2006 Honda Civic mini-review

Very nice review, thanks for posting it up

Keep it up carefully. We will not see the likes of the 240 again in the foreseeable future.

Easy explanation: Hondas never ever break. Just ask my officemate, whose own '03 Civic Hybrid was marooned at the Honda dealer for upwards of three weeks waiting for a replacement traction ("IMA") battery -- one of those parts that never ever fails. The dealership had the stones to tell him his was the first such failure, ever, anywhere in the world.

A great deal more than 50%.

Headlamps are passable. Rear lamps? Well..."Americans prefer red turn signals" (Not!).

Yeah, I plan to keep it for a while yet. Unless I move to NYC, in which case I might keep it at my family's place in NJ and use it as a 'weekend trip car.' Insurance isn't terribly expensive and the car costs little to maintain.

Haha. Wasn't there an urban legend like that about Rolls Royce? A Rolls Royce broke its driveshaft, Rolls sent out a mechanic to replace it, didn't charge the owner because "Rolls Royces never break down."

If only Honda provided such good service.... The party line from the salesguy, BTW, was that the car should only be serviced by an authorized Honda mechanic and that authorized Honda mechanics know how to do all necessary repairs quickly.

I don't recall if the new Civic has LED tail lights. I can understand red turn signals when the tail lights are LED since red bright LEDs are much cheaper then amber ones. And LED taillights are good for safety since there'll be fewer ignorants driving around with burnt out tail lights and/or turn signals.

If it doesn't have LEDs, then it's stupid; I agree.

BTW- I find _some_ LED brake lights like those on the Caddy SRX to be annoyingly bright - like a set of pinpoints burning into my eyeballs. Aren't there safety rules that require manufs to put appropriate diffusers on those things? Or at least not to use LEDs with such a well-focussed beam pattern.

-Andrew

Uh-huh...

It doesn't.

US (=North American) brake and turn signal lamp specifications permit much higher intensity than rest-of-world ECE specifications.

That's a misleading response. It is true that the US specs have a higher allowed maximum intensity (420 vs 185), but in this case, the problem he is referring to is the apparent brightness of the lamp which is an entirely different quantity than the intensity emitted by the lamp. The same intensity coming from a smaller area appears brighter and the fact that he can see the discrete leds on the SRX is contributing to the sensation that the lamp is overly bright. Neither the US nor the ECE regulation directly addresses the brightness question in their regulations. In fact the export version of the SRX has the same optical system for it's rear lamp and would have the same brightness issue. The issue is indirectly adressed by having minimum luminous area requrirements. However the luminous area requirements don't necessarily exclude areas that appear discontinous and thus brighter like the ones that are found on some LED tail lights.

Exactly the same? You sure? The US/Canuck model has red rear turn signals. I thought that those were illegal in most of the civilized world :)

-Andrew

Your right - not exactly the same :) The design of the reflector is the same, the export has only 1 vertical strip of red leds, the other vertical strip is amber. If I remember correctly it also has a clear outer lens instead of a red lens like the US version and the reflector isn't chromed, so you really are looking right at the leds for the export version.

It's nothing of the sort. The OP said he finds certain brake lights objectionably bright and asks why safety rules don't preclude such bright lights. I directly answered why such bright brake lights exist in his driving environment.

See? We agree.

Er...no, it's not "entirely different" at all. The two phenomena (intensity emitted, apparent brightness) are linked through a third factor which you yourself acknowledge: illuminated area. Your argument, therefore, boils down to "You say X, Y and Z. That's misleading. What's really going on is X, Y and Z."

Having direct experience with both the NAFTA and rest-of-world versions of the SRX rear lamp, I'm afraid I must correct you on this one. The lamps are the same size and shape, but are not optically the same. As you yourself acknowledge in a later post (when Andrew S. called you on this incorrect statement), the rest-of-world lamp has half the number of red (brake/tail) emitters, the other half of the emitters being amber (for the directional signal). There are also differences in the LED emitters' self-contained optics, as well as differences that are largely cosmetic (clear outer lens rather than red).

But it doesn't.

The issue is indirectly *acknowledged* by having minimum luminous area requirements. The existence of excessively-glaring brake and rear directional lights is evidence that it is not *addressed*.

I was part of the team that actually engineered the SRX rear lamp and I know exactly how the lamp is made. I didn't go into exact details which weren't necessary to the explanation of the brightness issue. If you are want to get nit picky about the details then fine, but my description of the system is not "incorrect". I would assume you would accept my qualifications to speak directly to the issue. So more explicitly then, the LEDs used for the export versions have an even narrower beam spread than the LEDs used for the domestic as evidenced by the 'led emitters self-contained optics'. And since there is no metallized reflector around the export leds, the apparent lit area to an observer will be even smaller. So it is quite likely (we don't know for sure because brightness perception has a subjective and context sensitive component as well that is not rigorously qauntified by existing mathematical models) that this lamp would be even more annoying to Andrew than the NAFTA version.

