Why don't newer Mercedes' have yellow fog lights?
 

I was just wondering why the newer Mercedes' don't have yellow fog lights like those of the mid 80's to early 90's? From what I have noticed, the newer cars fog lights are white lights that are located near the bottom of the bumper. Does anybody know the reason for the absence of the yellow fog light?

Brian

Research in Europe
 

mentioned in _Road and Track_ a decade or so ago indicated that the yellow fogs (and yellow headlights in France, Switzerland, and (long ago) in Sweden) weren't the unalloyed advantage that they had been thought to be, but that for many people yellow light confused their depth perception. Also, for foglights to be used for their real purpose, the closer to the ground the better, so the type like I have on my '85 300TD are inferior on two counts.

Does anybody know what's the effect to the car in the front, if I turn on my yellow fog lights at night even without fog, will they be disturbed?

I feel the head lights on my W124 400E are too dim even with the new bulbs, when it rained at night I nearly hit a pedestrian several months ago, also nearly ran over neighbour's black cat once, that was very scary, I feel turning on fog light helps a lot.

Thanks.

I think when the new xenon lights became maintstream, their superior lighting refuted the need to use the old amber units...

i still prefer the yellow lights, i see the road better.

One of the reasons the yellow bulbs/filters are being phased out is because cadmium is used in the coating, and is on environmental watch lists. I had the stock US headlights with the yellow filter, and the Euro lights with no filter. Personally I felt I could see better with the yellow, so I installed yellow h3 bulbs, no longer available. When I had the yellow fog lights on, no oncoming traffic ever 'flashed' me. With the white bulbs they just assume it is hi beams, and flash me all the time - PITA.

The only real solution to not seeing pedestrians, however, is the euro lights with their superior low beam pattern and light output. Fog light beam patterns are so close to the car that they will only let you identify what you just hit.

EDIT: Here is what I was told by Ken Beard at Susquehanna motors when I inquired about replacement H3 yellow bulbs:

"The yellowstars are no longer made in Europe - as of the first of last year, it was illegal to equip a new car (from the factory) with them and also illegal to manufacture them (an environmental issue since the process uses cadmium). The French were the ones who required the yellow lights so they were seen all over the Continent. With the homogenization of the Continent - the yellow had to go - by democratic vote I'm sure"

I have done a fair amount of off roading in jeeps in the mountains, in the worst of weathers. Believe me, in heavy fog, if you have a white beam of light, it just adds to the fog. A yellow light beam is able to penetrate it, somewhat. For the photography enthusiasts, ever used a yellow filter to increase contrast in overcast conditions? Its the same principle.

For me, fog lights have got to be yellow. That's why I like the older benzes more.

I like the yellow lights better. Especially in foggy coastal area it helps a lot. On coming cars can see me better too.

So is the real reason environmental or because they were ineffective being too high off the ground? I thought that fog lights should be used in visibilty less than 100 yards, so the white light of your regular beam doesn't reflect off the fog. From what I understand, in visibility less than 100 yards, the yellow fog lights penetrate the fog deeper and allow better vision. They are not to be used for regular driving because their light beam pattern is only designed to put out light a few yards in front of the car. To me, they seem to work just fine so I'm not quite sure why Mercedes changed them. I think I might send an e-mail to Mercedes and see what they say.

Brian

you are absolutely correct, Brian. Fog lights are to be used when visibility is in fact less than 50 feet. Their beam MUST be aimed down, to improve visibility over only the next 20-30 feet, no more. But for that, they don't HAVE to be positioned lower. The angle of the beam is far more important than where the light is physically positioned. In fact, higher is better since you can beam it down, so that the reflection off the fog will not come directly into your eyes. And white light is a waste in the fog, so I also wonder why Mercedes made the shift!

Maybe for those who like to turn on fog lights regardless of the weather, it looks cooler than the ancient yellow lights, hehe.

So There is no chance..
 

So there is no chance in locating "yellow" headlamp bulbs for my 89 300e?

foxraul13

if you have euro lights, i know where you can get "yellow" h4 headlight bulbs.

standard wattage is pretty inferior [imho]

peter

"yellow lights"
 

foxraul13

a picture installed

peter

Since the fog light bulb is H3. Why don't you try the expensive PIAA Ion Crystal H3 bulbs? I am thinking of getting them.

Not sure how they'd look though.

When I could still get them, I ran H3 Hella yellow star bulbs in my Euros - these were just as yellow as the original US lights. After they stopped making them, I bought some Philips H3 All Weather 'yellow light' bulbs. They aren't yellow - more like beige. Let me know if the PIAAs are better.

The yellow fog lights are awesome in the fog. I can see far more than any white fog light i have had. Plus they are highly visible allowing other vehicles to see and avoid hitting me. To me a mercedes just isn't the same without them.

I have the PIAA Ion Crystal. They are wonderful!!!

