The thoughtless; the selfish, and the attention-starved tampered with their vehicles in unsafe, antisocial ways seventy-one years ago, as they still do now. In that foreign country known as The Past, though, enforcement was more widespread and aimed at public peace and safety, rather than just selectively applied as a convenient excuse to hassle certain kinds of people. Also, tossing hazardous toxic waste in the bay was considered nothing but appropriate and convenient.
Here’s an article in the Salinas Californian from 31 October 1952, about the scourge and menace of illegal lights and mufflers. Yes, before the 1968 advent of Federal (i.e., national) vehicle equipment standards, each and every lighting device on each and every vehicle had to be approved by each and every state! The text is small and hard to read, so I’ll transcribe it. And it’s poorly written; the errors of phrasing; spelling; typography; relevance, and punctuation you’re about to read are authentic originals. I’d say fasten your seat belt, but don’t bother; there’s no such thing in 1952, so more like smoke ’em if ya got ’em, I guess. Now then:
Beware of improper or defective auto equipment. That is the advice of the California highway patrol and Salinas police department.
“Illegal mufflers, tail lights and headlight covers on cars are a direct violation of the California vehicle code,” said Capt. Gerald E. Page of the highway patrol.
When a motorist gets a citation from police or patrol officers for having an improper muffler on his car he is required to appear at the Salinas municipal court if he is guilty. Judge J. A. Jeffery imposes a fine. In addition, the court requires the illegal muffler be surrendered to the patrol for destruction. Finally the vehicle must be checked to insure that proper equipment has been installed.
‘Illegal’ Mufflers Defined
What constitutes an illegal muffler? According to Section 673 of the California vehicle code, “Every motor vehicle subject to registration and operated on a highway shall at all times be equipped with an adequate muffler in constant operation and properly maintained.” The section requires proper maintenance to prevent any excessive or unusual noise. It also states that no such muffler or exhaust system shall be equipped with a cut-out, bypass, or similar device. The secotion requires that no person shall modify the exhaust system of a motor vehicle in a manner which will amplify or increase the noise emitted by the motor of such vehicle except that allowed by the muffler originally installed on the vehicle. Such original muffler must comply with all the requirements of Section 673, the law adds.
Shown in above photo are the more than 50 illegal mufflers turned into the local California highway patrol office on Abbott street within the yast few weeks. These mufflers were thrown in deep water of Monterey Bay yesterday. Capt. Gerald E. Page, at left, holds one of the illegal mufflers. Sgt. Charles Garcia holds the “ram-rod” used to check mufflers to determine if they have been “de-gutted” or contain steel wool or other illegal parts.
Officers at the CHP office on Abbot street are expertly trained in spotting an illegal muffler. A stack of more than 50 mufflers has been collected at the CHP office over the last few weeks. They were disposed of in a deep area of Monterey bay yesterday, Cpt. Page related.
“Blue dot” or even solid blue tail lights are illegal in this state, Capt. Page explains. “They never have been approved by the state, he adds. California law requires that specific colors are used for definite aims, such as red for stop, yellow for caution and green or white for go signals.
Captain Page holds a “blue-dot” tail light lens which is illegal to use in California. A warning to motorists has been made by the highway patrol, local police department and municipal court that use of blue tail lights are illegal in this state.
Must Be Approved
Tail lights and stop lights may be tied in together in one unit if previously approved by the state. Also, tail lights and turning lights may be operated from one unit, if approved, the law states. It is the manufacturers’ responsibility to submit devices on new cars to the California highway patrol for tests and approval, Capt. Page says.
Section 645 of the CVC states, “No person shall sell or offer for sale for use upon or as part of the equipment of a motor vehicle, trailer or semi-trailer, nor shall any person use upon any such vehicle any lamp or device referred to in this section unless of a type which has been submitted to and approved by the department.”
This section also lists such lighting devices to which the law applies. It includes headlamps, passing or fog lamps, rear or tail lamps, license plate lamps, clearance lamps, reflectors on vehicles of all types as well as warning or signal devices.
Legal Lights Defined
Captain Page explains the law specifically states white lights are to be used on the front end of vehicles and red or amber for the rear. White lights maybe used in the rear of a vehicle for use as back up lights, he says. But, he adds, they may be used only when backing the vehicle, according to the state code. They are not to be used when the vehicle is travelling forwards.