And if you want to educate people on their questions regarding things like lamp brightness why not use the correct terms and the correct measures and clearly explain the difference? A stop lamp that has 420 cd using pillowed lens optics over a 6" circle is going to appear much less bright than a stop lamp that has 100 cd max intensity and is inside a 2" circle. Additionally, the brightness is a function of both positional and directional variables which means it isn't completely characterized by knowing a far field intensity and a lamp area. Passing off a brightness issue as due to higher far field intensity maximums as you posted before illustrates a poor understanding of the issue at best, if not a total misunderstanding. Which is why i felt the response was misleading. Since you have access to the SRX lamps, photometer the lamps for intensity and let us know what the intensity values are compared to the maximums published in the spec and see how well your explanation of a higher allowable maximum intensity bears out for explaining why the lamp appear annoyingly bright to Andrew.

I only mentioned that the issue is addressed indirectly through minimum luminous intensity area requirements (of which the ECE doesn't have for most cases) because they did serve to control brightness when optical systems where of the traditional nature of pillowed or fluted outer lenses. Since optical technology has changed, the underlying assumption that a minimum luminous area will limit brightness may not be true in all cases. As such there might be a reason to look at readressing the luminous area definitions or specifically mandating a brightness sprecification independent of the photometrics of the lamp which would be a complicated and difficult issue to quantify because of the subjective and context sensitive components of brightness perception.

I agree that there is a need to address the apparent brightness issue in the regulations. As you approach far field, intensity is the only important factor. But with tail lamps, you are often viewing the lamp in the near field and the apparent brightness can vary greatly regardless of intensity. Perhaps adding a near field spec of maximum nits (cd/m^2) would solve the problem. Mark

That's certainly how I'd begin to approach the problem of vehicle brake and directional signal lamp glare. It would probably not be enough just to specify a max axial cd/m^2 value, for doing so might tend to result indirectly in lamps that don't perform well under conditions of high ambient light levels (NV, NM, AZ, TX, most of Australia, anywhere the sun shines when there's snow on the ground, anywhere the sun shines when there's *not* snow on the ground...). We wouldn't want to solve one problem only to create a new one. Of course, there are variable-intensity lamps permitted by some regulations--less intense when it's dark out, more intense when it's bright out--but such equipment is likely to remain in the category of expensive-car playtoys for the foreseeable future.

Offhand, a couple of possible tactics might be:

-A sliding set of requirements such that lamps with less than "x" luminance must produce at least "y" intensity, while lamps with more than "x" luminance may produce no more than "z" intensity

-An equation factoring-in the intensity and luminance of a lamp, with the performance requirement being stated in terms of the acceptable solution range to the equation. By this method, the two factors might easily be weighted independently of one another, to optimize the performance requirements.

Either way (or with any other solution), it seems likely that some existing provisions contained in today's worldwide regulations will probably have to change -- and such changes are very difficult to effect. Nevertheless, the present illuminated-area method of (theoretically) controlling brightness is becoming more and more obsolete, as Boxman correctly points out. (That said, there have been plenty of overly-glaring brake and turn signal lamps using very conventional bulb-and-optic-lens technology...!)

DS

Unfortunately, it seems that most Americans don't use turn signals, so they wouldn't care what color the turn signals are (or if side-visible turn signals are installed). Which means those who do use turn signals have to live with inferior red ones on many cars.

Which US market cars with red rear turn signals have ECE market versions of the same body style for which ECE market rear lights can be installed easily?

Why didn't your team just design a single US-ECE compliant rear lamp (with yellow rear turn signal for added visibility compared to red rear turn signals in US applications) instead of designing two different versions?

GM didn't want it that way.

Gosh...lots of them. You want an exhaustive list?!

And American automakers are *not* the only offenders in this regard. BMW seems to have done it often in the mid-90s. Infiniti is doing it with the G35/Skyline. And VW is by far the worst. The prior generation Jetta and Passat had real rear lights. This generation (2006+) is trying to imitate the 1998+ Chebby Impala for some unfathomable reason. (Not to mention the myriad other things wrong with the new Passat like the move from a Torsen AWD system to a front-biased Haldex).

-Andrew

How about the new Honda Civic, since that is the topic of this discussion? Or is the sedan a US/Canada-only body style?

Is there any company grouping that doesn't downgrade the rear turn signals for the US market on some models? Maybe Hyundai or Subaru?

GM: many models Ford: many models DC: many models (mostly trucks and SUVs) Toyota: Sienna Honda: many models Renault (Nissan): many models BMW: 3-series, others? VW: many (mostly Audi) models

Subaru Legacy sedans have red signals after 2004.

More like all nowadays. Jetta, Passat, and presumably the new Golf are red.

Hm, more like a brand, although that do have a large amount of autonomy (use their own I-5/I-6 engines and all) but Volvo still hasn't moved over to the dark side... I guess it'd hurt their 'safety' image.

Cheers, Andrew