US auto regulations are extremely conservative on the lights/signals front, have been for a long time. Some European car designs in the late 20th century were compromised when brought to the US because the headlights had to be made worse (in an aesthetic sense) even though there was no safety reason to do so — Citroen DS was one of these.
And maybe they should be conservative, but I don’t see how anyone can argue that it should take a decade to get something like this approved (or formally rejected).
Ford had to petition the government to switch from sealed beam headlights to composite lights by claiming they couldn't meet fuel economy standards without them. The truth was they just wanted to use them on the then new Taurus.
It was another 5 years before you could use a shape other than rectangular or round, even for composite lights. I believe the Dodge Viper was the first US car to get them.
I agree the NHTSA is way too slow, but damn am I glad they're doing the work! I love that they're checking everything carefully and doing the research before approving new designs.
They are not doing their work, their work is to allow highest available safety standards to be implemented, not to block progress. Their inability to allow curved rear mirrors killed god knows how many US people. You have decades of statistics form ie Europe to back it up, same as for this topic (OK decade and a half for lights).
I suspect its rather a typical lazy government bureaucratic hell case.
The NHTSA is regulating all the wrong things. How many people have been killed by wrong headlight shape? How would you even test that regulation? Meanwhile, people are free to go 100mph in cities, with the trivially demonstrable deaths that causes for no upside.
They could regulate cars to make sure they're incapable of going faster than a certain speed, but people seem to want faster and faster cars for some reason and I'm guessing most accidents aren't happening at > 100mph speeds
Largely because we have a long inversion of how government should act. It should have never needed "approval" in the first place, government should have to seek to ban a product, innovation, etc based on their own creditable evidence the thing is dangerous.
Instead of we adopted a position of everything being illegal until it is blessed by a regulator, it is in effect guilty until proven innocent.
Until we put government back into the proper context innovation will continue to be inhibited
> Largely because we have a long inversion of how government should act. It should have never needed "approval" in the first place, government should have to seek to ban a product, innovation, etc based on their own creditable evidence the thing is dangerous.
Uh, no. There should be a well defined standard of what light need (light area of this and that size or at least this or that brightness) and can't (low beams blinding oncoming traffic etc.) do, then let market work within those limits. The regulation should have actual research behind it. Pretty sure that's how it works in EU.
Then if for some reason behavior of lights on the market causes problem, the standard should be revised, not ban random products for breaking rules that haven't existed when they were created (aside from extreme cases I guess)
And maybe they should be conservative, but I don’t see how anyone can argue that it should take a decade to get something like this approved (or formally rejected).