Fog lights on the front end of a vehicle are permissible when properly mounted and adjusted, Captain Page points out. They ust be mounted below the level of the head lamp centers and not ness than 16 inches above the roadway. Fog lights must be aimed so that no part of the main beam shall be higher than the fog lamp centers at a distance of 25 feet ahead of the vehicle, he relates.
“All lights must be kept in proper adjustment at all times,” Captain Page warns. Lighting devices are tested by the state to insure their compliance with California law and to determine their fitness for intended purposes.
Headlight covers also are illegal, Captain Page warns further. He says the so called “glare reducers” found on some vehicles actually cuts down about 60 per cent of the light. No additions or alterations to a device that has been previously approved are allowed.
Capt. Gerald E page of the local highway patrol office places one of the illegal “glare reducers” on a headlight to show how it would cut down 60 per cent of the light.
When vehicles are found using illegal mufflers, head or tail lights, Captain Page warns that the proper steps will be taken to insure proper equipment be installed. “A life may be saved by using proper equipment which can cut the accident rate. That life saved may be your own,” Captain Page concludes.
Actually, though the actions of the CHP seem archaic now, I must say that I like the way they kept law and order there back in the day. I’m a conservative traditionalist so I agree with them. I know I may be in the minority now, but that’s just how I feel and always have.
Well that’s pretty serious, although it didn’t totally work. Blue dots and chrome headlight shades still drive me nuts today. And my friend’s 17 year old son asked if he could tint the taillights on the family car. How about NO!
Imagine the fun Captain Fun Police would have had in 1970s CA. And the “ram rod”. Peak mid century tech.
Though I do wish the Queensland police would use the ‘ram rod’ on open piped HDs.
If you go to a typical car show today, this kind of stuff is all over the place. Because it’s “kool”! It was a small subculture back then, but people today believe that’s what the ’50s were all about. Apparently it’s not kool enough to just have an original car from the 40s-60s–it has to be mommocked up with this J. C. Whitney hot rod, greaser krud. But as they say, “Whatever turns you on.”
The modern equivalent is tinted windows, fart can exhaust, etc.
P. S.: I live on a hill–it’s amazing how many cars going by have loud exhaust. Pickup trucks especially.
Personal CC Effect ™ here: Just yesterday, when I had some downtime at lunch, I was reading an article about emergency lighting requirements in the various states in the US, i.e. how Pennsylvania volunteer firefighters are allowed to have blue flashing lights on their personal cars, something totally not allowed across the border here in Maryland! – But I digress as usual…
This is fascinating, as Maryland was pretty strict with us teenagers back in the seventies regarding illegal mufflers (and even legal aftermarket ones if they were deemed too loud).
But we’ve never seemed to be as concerned about the “blue dots”, as many folks with fifties cars did that to make their taillights appear to be purple. (trick of the human eye IIRC)
The current fad of folks darkening their taillights drives me nuts! Why make your car harder to see at night? At least the blue dots got your attention!
And the less said about the bro-dozers with those high intensity white LED bars in the front, the better.
Glass Houses Though: I am guilty of putting sequential turn signals on my 2007 Mustang, a thing not approved (AFAIK) until the 2010 model year, but I do have them wired correctly so that they do not sequence when the brakes are applied, They all come on as they should.
As always Daniel, I appreciate your insight and knowledge on the subject of automotive lighting!
In Maryland it’s illegal for anyone other than cops to have a blue light on the exterior of their car. It seems to be enforced for roof lights and such, but they seem to let glowing blue LEDs on the undercarriage slide, though they aren’t legal either.
Because obvious reasons, of course! (stupid people have argued “It’s fine, it’s a one-way tint”).
Thunderbirds, Cougars, Imperials, and probably a few others I’m forgetting had sequential rear turn signals for one or more years after the ’68 advent of federal lighting regs, perhaps as late as ’73. The key to whether they’re okeh is whether the first segment to light up meets—all by itself—the requirements for minimum intensity (≥80 candela for red, 130 for amber); lit area (≥50 cm2 rear, 22 front); and duty cycle (percentage on/off time and on-dwell/off-dwell time, more or less; the allowance is wide).
Good work! (in other words, you give a carp and treat the car’s safety lights as such, rather than as fashion toys)
Another thing that annoys me are the dark plastic license plate covers, illegal in my state (NY), but very common on the road.
Yep, I’m noticing more and more of them with the proliferation of speed and traffic light cameras. Users think the cameras will not be able to read the covered license plates.
Also, it seems that every car dealer now places its license plate frames on every car sold. While better than the old dealer emblems screwed into the trunk, many obscure the state name. Maybe not a problem in-state where law enforcement is familiar with local tags, but out of state tags must be difficult to ID.
