But there is no doubt they f*cked this design. If one of the two tail lights and/or a brake light(s) is/are out then the situation will only be worse. I'd short Cooper stock were I an investor. This will cost them a pretty penny. Gawd, I can't imagine what a self-driving car would see when it is following a Mini down a foggy British roadway. Perhaps someone could model it?
- jen20 5y agoIf it’s on a British road, said self-driving car will see normal yellow indicators, since red is not a permissible colour. As mentioned in the article.
- ashtonkem 5y agoYeah, I think the amber horizontal bar in the middle for EU cars is an acceptable design. Cutesy, but no risk to the health and safety of the driver and others. It's the US spec that seems incredibly poorly thought out.
- jen20 5y agoEven though this is a particularly egregious example, poorly thought out indicators are not exactly new in the US though - it is unfathomable to me why people thing that making the turn signals the same colour as both tail and brake light is a good idea...
- dboreham 5y agoIt was almost certainly a grandfathered cost reducing measure.
- u801e 5y agoIf I'm not mistaken, rear fog lamps are required by UNECE regulations and would mitigate this issue. Unfortunately, in the US rear fog lamps are not required.
- bcraven 5y agoAs the article states, the euro-models light up the middle bar of the lamp. This appears to be US-centric issue due to the fact turn signals are not required to be amber.
- thiht 5y ago> So what about when you can only see half of the car? Like when it’s changing lanes or pulling out of a parking spot? You know, like those times when a signal is MOST useful? You either see which side of the car you're seeing, or you don't and the shape of the light doesn't matter. When you drive, you don't interpret the light of the turn signal, you interpret where it is. For me that's one thing that looks stupid on paper but that doesn't matter in real life with all the context we have when driving.
- afavour 5y agoWhat about when it’s dark?
- forgetfulness 5y agoAnd say, you're a cyclist, going somewhat fast but not having headlights that would illuminate the rear of the car as to make out the relation of these arrows and the vehicle.
- SkeuomorphicBee 5y ago> When you drive, you don't interpret the light of the turn signal, you interpret where it is. That is not true, you only interpret "where it is" because there is no other information encoded in the light itself, when seeing a regular car with a plain signal you do interpret where it is. But in service cars (police car, ambulances, road maintenance trucks), large truck, or static light signaling, we frequently have special purpose lights with a meaning encoded in the light itself, and in those cases the position is irrelevant, the meaning is 100% in the icon used, so all drivers are already primed to interpret an arrow shaped light as an arrow. Now, those service vehicles don't have those special purpose lights in places were they could be ambiguously interpreted as a turn signal, so there is no problem there, but that Mini turn signal is quite unsettling, it sends two conflicting messages (position vs iconography), and that is BAD in traffic.
- OneLeggedCat 5y agoHave you ever driven in rural areas at night before?
- diarrhea 5y ago> So what about when you can only see half of the car? Like when it’s changing lanes or pulling out of a parking spot? You know, like those times when a signal is MOST useful? I don't understand how this is different with any other indicators.
- p49k 5y agoWith other indicators, if you lack context your brain is aware that you don’t have enough info to deduce what’s happening. With the MINI, they are providing additional (incorrect) context to reassure you of the (wrong) result.
- misnome 5y agoThis is what I _hate_ about the Audi striping indicators. Yes, they are actually useful when you see them when they are indicating. However, when they have the hazard lights on, they still stripe. So if it's still and you can't see the left indicator, it feels like a very strong statement that they are trying to move out.
- Schlaefer 5y agoI'm still confused how they made it through regulation. Image you're a security-engineer and read "On average the indicator light runs at only 50% because we think it looks cool."
- Goz3rr 5y agoBesides the fact that they're blinking lights so only on 50% of the time by design, consider the fact that regulations specify the minimum luminous output which these cars obviously pass. Add to that the fact that you're using modern high power LED lights and that the human eye perceives light in a logarithmic manner, it wouldn't surprise me if these indicators will be more noticeable on their "minimum" output than their old incandescent bulb counterparts.
- growt 5y agoThe average regular indicator is also only on for 50% of the time. You know the joke: works, doesn't work, works, doesn't work
- avemg 5y agoThe design is dumb but you’re really stretching. I don’t need to see the entire rear of the car to know which way the blinker is indicating. If I did then that would mean 99% of the cars on the road, which have no arrow at all, would suffer from this ambiguity.