When the emitted light passes through the bulb's glass at a normal angle (perpendicular to the surface), it emits a brilliant yellow light. At angles other than normal, the light is bluish-white.

The effect on your foglamp beam is that in the middle of the beam, it is bright yellow, and in the fringes (especially visible at the top and bottom of the projected beam), it is bluish-white (though less blue than HIDs).

This means that when your beam is aimed properly, the oncoming drivers see the bluish-white part of the beam, which makes it a good DRL lamp (my car does not have DRLs).

Hey ebennz!
 

Question for ya! where can i get those yellow headlamp bulbs, and how much do they cost. Thanks for posting up those pics.. i think they look awsome on your car!:)

Also...
 

Hey ebennz, do you have any night time shots of yoru car with the yellow hedlamps on? if so I would be cool to see them... thanks again....:rolleyes:

all,
i understand "narva" makes a "yellow" h3 bulb. does anyone know of a good narva supplier? they are cheaper than piaa.

foxraul13-
do you have euro lights? email me. i'll hook you up.

sorry i have no night pictures

peter

Yellow Fog Lights
 

The fog lights on my 79 450SLC were the factory installed Bosch white lights. I live in fog country in the Ozarks in Missouri. I wanted Yellow lights. I checked out various lights at auto stores and noticed that the amber is created in many of them by the reflector not the lens. I took out the reflectors, cleaned them very good and got a very high reflectivity gold paint (spray on) and made my own amber fog lights, they work great. If I had the right equipment I would have chemically plated them with gold, it works also. Incidently as pointed out by one of your resonders, yellow filters work for cameras and the same principle works for yellow fog lights!!!
Good Luck
Lee
79 450 SL
79 450 SLC with 450 SEL engine

ebennz
 

ebennz, i dont have the euro lights yet, but i plan on getting them soon for my car... Ill plan on having them in a few months... Alos correct me if im wrong, will i need a relay for the yellow lights?

Incidentally, I was told that the reason yellow lamps began in France originated from WWII.
Apparently when Germany took control of France,(1939?) they insisted that the locals used yellow headlamps so that they could be differentiated from the German troops’ vehicles, which used the universal white lamps.

Just my 2 pence worth


Barry


E200 Wagon 1994 109,000 miles.

Try these. They have a light yellow tint. I love them on my E320

http://www.powerbulbs.com/pawh1.htm

Intruder

Personally, I have yellow H3 in the fogs for both the W124 wagon and 500E, and I believe it cuts better in dense/high-water fog. BTW- I have Euro lights on both cars.

The yellow H3's I have are PIAA "crystal-ion" in the wagon, and Hella european yellow H3's in the 500E.

I believe that due to the "blue haze" when off-axis of the PIAA "crystal-ion" plus their position, I due get some people flashing me. However, since I'm on-axis as the driver, I only see the "yellow" light.

My direct experience correlates with what is said here. Taken from: http://lighting.mbz.org/tech/info/lights/light_color/

:-) neil
1988 360TE AMG
1993 500E
==============================

What is Selective-Yellow Light?

It's what happens when you subtract blue from an auto headlamp: Blue is the shortest wavelength and, as such, scatters the most readily. (To prove this to yourself, find a dark blue store front sign or something else that's a dark, pure blue against a dark background in the absence of white light. From any appreciable distance, it's almost impossible for your eyes to see the blue lighted object as a sharply defined form...the edges blur significantly.)

When blue light strikes water (rain, fog, snow) it scatters in all directions and makes on-road vision very difficult.

Blue also is a very difficult color of light to look at if it is at all intense...it stimulates the reaction we call "glare".

So the French figured to remove the blue from the output spectrum of their vehicles' front lamps. White light with the blue component subtracted is known as "selective yellow" light. It is a pure yellow color with little or no orange component--hence the French yellow headlamps. There haven't been any recent comparative studies. Yellow lamps were subjectively ranked as better in poor weather and lower in glare than white ones, and this matches my own experimental experience with fog lamps that produce yellow light. But is the effect real or just an illusion?

One problem with this conclusion as drawn from the French experience with selective-yellow headlamps in France is that when the question was being considered, the lamps that were being compared with white lamps reduced the absolute intensity of the beam by about 12 percent. This fact may have had a part in reducing the glare. Because the requirement for yellow light no longer exists (though such light is optional in many countries) we probably will never know the vagaries of the answer to this question.

