My new commute is 30 miles of twisty country roads, the standard lights are pretty poor on full beam even with “ultra” +120% bulbs.
The options seem to be higher rated 80w bulbs that may be dubious legally or good old fashioned driving lamps wired to come on with high beam.

Any driving lamp recomendations, I don’t need rally specials, just something to make country driving less stressful.

Ta

Have you tried driving more slowly?

For what car? Ring still make good driving lamps, despite the rest of their stuff being lo-rent Chinese trash. If money is no object, PIAA. Swedish ebay is your friend for bargains here..

I would put captain slow to shame, seeing is useful at any speed.

The car is my otherwise(double click aside) loved up fabia.

What’s the car?

Captain Slow is by far the best driver out of those three on Top Gear. Never wondered why he is the only one that ever does flat out runs in the stupidly expensive cars? Veyron and LaFerrarri to name but two.

Anyway, forget the lights – change your driving style – driving only gets stressful when you can’t keep up with your mistakes. Either slow down or take in more of the visual stuff going on around you – regardless of lights.

What the visual stuff I can’t see?

Surely you mean the visual stuff that you’re not using.

10: If X = car thread, then type “criticise driving”
20: goto 10

It might be worth checking out owners groups to see if there’s any recommendations…

I have a Fabia aswell and the bulbs were really poor. I put in a set of Osram Nightbreakers and they are much better. I’m happy with them on dipped beam on country roads.

Yellow driving glasses? or are they only any good to stop dazzle?

The headlights on my old Astra are pretty poor, the lenses have gone a bit misty. I use the hope for the best method and highly recommend it.

I know you may think this is daft, but are the lamps correctly aimed, they can migrate a bit over time…more so if someone’s nudged your car out of the way. Had similar experience with my van until I realigned the lights properly and hey presto…proper lighting.
Are they auto adjusting for load or manual levers….worn checking they’re working and set right too.
Finally, have you had your eyes tested recently……first thing I noticed when I ended up with distance glasses was night visibility was sharper and that was only a mild prescription!

Had a set on a previous motor.

They were ace for reminding tossers where dip is.

Driving fast not so much.

Older car that means the headlights polished back up to the way they once were?

Which lights does your Fabia have?

There’s two types: the standard and the ‘projector’ ones. The standard ones are known to be poor on full beam as the reflector is shaped for both dipped and main so is a compromise. The ‘projector’ ones are like a sun in comparison, unless you have the smoked lenses (MonteCarlo/Vrs style) which are a bit dim. Both types are also known to be set low out of the factory so it might be worth getting the alignment checked, made a massive difference to mine. The factory settings will pass an MOT but there is improvements to be had with a tweak.

Loads on the Briskoda forums about it.

I’ve got some Cibie Oscars in the garage gathering dust if the o.p decides on that route.

I used to live in countryside which was very very dark. 50-60mph roads feel a lot safer when you can see into the far distance and driving lights were common.

I now live in W Yorks and there aren’t many dark roads. However we went to Snowdonia recently in the winter and had to drive back to the cottage in the dark. Even though I have a brand new car with modern lights there were still gaps in the light output and they didn’t reach as far as I needed really. I wasn’t going anywhere near the speed limit but I would have been happier and more relaxed with driving lights.

If I lived back in the countryside it’s one of the first things I’d fit to a car. Why not make things a bit safer for yourself?

Or to be slightly illegal you could go down the HiD route 😉
http://www.hids4u.co.uk/skoda-hid-conversion-kit.html
I had a 50w HiD light on a motorcycle a few years ago and it was excellent, main beam wasn`t needed 😀

Apparantley MOT stations are looking about for those Hid conversions now and you stand a good chance of failing the MOT with them.

biglee1 – Member

Or to be slightly illegal you could go down the HiD route
http://www.hids4u.co.uk/skoda-hid-conversion-kit.html
I had a 50w HiD light on a motorcycle a few years ago and it was excellent, main beam wasn`t needed

Please god no.

Suggsey probably has it. Ihad this on a citroen zx and adjusted the lights (they had been set too low) was a complete change for night time driving.

In rural Herefordshire, you soon find out if your lights are any good/appropriate. My old Yeti was fine on main beam but not great on the dipped beam. The new one has some kind of elven magic going on with Xenon which are fantastic. It’s like going from pre-halogen nicad Lumi’s to the latest XPG 3s! And they look round corners as well.

My last set of spots were DX-160s (I think, not legal at all) which use to dim the dashboard lights on an escort Mark 2. Talking of age, NW you’re showing yours with that code 😉

Anyway, brighter lights are definitely better at any speed, whatever the perfect drivers may say on this thread.

You know it makes sense!

Mount yourself a 36″ LED lightbar across the top of the front bumper. Sorted….

Suggsey probably has it. Ihad this on a citroen zx and adjusted the lights (they had been set too low) was a complete change for night time driving.

