Post by newshoundPost by Tim+Post by The Natural PhilosopherPost by The Natural Philosopherhttps://tinyurl.com/sw24asjzz effective from 6 July 2022, and retro
fitted to all cars by 2024. Initially they will have an override or
on/off switch, but later on this will be withdrawn.
Sounds potentially dangerous to me, but then I don't know how they'd
implement it for my 20 year old Rover 75! Just hope it doesn't become
an MOT pass/fail issue.
I can't see how it can be retrofitted and IIRC no car legislation has
ever been made retrospective.
I had to fit a foglight to a car once when it was mandatory for the MOT
and the dealer sold a model with a late registration. No foglight. No MOT.
But not for very old cars.
I recall fitting a squishy bulb windscreen washer, too.
Tell kids today that you used to be able to buy screen washer kits to
upgrade your car and they won’t believe you… ;-)
Or that the heater was an optional extra on the original Mini
My mum's 1960-registered Morris Minor had a heater when she bought it
second-hand in 1967. But I'm not sure whether it was fitted as standard, or
was an optional extra - or was something that was fitted later - like the
flashing indicators that replaced the trafficators (semaphore arms with
orange bulbs). I remember the trafficators still worked for a few years in
conjunction with the flashing indicators, until first one arm and then the
other jammed, burnt out the solenoid and stopped working.
Some cars had windscreen wipers which slowed down and stopped as you went up
(or was it down) a hill, because they were driven off the vacuum in the
inlet manifold.
I bet a lot of young drivers would be horrified to learn that you had to
wind the windows down with a handle, rather than electric motor, or that you
had to repeatedly pump a rubber bulb or knob on the dashboard to wash the
windscreen. I hadn't realised that windscreen washers (rubber bulb type)
were actually optional on some cars.
Or that a lot of cars until the late 60s / early 70s didn't have synchromesh
on first gear (and maybe second). Or that some cars had a slot in the front
bumper to fit a bayonet end on the wheelbrace to turn the engine over if the
battery was (almost) flat. I presume no cars with transverse engines ever
had starting handles because the end of the crankshaft would be behind one
of the wheels!
Going back to rear foglights, what is the rule about having one or two
lights? A lot of cars nowadays only have one light on the offside. Some of
my earlier cars (2x VW Golf, 2x Peugeot 306) had red "glass" and an empty
space for a bulb on the nearside, but no bulb was fitted (so I fitted one).
On my latest car (Peugeot 308), the clusters include only a reversing light
on the nearside and only a foglight on the offside. Trying to reverse with
only one light is difficult, so I put my foglight on as well to light up the
offside so I can see the walls/hedges/gateposts on *both* sides of the car
at night.
Is the single foglight just penny-pinching, or do some countries actually
have rules which say that you must *not* have two rear foglights? And if so,
why, given that foglights serve the same purpose in fog as tail lights do in
non-fog: as well as showing that your car is there, they allow cars behind
you to see the width of your car to judge how far away they are from you.