Monday, December 12, 2011

Full beams are not a substitute for a blown bulb

Public service announcement : if you have a blown headlight bulb, change it. Using your full beams and fog lights is not a substitute. Replacement bulbs are cheap and it'll take you seconds to do it. Now we're all commuting in the dark every morning and evening, this is particularly irksome. Drivers who could care less about their car, bumble along on autopilot blinding everyone in front of them because they're too bloody lazy to spend less than a tenner to fix a problem on their cars. If I was a police officer I'd pull everyone of these goons over and ticket them. Why? Because driving on full beams in traffic is dangerous - it blinds everyone coming towards you, and anyone in front of you with a rearview mirror. I think the only thing that's worse is drivers with a blown bulb who don't drive on high beams, but also don't bother to fix the bulb. In the dark, it's now difficult to tell if you're looking at a car or a motorbike because there's only one headlight. Either way - don't be lazy. Just fix the damned thing. It's easy to do, just make sure you don't handle the new bulb with your bare hands - wear some cotton or rubber gloves. If you touch the glass on the bulb with your bare skin, the grease you leave behind will cause a hotspot and the bulb will crack and fail. The only exception to this is if you have HID lights - those are a lot pricier to fix because it means either a new arc discharge unit, new control unit, new ballast, or all of the above. But then you knew that when you paid an extra $1000 for them on the car when new, right?