French cars always seem to have good lights. Probably started when they were restricted to 40W and yellow lenses. The reflectors and lenses had to be perfectly designed to compensate.
I had some Cibie Oscar SC cornering lights on my old Forester. Fantastic for seeing round, er, corners!

There the projector type which work really well on our other car. Chat on Brisko net suggests I should upgrade the bulbs so I did but was a bit cheap and went with some Halfords own brand rather than the Osrams.
Other than going to the shops when I cba using a bike the car has a three days commute across the remaining rural bits of Suffolk and quarterly trips to Scotland.

There’s a bewildering range of options from £20 to a £500 and whilst I’m tempted with a big pair of Cibie’s something more subtle may be better.

There must be some dinky little aftermarket LEDs available by now..?

Have you tried driving more slowly?

Clearly you haven’t experienced the delight of driving lamps.

It’s a long time since I had any, but Cibie Oscar long range and Oscar Plus fogs (along with 110W headlamp bulbs – illegal yes, but…). I have an amusing tale about lighting up a police car 😳

I don’t know what today’s choice would be though.

Can get 4 1800 lumen led floods for 30 quid delivered from germany.

From up the page- I had a half-HID setup in the motorbike (only one of the 2 headlights could do it well, the other was all glare and scatter so it came straight back out). It passed I think 4 MOTs and half a dozen police roadside checks without any batting an eyelid, I got “good headlights those” from a couple of traffic coppers. And no more flashes on the road than normal, which is probably the better test. (they were low temp, white not blue)

It’s not a route I’d exactly recommend- it is straigh out illegal, and it sometimes seems like most installs are bad, and as with mine some headlights don’t work with it. But it might work out.

Upgraded wiring loom works on my VW T4..
something to do with the voltage drop in the original wires.

They got strict on non compliant hids a few years back. My golf failed 3 years ago ( after passing for the previous 7 years as they were on from new.

Had to fit standard units from scrap yard.

Shame as the lights were shite after that.

I had 5″ lights on the roof of the landrover and 9″ on the bumper.
The 5″ ones were quite expensive Warn units whereas the larger ones were cheaper jobs.
The smaller ones were noticeably brighter so may be worth paying more for decent units.
http://www.macmillan4x4.co.uk/Photos/landy18.html

http://www.macmillan4x4.co.uk/Photos/landy16.html

See if you can borrow a Fiat Coupe from somewhere, preferably a turbo. Drive that for a few hours at night, after that ANYTHING will feel like a vast improvement!

Warning, nerdy vehicle lighting designer content below!

Best thing to do is start looking at the basics:

Are the lenses clean?
Are the lamps adjusted correctly for dip and aim?
How old are the Bulbs as halogen bulbs degrade over their life.
Is there condensation inside the light as this can cause rust in the lamp terminals and shorten the life of the bulbs.

If the lenses are going cloudy you can get polishing kits to fix this ( but these tend to be of dubious quality and are usually only a stop gap as the plastic lens has probably degraded so badly if this has happened it will be far weaker and liable to crack)

After market HID kits are flat out illegal. Sorry guys, if the cops don’t notice ( and they usually won’t) the MOT inspector probably will as he will look for the E marking on the lamps and the test centres are on the look out for these systems now. Also it’s an illegal mod in the eyes of your insurance company…so if you have had an accident…
The same goes for LED bulb kits.

You can get higher power bulbs but again you have to be careful, the super high power halogen bulb kits ( they are marketed as Xenon bright but they are not Xenon HID) are of varying power output and highly variable performance improvement but the lifespan of the bulbs range from poor to dreadful. I’ve heard of people blowing out sets of these bulbs in less than two months of night driving….not good at £20 plus for a pair.

High power bulbs lifespan tends to be about 200hrs whilst normal halogen bulbs are at about1200-2000 hrs. Proper OEM Xenon HID’s are at about 10,000hrs plus and new LED car lights are rated at whole life of the car ( so it’s assumed they will do 20,000hrs) but these are really only widely available on high end Audis, Mercs etc. so for performance you do pay for what you get at the moment. LED headlights will be more widely available over the next 5-10 years as they use a lot less power (3-5w as opposed to 55w on halogen) so they help with CO2 emission reduction.

Told you it was nerdy content…

Auxiliary lights are not illegal (providing they are E marked) though but again it’s a mod to your car so the insurance company needs to be informed. But if you want to go down this route one of my ex colleagues makes rather nice high performance road legal LED high beam lights which are the far side of awesome….as used on the TopGear toyota hilux they took to the magnetic North Pole. 🙂

Daniel Stern has always given me excellent advice. He is a bit of a lighting expert in the US, and when I have contacted him in the past, has been open and helpful.

I drive a company car so adding extra lights is no no (although I did in the 90’s), my last car was a Toyota Avensis which had standard headlights which were pretty good, my new car a Astra are cr@p I fitted Osram night breakers and they made a hell of a difference, only problem the dipped beam bulbs failed after a year, high beam still fine though