I recently watched an expose on YouTube concerning “Ghost license plates” where the toll and speed cameras can’t read the tag numbers. The video also showed a new type of license plate surround that has a flexible black cover that drops down over a plate, much like a theater curtain.
The driver uses a remote fob to activate it. Touching the remote button a second time opens the curtain. It’s battery operated and self contained, making it hard to spot by the police. The people making the video said they are available on the internet, and shipped from [no surprised here] China.
Steve Lehto also indicated in one of his videos that the state of Pennsylvania has enacted a regulation outlawing ANY license plate surrounds, even on cars from other states. If you drive in PA and your vehicle has a license plate surround, you can be pulled over and fined. I don’t know how serious they are about enforcement. I live in Maryland and every day I see PA vehicles with various PA car dealer and aftermarket plate surrounds.
I am a advisory board member of the Maryland Transportation Authority [MTA] concerning the Chesapeake Bay Bridge operations and planning for the eventual 3rd bridge. For the MTA, ghost plates are a growing problem, especially as to revenue loss. One possible solution to the covers is a new telephoto camera that focuses in on a car that has a non-readable plate, looking again about 1/2 mile further. A tracking computer follows the car in question after going thru the automated toll collection plaza, even if it changes lanes. The angle of the camera at that point very acute, allowing the plate number to be read if it’s a polarized cover, or a open/close cover after the cover has been re-opened.
MTA officers pull over cars with restricted view covers, and sometimes offer the driver the option of breaking the cover in half and avoiding the citation/fine, or the MTA officers can remove & confiscate the cover, and require the driver to come to court if they want it returned. [I’m told that has not happened yet!]
A recent and very dangerous trend among young drivers is the installation of tint on ALL glass including windshields, because toll cameras often take a photo of the driver too. Maryland State Police are beginning to impound vehicles if they are found to have an applied windshield tint.
*VERY* glad to hear _someone_ is addressing the plague of over tinted windows .
-Nate
Great item to bring to us. Has anyone gotten annoyed at the (I presume) aftermarket color lenses that can be added to the circular headlights of some JEEP models? The colors to wh ich I object are red: this is for rear marker and rear side markers only, green: this is for volunteer EMT’s only, blue: this is for volunteer firemen only. The face that they do not flash is not an excuse. The other colors are okay including amber, which is the normal front parking lamp color. Why state governments have not banned these colors is beyond me.
The headlights used by (some) Jeep owners are replacement, mostly LED units, that can have adjustable rings around them, colors of which can be selected by an app on a mobile phone.
The same LED lights show up on some NA Miatas; both are round and relatively easy to swap in.
Oh, they have; they just don’t enforce the bans, mostly. And you’re right; red light to the front is abjectly dangerous.
I personally think, in typical middle age “wisdom” that the vast majority of vehicle modifications should be banned. Younger me would have thought that perspective is draconian, but every time the morons run up the street with their open pipes, I imagine a police officer with a decibel meter writing them up with a stiff fine/impounding the vehicle.
It’s quite a hell of a thing for an American to visit Germany (for example) and experience a near-total absence of unsafe vehicle modifications and misaimed/misused lights.
Everyone has a problem (me included) with loud exhaust pipes so laws get passed to deal with them. Jake brakes are not allowed to be used in certain areas because they are too loud. Harley Davidson’s never get so much as a mention. I don’t get it. Yeah I know that loud pipes save lives. So do helmets. How do such disgustingly loud bikes not get cited?
No, not even a little bit. Loud exhaust pipes on motorcycles do utterly nothing to reduce the likelihood or severity of collision involvement. This is simple physics; the motorcycle goes forward and the noise goes backward. That’s why you don’t hear the loud pipes until the motorcycle passes you, unless you’re unlucky enough to be stuck behind it. I wouldn’t be surprised if loud pipes annoy following drivers enough to worsen their behaviour in dangerous ways.
Same goes for other useless-at-best ‘safety’ add-ons: motorcycle headlight ‘modulators’—the gadgets that constantly blink high/low/high/low beam—and brake light blink/flash/’pulse’ devices (on any kind of vehicle).
But a falsehood repeated often enough becomes one of those things everyone ‘knows’. In fact, “Loud pipes save lives!” is short for “YOU’RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME! I GITTA MAKE AS MUCH NOISE AS I WANT! YES HUH, DO TOO, TIMES A FINITY!”.