A good fog lamp has almost no upward light and a very sharp cutoff. (And a well-placed fog lamp is mounted low to the ground, to maximize vertical separation between the driver's eyes and the cutoff of the beam pattern, thus throwing light "under" the fog blanket from the driver's perspective.) Now, selective-yellow light is, subjectively, a better color for a fog lamp because the main part of the beam (below the cutoff) creates the effect of less-glaring backdazzle. The only condition under which selective-yellow light (or any kind of yellow light, for that matter) has actual, physically greater penetration power is in what is called "blue fog", in which the water droplets are many, many times smaller than the droplet size found in common atmospheric fog. A fog lamp is not defined as "yellow", but as a lamp that produces a very wide bar of light with minimal-to-no uplight and a sharp horizontal cutoff, and the determinant of a good fog lamp is amount of uplight (less is better) and sharpness of cutoff (sharper is better), not beam color. Selective-yellow light can improve fog lamp performance, because it is lacking in the high frequency/short wavelength blue light that reflects readily off atmospheric moisture (frozen or not) and into your eyes. I prefer selective-yellow fog lamps, though I would certainly take a good white fog lamp over a poor selective-yellow one. (My preference is for good selective-yellow ones!).
Modern methods of obtaining selective-yellow light, such as the placement of a yellow-pass dichroic filter on the bulb envelope, on the reflector or on the lens, can create more problems than they solve. The blue-appearing lenses in many Asian-made fog lamps ("ion crystal", "gold irridium", and other nonsensical marketing names) are coated with a multilayer dichroic interference coating which passes selective-yellow light "on axis", which means "straight ahead". Unfortunately, these coatings tend to glow blue when viewed off-axis, which has caused problems with people getting pulled over for illegal "blue" lights 'cause the cop sees blue.

Many lamps involving dichroic filter coatings on the bulb, reflector or lens tend to create "blue haze" above the beam cutoff or, in the case of a driving or SAE headlamp beam, scattered throughout the beam. That's because of the irridescence of these coatings, which causes or aggravates secondary-reflection problems where none would exist absent the coating. With the mirrorlike dichroic coating reflecting images of the glowing filament, light gets where it doesn't belong. None of these effects help the performance of your lamps at all! Headlamps should be white, and it is best to stick with regular, clear bulbs! Blue light is NEVER used in performance halogen lighting, ONLY in poseur items.


What about these various methods of getting selective-yellow light? Until the mid 1990s, headlamps in France were required to produce yellow light. This was accomplished in one of several ways: With a headlamp lens made out of yellow glass, with a yellow glass balloon in front of the bulb either as part of the bulb or as part of the lamp unit, or, more recently, with a yellow-pass dichroic filter coating on halogen bulbs. When we talk about light color in an automotive context, we need to address the question of legality.

Under US Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard number 108 and Canadian Motor Vehicle Standards 108 and 108.1, headlamps as originally installed on motor vehicles (and as installed by anyone other than the vehicle owner) must produce white light.

Let's stop there for a moment. What is "White"? FMVSS108 contains a reference to an SAE standard that defines "white" light in terms of wavelengths. But it's not just one set color. The standard includes a wavelength aggregate RANGE that is considered "white". That's why arc-discharge headlamps, with their decidedly bluish cast, still are considered "white". It's why "blue ion" or "crystal blue" bulbs with blue-pass dichroic filters sold to poseurs who want to try to pretend they have arc-discharge lamps are NOT considered "white". To read all about blue light, click here But more relevant to this discussion, the light can tend towards a yellow tint to a certain degree and still qualify as acceptable "white" light. Osram, Narva, Philips and other established European bulbmakers have been offering partial-tint selective-yellow bulbs alongside their ranges of clear/white bulbs and full-tint selective-yellow bulbs for some time now in Europe. Such bulbs are beginning to appear in bulb formats used in many US headlamps. Philips North America, for instance, is marketing a line of bulbs that have a light dichroic filter coating on them to tint the light yellow. They are sold under the "WeatherVision" name. Such bulbs can, in certain kinds of headlamps and under certain atmospheric conditions, subjectively improve poor-weather visibility. There is no concrete physical improvement, though, in most conditions, and most headlamps create the "blue haze" mentioned above with bulbs like this. The yellow-tinted light doesn't glare as much in rain, fog, or snow, but you don't see as well in good weather.

There also are European-type (H1, H3, H4, etc.) bulbs with a heavier dichroic filter or a yellow glass balloon over them that produces full-tint selective-yellow light. Under FMVSS108, these wouldn't be acceptable.

The laws vary from state to state. New Jersey and several other Eastern Seaboard states allow nothing but DOT-spec white headlamps. Most of the states either don't specify (and hence officially don't care) what sort of headlamp you use, as long as it has a high and a low beam. Most states say either that the headlamps must be "white" or that any lamps facing forward on a car must be "white, yellow, or amber". But white is the correct color for a headlamp.

To guarantee compliance with all laws and not raise the ire of your local police in the US and Canada, headlamps must be white. Auxiliary lamps (fog, driving, etc.) can be either white or selective yellow, though it should be mentioned that there's no reason for a driving lamp to be any color other than white..

Hi Leewolf, You must be an engineer at heart. Very creative solution. Great idea-Tank.