Front Brake Lights Could Drastically Diminish Road Accident Rates

Once we have proper self driving cars none of these recent "innovations" like that or the speed limiting would matter.

Ideally self driving cars would also be without a steering wheel and just be half width with a single seat or two seats facing each other to reduce energy requirements. You could just develop this with a manhattan style project and test it in a single city banning all other private cars except delivery vehicles.

I was having a very hard time seeing any possible benefit of a front brake light, since nobody accident prone ever looks in their mirrors.

I suppose in today's world of automatic transmissions that move the car forward whenever the brakes are released, they might serve some purpose at a four-way stop adding information about immediate intent of the other parties, but even there... that's more of a Darwinian situation where people who get into crashes at four way stops are sorting themselves out from the rest of reasonably competent drivers. If they're going fast enough for injuries at a four way stop, they deserve what they get. If they get a minor fender bender - that's a lesson to read the other traffic better next time.

Can I have indicators that are in the same place on all cars and not buried in the headlight? That'd be cool.

Wouldn’t better driving education and testing work just as well, if not better?

Don't worry, my fellow americans, we'll still manage to fuck it up.

Since we're all throwing random ideas out here, I want to equip my vehicle with an annoyingly loud external speaker so that when someone near me does something dumb, I can personally shame them.

Not selling tanks as cars could also help. Especially with fatality rates

Reminded me of this Technology Connections video, in which the dude explained (among other brake-light related things) how some law allows electric vehicles to get away with not using their brake lights: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0YW7x9U5TQ

By signaling to oncoming traffic and vehicles approaching from the side, a front brake light provides an essential visual cue that a car is slowing down or preparing to stop. When the light is extinguished, it indicates that a stationary vehicle might initiate movement. According to Tomasch, this visual feedback can significantly truncate the reaction time for other road users, leading to shorter stopping distances and consequently diminishing the likelihood of accidents.

Sounds reasonable. Personally I just want front turn signals to be visible from the opposite side again.

I still think rear signaling could be improved dramatically by using a wide third-brake light to show the intensity of braking.

For example -- I have seen some aftermarket turn signals which are bars the width of the vehicle, and show a "moving" signal starting in the center and then progressing towards the outer edge of the vehicle.

So now take that idea for brake. When you barely have your foot on the brake pedal, it would light a couple lights in the center of your brake signal. Press a little harder and now it's lighting up 1/4 of the lights from the center towards the outside edge of the vehicle. And when you're pressing the brake pedal to the floor, all of the lights are lit up from the center to the outside edges of the vehicle. The harder you press on the pedal, the more lights are illuminated.

Now you have an immediate indication of just how hard the person in front of you is braking. With the normal on/off brake signals, you don't know what's happening until moments later as you determine how fast you are approaching that car. They could be casually slowing, or they could be locking up their wheels for an accident in front of them.

First of all, this would be illegal in many countries.

Second of all: we can differentiate cars by: has red lights, back.

If we lose this option we can no longer differentiate easily if there is a car coming towards us or driving away from us.

I'd rather see mandatory rear running lights. The amount of people who can't be arsed to turn on their lights in bad visibility conditions is too damn high.

I don't understand this at all. Why do I, as a person in front of a vehicle, care whether or not it's braking?

This sure riled people up.

This is stupid

I think they should have it so there's a type of "slow down" light that supplements the brake light for when your deceleration is from taking your foot off the gas.

Like someone said in the hnews comments, this might work for auto transmission but with manual gearing you've got people using engine braking on hills.

Also like stated in the article the colouring is going to be an issue and trying to see some green lights whilst the headlights are on (full beam fog lights perhaps too?) doesn't seem practicable to me.

Risk Compension predicts that drivers would simply use this new information to drive more aggressively, negating any possible safety benefits.

I read the article and the next one comes up: "Mouse Sperm Structure Unveils Asthenozoospermia Mechanisms" and my co-worker was like wtf are you reading.

This will lead to people braking momentarily to slow down, and others turning in front of slowing down traffic.

Little benefit, but the cost of adding front brake lights would be passed on to the car buyers.

Struggled with this for a second, then I figured it out...

The brake light coming ON isn't the important part, like the rear brake lights... it's the brake lights turning OFF that's important in the front.

So maybe, now hear me out, MAYBE we need to invert that. Have front brake lights that are on ALL the time, and pressing the brake turns them off to indicate safety?

They would probably just use the existing amber lights so noone would know if you were turning or not. I'm not bitter.

It would also help to know whether or not I'm going to get smushed.

Would speed up crosswalks a lot too. Whenever I cross a crosswalk with my dog I don't want to risk me misjudging the braking of cars so I tend to really wait until I'm sure they're stopping.

I'm salty because nobody took my front-blinker serious 😤 but we should embrace front brakes?! 😔

Whatever makes things more safe 🌞!