Brake Lights on the Front of Your Car? They're Being Studied—and Could Prevent More Crashes

Motor Trend

4 days ago

The scenario reads like this: you're in your car, stopped at an intersection—but cross traffic isn't required to stop. You want to pull out, either to go straight through the intersection or to turn, and look over and see a car approaching from one side. Is that driver slowing down? Their blinker is on, but what is their intention? Do they see you stopped there? You can only see the front of the approaching vehicle, so all of that is pretty much a mystery—because the brake lights that'd tell you more, well, are on the other side of the car.
You seem to have time to pull out and complete your maneuver—do you take the risk of a potential crash, assuming that approaching vehicle is slowing down (giving you more time to act)? This is a nearly everyday occurrence for most American drivers, and many of them do end up taking that risk and becoming another crash statistic. A study suggests that there might be an easy and immediate solution to this guessing game of vehicular roulette: brake lights visible from the front and sides of new vehicles.
It's not a totally crazy or infeasible idea, as the story from ZME Science points out. It can be difficult to discern whether another vehicle's nose is dipping because it's slowing, especially from a distance; many modern vehicles boast body control that snuffs out that behavior almost entirely compared to, say, large land yachts from the 1970s. In other words, the most obvious way to determine what another vehicle is doing—if you can only see it from the front—is to rely on some sort of indicator at the front and sides of vehicles that could signal to other motorists and pedestrians whether or not it's slowing down. Again, such information is critical to cross traffic and especially to pedestrians.
While you might be thinking this thinking would lead to a bright red light fitted to the front and sides of a vehicle—which is illegal in the FMVSS and further still by many state laws on forward and side lighting—the study by Graz University of Austria, Comenius University of Slovakia, and the Bonn Institute for Legal and Traffic Psychology of Germany suggests that these forward brake lights be green in color. A logical idea considering that a front green light would automatically be associated with the sign that you're good to go, just like a standard traffic light. The study suggests that front-facing brake indicator lights—not even including side brake lights—could reduce intersection collisions by 17 percent and could possibly lessen injury related to those types of crashes by 25 percent.
The way this study simulated potential real-world results was by recreating real crashes. In each scenario, three different reaction times were tested between 0.5 second to 1.5 seconds. The faster two of the three reaction times showed between nearly 8 percent to 17 percent of those simulated accidents could have been avoided all together. For nearly 26 percent of those same accidents, the injury severity dropped as the average crash speeds were reduced to around 18 mph from an original high of nearly 28 mph. 10 mph might not seem like much, but that equals to just over a 44 percent difference in kinetic energy for the 4,400-pound weight of your average American vehicle.
We're skeptical of the conclusion drawn in ZME Science by the author suggesting it'd be easy to implement a new light on a modern CAN Bus or Zonal communications vehicle and holding optimism in the speed of NHTSA to implement such a change. More likely, any changes would apply only to newer vehicles going forward, not necessarily retroactively added to existing cars on American roads—older vehicles might simply not support an extra lamp setup, for a variety of technical reasons.
Then there is the challenge of getting a green front light legal for use via NHTSA regulations, let alone local laws on lighting. NHTSA and the FMVSS section 108 only allow for white or clear lenses or lighting for forward illumination and white or amber color or lighting for side and signal lighting. Auxiliary lighting like daytime running, driving lights, or fog lights can be white or amber in color, too. Any other color is not legal on the front or sides of a vehicle.
While Mercedes-Benz has an 'OK' to run turquoise lights—indicating a vehicle in true full-self driving mode on SAE Level 3 prototype vehicles—in a couple of states, this is technically not legal for the rest of the U.S. and is an exception. For something like this to be implemented nationwide, presumably as a required safety fitment, it would need literal Congressional approval and that's only recently come to allow updates to the rules on truly adaptive lighting like that offered for years overseas as part of HR 3684—aka the 2022 Infrastructure Bill—during the Biden Administration.
All of which is to say, the FMVSS will have the final say. Given how today, that same regulatory framework makes it illegal to install LED replacement bulbs in headlight housings originally designed for HID, halogen, or incandescent bulbs, and is only just now being updated to accommodate high tech adaptive lighting technology that's been available elsewhere in the world for years, don't hold your breath that your next car might sprout a set of fancy new signaling lamps.