Concept Corner: Yellow Tail Lights?

To continue with the “Concept Corner” series, this week we have a short write up about car tail lights. What about them? Well, an idea I had a while back to help with traffic flow and safety.

Living in California, I see horrible, horrible, HORRIBLE drivers everyday. Because of this, I am always looking for ways to make driving safer for those of us that can handle driving a car. This idea is actually rather simple, but could prove to be rather useful.

As I am sure you all know, when you are driving you have generally have two states that you are in: accelerating or braking. When you are accelerating you have no means of letting others know you are doing this other than the fact that they can see you moving. On the other hand, when you are braking, you have brake lights on the back of your car to indicate your action. This means that from the other driver’s point of view there is effectively no difference in what they see when you are accelerating, maintaining speed or have taken your foot off the accelerator and are coasting.

This is where yellow brake lights come into play. This would be another 1 or 2 indicator lights in the back (perhaps side markers as well) of you car that would illuminate when you are neither breaking nor accelerating but simply coasting. This would give other drivers insight into what your actions are most probably going to be. If you take your foot off the accelerator pedal in your car, you are most likely trying to slow down or are getting ready to apply the brakes. This yellow light would give the other drivers around you the opportunity to react accordingly.

I realize that in order for a system like this to work, we need to have an educated and intelligent populous when it comes to driving. This unfortunately doesn’t seem to be the case around here. People around here seem to have the idea that you are either pressing the accelerator or the brake; there is no in between. If only people understood the concept of throttle control..

I would love to work out a prototype of this system and do some real world testing. Unfortunately, due to cost and the vehicle code laws, I don’t think I can make that happen at this time. But, as always, feel free to contact me if you are someone that feels there is something to this, and we can work on getting it pushed forward. Of course, if you feel the opposite I would love to hear your feedback as well.