Dynamic hazard-warning light system for vehicles, description



This description is referring to the actual existing hazard-warning light system for all road driving vehicles, such as passenger cars, busses and trucks etc. Although the already existing hazard-warning light systems of these vehicles have attributed a big contribution to the safety of modern traffic they still can be improved.

Characteristic for the actual hazard-warning lights is, that if set, all direction indicating lights of the vehicle start to blink at the same time and continue to blink all together with the frequency of the normal direction indicator lights. Thus one may call them 'static' hazard-warning lights. Exactly this characteristic of the actual hazard-warning lights may lead the drivers of either the approaching or the following vehicles under certain circumstances to irritations and result in dangerous situations. The introduced improvement delivers additional security in our present times with reduced space for the ongrowing traffic.

Dangerous situations with the actual hazard-warning lights may come up always, if one side or one light unit of the hazard warning vehicle is hidden for approaching or following vehicles.

If drivers of bypassing vehicles can not see both sides of the hazard warning vehicle, it is not clear to them, wether the hazard blinking vehicle has set the direction indicator in order to change its positon, or if the hazard-warning lights are set. Thus they may act without knowledge of the real situation as for example in countries, where it is an obligation for busses to set the hazard-warning lights while standing in parking bays. If the one side that points to the middle of the road is hidden by another vehicle, one may think that the bus has just arrived to the parking bay not knowing, that there already exists the danger of hitting dismissed passengers when overtaking that parking bay.

The rising of dangerous situations due to only half-side visible hazard-warning lights is promoted by the fact, that actual hazard-warning lights are blinking with the same frequency as ordinary direction indicator lights. As a result it is impossible for bypassing drivers to doubtlessly identify the hazard-warning lights as such.

In order to improve this situation one could think on changing the blinking frequency of both, the direction indicator and the hazard-warning lights in relationship to each other.

Due to the fact, that today's indicator systems react to a failure of any indicator bulb with an increasing of the blinking frequency, it makes not much sense to increase the frequency of hazard-warning lights since then, if only one side of the vehicle is visible, again they would not differ from an indicator signal, in this case an indicator signal of an indicating system with a faulty signal bulb.

Increasing the blinking frequency even more higher in order to achieve a difference between direction indicator and hazard-warning lights makes also not much sense, since it may not be received as blinking light when seen from greater distances. Moreover estimating frequency differences of defective indicating systems and hazard-warning lights may be rather difficult for some people.

It is also no good idea to reduce the blinking frequency of hazard-warning lights, because the resulting longer periods of darkness would reduce the overall signal brightness.

To enable drivers from approaching or following vehicles to identify hazard-warning lights of hazard-blinking vehicles doubtlessly as such, even if one side of them is hidden, herewith the 'dynamic' hazard-warning light is introduced.

The dynamic hazard-warning light system provides head and rear light units for vehicles with at least two indicator lights per unit instead of one, advantageously arranged more or less one above the other.

This could be transferred to the side indicators as well. Especially modern head and rear light units are nearly ideal to integrate two separate indicator lights inside. Separate indicator lights on each side of the vehicle, that are not integrated within the head or rear light units are possible as well.

Due to this new arrangement of indicator lights the following blinking options will be possible: In case of normal direction indicating signals nothing will change, neither drivers or other participants in traffic need to get used to something new referring to direction indicator lights.

Setting the hazard-warning lights means no more continuous, ordinary blinking of all direction indicating lights at the same time. Instead a lighting system with unique caracteristics acts by switching first all top indicator lights of each head and rear light unit while the corresponding lower ones are turned of, followed by a period of shining lower indicator lights while the corresponding top indicator lights are turned off. This change continues with the same frequency as provided by todays blinking systems.

This delivers the following advantages:

All in all it is to expect, that the dynamic hazard-warning light system will add another contribution to make modern traffic more safe.


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Copyright (c) 2006-2010 by Andreas-Josef v. Gencsy and Alexander v. Gencsy