But the world is run by those who show up and shout loudest, and motorcyclists, who are vulnerable road users, have a legitimate gripe with their safety having long been an afterthought at best in the traffic system. So the laws get written and enforced (or not) in accord with the wishes of the ignorant; the gullible, and their commercially-interested coattailers.
You don’t have to be standing right behind a noisy vehicle to hear it coming, and I’d probably wager in terms of pedestrian safety there’s something to that saying, I’ve certainly been “snuck up” on by a silent Tesla or two crossing the street or walking through a parking lot, but when I’m at a car show where a good proportion of cars have loud exhausts and are coming and going I can hear perfectly clear that a car is coming up from behind me where I can get out of the way without being startled.
Anecdotal sure, but no more so than loud pipes causing road rage.
If you’d like to talk about it, Matt, we can do it over…
…there, where the goalposts and topic at hand actually still are.
Otherwise: nah, thanks.
That’s fine, there seem to be a bit too many strawmen over there anyway
I remember us talking about this image of Capt. Page and the glare reducers in the comments of an article last year. Those glare reducers (i.e., vision reducers) still baffle me.
Here in Northern Virginia, there seems to be virtually no enforcement of lighting standards any longer. All kinds of blinking and/or oddly colored lights are seen on the roads.
There was some pushback on the lack of noise enforcement though – a few years ago, a new State law was passed that prohibited police from enforcing vehicular noise standards, and to no one’s surprise (except, apparently, the politicians who pushed this) it led to a proliferation of very loud exhausts. There were enough complaints that the bill’s original sponsors drafted a new bill to once again enforce noise limits. I’m not sure about the details, but it seems to have helped somewhat.
I have European and UK-market aspherical outside rear view mirrors on my US-market car. I don’t know if they’re legal here in MD – it’s definitely illegal for a manufacturer to sell a new car with them, and maybe to sell it secondhand too. But in some cases non-compliant OEM parts for a different region was a rare thing back when the law were made, so I’m not sure if it’s illegal for me to buy them online and use them. If they are illegal, then arrest me! I’m not afraid of that, because they’re so rare in the US that most cops haven’t heard of them, and those that have likely don’t think to check for them because they’re so rare.
They *should* be legal though. These are slightly convex across most of the mirror face, but heavily convex in the outer inch and a half or so, with a faint dashed line where the latter section begins. They do a great job of eliminating blind spots, and I soon learn to live with some distortion on the outer edge. The important thing – is there a car there or not – is much easier to detect than with flat driver side/convex passenger side mirrors that are mandated in the USA.
I haven’t mucked with the lighting on my current car, but did replace the rectangular low (dip) sealed beam on my first car with Hella H4s, and put 50-watt halogen backup lamps on my next (these were cheaply made but brightened my nighttime view when backing up).
Illegal in Maryland? – I don’t know about that. My new 2016 Civic came with this type of mirror on the driver’s side, and Heritage Honda was more than happy to sell it to me. Maybe the law was different in 2016. Or…
Maybe they’re Judas Priest fans and like “Breakin’ the Law”. 😉
What annoys me almost as much as overbright, poorly aimed, 5′ high headlights are tinted front windows. As a cyclist (and even as a car driver) I need to know if a driver has seen me, and the best way to do that is to catch their eye. With dark windows that’s not possible. Also, without tint the other driver’s peripheral vision will often pick up my glance so they notice me. (Our brains are pretty amazing at that – we’ve all experienced that feeling of being looked at.) But window tint is never enforced except as an excuse for some other er investigation.
Somehow I missed this episode of ‘Highway Patrol’. I could see Sgt. Dan Matthews flinging illegal mufflers into the drink. Between drinks….
The illegal mufflers were disposed of in Monterey Bay. I guess scrap metal recovery wasn’t a thing then.
Neither was worrying about lead-poisoning the ecosystem (think of the gasoline those cars were burning dirtily).
I’m not a lawyer. But to the best of my understanding, the laws around parts that do not meet the laws and codes make no sense.
a) it is illegal for manufacturers of vehicles to install parts that don’t meet regulations
b) it is legal for other manufacturers to make and sell parts that don’t meet regulations
c) it is legal for dealers, shops, and individuals to install parts that don’t meet regulations
d) it is illegal for an individual to operate a vehicle on public roads when parts don’t meet regulations
If my understanding is remotely close to correct, illegal modifications will never be stopped.
