When you are driving in dark, foggy conditions, conventional foglamps don’t seem to help much.
Today’s invention is a new operating regime for car lights in heavy fog or dark, misty conditions.
Using your high beams only lights up the roadsigns too brightly, as well as the mist itself and this can be quite disorientating. Just using the sidelights allows you to see further ahead in fog, but the roadsigns and markings are then less visible.
I’ve noticed that simply flicking between full beam and side lights, at a frequency of about 2Hz, illuminates both the road ahead and the roadsigns really effectively.
Cars would be equipped with a ‘dark+fog’ lighting regime in which this flicking would be performed automatically. It might be effective to have this frequency increase with vehicle speed (although keeping well below flicker fusion frequency.
