Annoying Fog Lights

Whenever I drive at night it's hard not to notice that maybe three out of four cars I meet have their fog lights on. Instead of squinting at the glare from two lights, now I'm coping with four.

If there was some safety benefit to driving around on clear nights with the fog lights blazing, I wouldn't complain. But as the name suggests, fog lights are for use in fog.  Regardless, many drivers seem to regard them as fashion accessories and leave them switched on for the life of the vehicle.

Fog lights are for dense fog or blowing snow when headlights ricochet off the water droplets and back into a driver's eyes.  They have extra-sharp horizontal cutoffs to direct the light down and just ahead of the vehicle.

They're not driving lights and don't augment the high beams by throwing extra light down the road. If that were the case, vehicles factory-equipped with fog lights would allow the driver to turn them on along with the high beams.

Some drivers defend the full-time use of fog lights, claiming that more lights make a car easier to see at night. In my opinion, a driver who can't see two headlights after dark shouldn't be driving in the first place.

A lot of states dictate fog light mounting height and the maximum number allowed. For example, my home state of Arizona permits no more than two. But only a few make it illegal to drive on clear nights with the fog lights on.

In Louisiana and Oklahoma it's illegal to drive with the fog lights on unless visibility is reduced due to weather.  In Oregon fog lights are to be treated like high beams: they must be shut off when following another car within 350 feet or if an oncoming car is within 500 feet.

These states are among the few exceptions. Elsewhere, clueless drivers are free to annoy others by leaving them on permanently.

Some drivers install their own fog lights which, judging from the results, often seems to be a waste of time. Many are too small to be effective. 

Hella fog light

In lights the key factor is the size and shape of the reflector.  Make it too small and lighting efficiency drops off the map. You might be able to see the light, but it won't be doing much to light the road.

This means that a round fog light with a diameter less than about four inches is probably not big enough to be useful.  In rectangular lights, a three-by-five-inch model is on the small side.

This can pose a problem when it comes to fitting them onto a vehicle. To be effective, fog lights need to be mounted low. Factory car stylists can pencil them in easily enough, but aftermarket designers are in a quandry. Make the light big enough to be effective and many customers won't buy it. The objections: too big, too tough to find space for it.

Make it fashionably small and the light might be a sales success, but it probably won't be very effective.

Turning on the fog lights is a desperation move, for conditions so lousy that headlights don't help much. The rest of the time they're unnecessary, not to mention annoying. So to everyone who's driving around on clear nights with their fog lights on, please turn the damn things off.