- fsckboy 5y agothen why did the Mini representative say "when you can see full rear of the car"?
- Retric 5y agoThe issue is if you only see 1/2 the car people are going to make the wrong assumption rather than not knowing. You really don’t want confusion when driving multi ton vehicles at highway speeds.
- mthoms 5y agoIt's dark/foggy and you're cycling along a bank of parked cars. Up ahead you see a flashing arrow pointing right but can't make out the car itself. Is your first, gut instinct "up ahead there is a car pulling out to the left from the parking lane"? Or is it... "WTF is that?"
- hellbannedguy 5y agoI could care less about this tiny problem. Is there a Mini owner satisfied with the mechanical part of their vechicle after 70k? They have such a low oil pan, you don't dare not check it. And every owner complains of things breaking down. A few days ago I was talking to a Mini owner. Age friend has to go to England for a year, and gave the car to this guy, with the caviet of taking care of maintance. The car had 50k--so it was new? First week a new Serpintine Belt. Then faulty sensors, and a list of problems he was listing off. They are cute though. I'm looking for a salvaged one to electrify.
- noneeeed 5y agoEven if I could see the full back of the car I think I'd still risk a brain-fart. It's like a driving Stroop Test (where words like "blue" are shown but you have to say what colour they are shown in, not what colour they say).
- nextos 5y agoThe designers screwed up many obvious things, not just these signals. Mini Mk 1 (2000) was a beautiful minimal design by Frank Stephenson. Things started going downhill with Mk 2 (2006) and further models. He left, and I guess designers suffered from non-invented here syndrome. I own a Mk 1 and I've leased or driven all other models. Aside from being uglier, many subtle things in the dashboard were tweaked making it a lot less intuitive. It makes me angry every time I see how they ruined a great design. Engines, on the other hand, have improved very significantly with each generation.
- riazrizvi 5y agoFor a car branded for being small, that is now 3x heavier than the original sensational design I would not call this absolute idiocy. It is consistent idiocy.
- throwaway0a5e 5y agoCost of compliance but in pounds instead of dollars.
- JustResign 5y agoGiven Mini's British origins, this is brilliant
- cratermoon 5y agoOr when it's dark. I'm imagining a cyclist or pedestrian seeing only the blinking light and maybe a vague outline of the vehicle at best, seeing the <- blinking and thinking, "that car is turning left". Then the cyclist wakes up in the hospital after being flattened by a right hook[1] 1 https://www.welovecycling.com/wide/2019/04/08/whats-a-right-hook-in-cycling-and-how-to-avoid-it/ https://www.welovecycling.com/wide/2019/04/08/whats-a-right-...
- bagels 5y agoIf it's dark, I would assume it is likely that the taillights are also on.
- Reason077 5y agoUsually yes. But in urban areas (where there are lots of street lights, and lots of cyclists), people often forget to turn their lights on. I guess it's becoming less of a problem now that most cars have auto lights, but I still see cars driving around without lights pretty regularly.
- dwighttk 5y agoYeah I’m astonished at how often people drive with headlights off. Why is it even an option for lights to be off when in drive? I can understand wanting to turn them off sometimes, but not while moving.
- culturestate 5y agoI think the proliferation of daytime running lights is partly to blame here, because you still get some light out of the front even without headlights on. The thing that always gets me is switching between (rental) cars that have automatic headlight sensors and those that don't.
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- fishywang 5y agoAs a cyclist I'm always annoyed at the scenario that a car parked to the right of the bike lane having their left turn signal on, and their right turn signal is blocked by the car behind them, so I don't know if they are actually trying to pull out or just having their blinkers on. Designs like this could actually be a solution to that, if they have the whole <-> on both sides, so when it's blinker they blink -> <-, and when it's turn signal they turn on <- or ->, depending on which side. That would totally resolve cyclist's problem. But no. Mini completely ruined that. I have so many questions to the designer on how, in any scenario, this is a good idea.
- leokennis 5y agoPeople can complain about overbearing EU bureaucracy all they want - I love it. Please give me 500 pages of regulations about indicator lights if the end result is sane indicator lights.