That’s not quite the way it is. It’s more like this:
• It’s illegal to import; introduce into interstate commerce, or offer for first sale a new vehicle or item of vehicle equipment which doesn’t comply with all applicable Federal regulations.
• It’s illegal for a party regulated by the Federal vehicle standards (vehicle and equipment makers and importers and their agents/dealers; anyone working on somebody else’s car for any kind of pay) to remove, disable, impair the effectivencess of, or render inoperative any vehicle equipment or design feature mandatory under the Federal regulations (“Render inoperative” doesn’t just mean make it not work; it also means change how it works so it no longer complies with the regs).
• Vehicle owners are not regulated under the Federal vehicle standards; they are regulated by the registrar—that is, the state where the vehicle is registered. So at least in theory, they aren’t allowed to modify their vehicle in a manner that contravenes whatever state regs exist. State regs range from nonexistent to uselessly outdated to “shall conform to the applicable Federal standards”.
So illegal modifications can and could be stopped, they just aren’t because on this continent we don’t care.
What was it that the Modesto cop checked Harrison Ford’s hot rod for in “American Graffiti?” Something like headlights too close to the ground?
A lot of these petty rules are so cops have an excuse to pull a driver over and check for outstanding warrants, drunk driving, drugs, etc. Young whippersnappers are likely to transgress in small ways and large. The murderer of the country store owner a hundred yards from my former workplace was caught when an alert cop saw the cash register in the junk in his pickup bed. The store had had a couple of illegal video gambling machines that attracted the wrong ‘un.
All the time we see and hear illegally modified vehicles. Even low riders that drag the pavement releasing showers of sparks. No evidence of any enforcement of the laws. New Mexico even made the “low rider” the State vehicle recently.
I’m one who also dislikes the unfocused and poorly aimed LED ‘driving ” lights ~ they’re just more ‘my d*ck is bigger than yours’ crap from insecure people .
One can install far better than D.O.T. lamps and adjust them to as to not blind oncoming drivers .
I remember when 1968 came along and al those farmer’s pickups had to ditch the cool blue taillight lenses…
I seem to notice modulated headlights faster, same with blinky brake lights, maybe it’s my imagination but my attention in traffic goes right to either one of those .
Well into the late 1970’s the C.H.P. would set up decibel meter check points just past the bottom of an uphill grade, you either slowed down, or down shifted or you got a ticket .
Oddly enough I’ve never received a sound ticket even on my open piped oldies .
-Nate
“I notice ’em faster” types of subjective opinions are what makes the cash register ring for those who peddle blinky-flashy gadgets. But (at best) no actual, real crash-avoidance benefit shows up in rigourous scientific study.
When I took driver’s ed in high school back in the late 1960s, the textbook made a big deal about flashing your brake lights at least once before you really pressed on the brake pedal to slow down or stop. The premise was this would be more likely to get the attention of drivers behind you.
I suppose this was bogus advice, and if you really have to stop RIGHT NOW, you don’t have time to apply a warning flash of the lights.
It was Bill Haddon, the visionary former president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, who said that the notion of common sense in driving often proves to be wrong when scientifically examined, an example of course being the advice above.
Bill Haddon was right about that, amongst many other things.
Yeah, it’s really amazing to page through driver’s-ed textbooks and other materials on the subject from decades ago. In the near-total absence of science, and in context of hideously unsafe vehicles and roads, everybody was full of baseless ideas—why, it’s just common sense!—about how to eke out some bare margin of safety. There were people writing screeds about how seatbelts were stupid and useless and unnecessary; proudly bragging they’d taught their family to extend, on command (“Brace!”) their arms straight forward and bear hard against the dashboard or seatback, thus making seatbelts pointless. There is nothing such as common sense; at best it is a myth.
That flash-the-stop-lights-before-really-braking advice might not have been completely senseless; when that text was written, hydraulic stop light switches were the norm. With them, the lamps don’t light until the pedal is pressed enough to create some pressure in the brake lines. Mechanical stop light switches light the lamps just after the pedal begins moving. So pedal-flashing the stop lights might have sorta kinda almost maybe made up for the lights’ relatively tardy onset with hydraulic switching…if it is considered without regard to any other factors. But then we have to remember that a red light flashing on and off is also the signature of a turn signal on this continent, so any advance warning given by the pre-brake light flash would probably be consumed by the following driver, whether they’re aware of it or not, reckoning out just what the driver ahead was signalling.
The imagery of the display of confiscated illegal mufflers is quite the contrast to today where you see a similar display of confiscated illegal firearms. Times sure have changed, it’s quite the statement back then for what was a minor annoyance to the “damn kids and their hot rods! Get off my lawn” types.
