Hector Fratty

The University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, one of America’s top research facilities for matters related to vehicular lighting and human factors, is requesting your assistance as they prepare for two new surveys that stand to greatly expand the community’s body of knowledge regarding the general actual performance of car lights.

The first is a survey of photometric data for rear lighting on recent US-model vehicles, motivated by new American interest in the safety effects of amber versus red rear turn signals. Primary Researcher Michael Flannagan asks lighting community members to please send him photometry of rear lighting functions (rear position/tail, stop, and turn) for U.S.-model vehicles of model years 1990 to 2011. The most useful data is axial (H-V) intensity in candela, though values at other test points are eagerly welcomed.

In order to analyse the data, UMTRI would like to know the vehicle make, model, and range of applicable model years for each data set submitted, as well as basic information on the colour of the rear turn signal and the light sources used, and whatever other relevant comments may pertain to any specific data set.

If it is available, information is appreciated on the number and type of light sources and compartments for each function (turn, stop, tail), as well as whether and how the functions are combined across sources/compartments. To protect manufacturers’ proprietary interests, no individual-model photometric data or other model-specific information or comments will be published. Rather, the primary use of the data will be to correlate signal lamp characteristics with vehicle crash patterns.

The second is another in UMTRI’s long-running series of surveys of headlamp photometry.  The new survey is intended to cover U.S. vehicles for the 2011 model year.