One man’s ‘minor nuisance’ is another’s incessant plague.
From my experience, it’s considerably more difficult to reduce (quieten) the noise that comes out of a cars tail pipe than to increase it.
Over the years I have seen many proud of the fact that they have a louder than standard muffler and fail to appreciate that the exact opposite takes far greater skill to achieve.
That’s a good point. It takes skill; patience, and thought to build stuff and improve the world, but the dumbest dillweed can wreck stuff and worsen the world. Weird how people get all proud of themselves for the latter.
Most high performance cars come from the manufacturer with the most efficient power producing exhaust system. Many times the addition of an aftermarket system will reduce power or screw up the powerband. Back in the ’50’s most V8 cars had small single exhaust systems, adding duals would add power. Big Harleys had a very poor single exhaust that had a “flat pipe” that would squeeze between the frame downtube and the timing case. A different set of pipes would add some power if used with other mods.
I rode motorcycles for 35 years, in my youth I did like “better sounding” mufflers, but never too loud. I was always a long distance touring rider, and loud pipes get old fast.
I have two Mustangs, a ’96 with a cat back FlowMaster system which is very mellow sounding and not at all loud. My ’06 has a set of cat back MagnaFlows, which is a bit louder, but not objectionable at all. These were on the cars when I bought them, if they were too loud I would have passed. Nothing seems as loud as a new turbo four or Coyote Mustang with those obnoxious cackling exhausts. As a mature adult (old man) I now prefer the stock exhaust on my other vehicles. Though I used to love the staggered duals on my Harleys!
Oh, don’t get me started.
US headlight standards have changed, profoundly since the days of sealed beams, for better and worse. But (now Mr Stern will surely correct me if I’m wrong) I think headlights are self certified by manufacturers these days as complying with what standards there are, and I’m convinced some, notably, but far from exclusively, GM trucks, are way out of compliance with aim and light distribution. Let alone when they are 4WD, let alone when it’s jacked up 4WD from the factory, let alone when the genitally impaired get a hold of aftermarket parts and one needs a ladder to get in. Or aftermarket headlights, typically LEDs today, but still some HIDs which throw lots of light everywhere, especially in the eyes of oncoming drivers. While in the past police generally only enforced headlight standards on those who they didn’t like, today with so many different headlights on everything, they don’t have a clue and don’t bother.
Muffler disposal? In the bay? Dan’s probably more accurate on the most dangerous part being lead, but I bet there was a lot of asbestos in those things too.
The California legislature was making some noise about Motorcycle exhausts a couple of years ago with some estimate that over 90% of Harley exhausts were modified and technically illegal.
A curious note on some late model BMWs I’ve noticed is start them up and they’re loud at idle. Take off and they quiet down.
I always hated the blue dot taillights.
I also hate the heavy tinting on front side windows. It has always been theoretically illegal in Indiana, but I have yet to hear of anyone getting a car taken off the road because of it, and see plenty of them day to day.
The effective way to handle, require an annual inspection to get your tags.
Emissions, lights, tires, headlight aim and noise. Well, the genie is out of the bottle.
The blue dot tail lights never made sense to me.
I worked at the state DOT and the amount of time wasted yammering about what color of emergency lighting to use was astounding. The biggest laugh I had was a memo I found when I was cleaning out the files in the office I inherited. This memo was date 1962 and was requesting that the debate about amber or blue light usage on plow equipment. So here I am, somewhere between 1997 and 2000 and we are still discussing the same issue.
On loud exhaust, some of the vehicles are coming from the factory with cutouts built into the mufflers. We had these cars fail the race track sound decibel limits! So the manufacturers are even in the game.
We have seen a modest level of enforcement on emissions modifications. The feds have shut down some of the diesel emission delete business.
The “rolling coal” is my pet peeve.
What are the noisy folks going to do when the EV’s take over the world? Wire wheels and playing cards? Recorded sounds of a Civic with a fart can?
I agree with you that annual inspection is a good idea in theory; the thorny knot is how to avoid the pitfalls in practice. How do you stop it being abused to extort car owners for unneeded repairs? It works in Germany and other European countries, probably for at least two reasons: there’s a culture of giving a damn about these things which doesn’t exist on this continent. And if you modify your car in a manner that makes it noncompliant, your insurance is void; on top of being heavily fined for the modification, you’re also liable for whatever crash happens. We don’t have that here, either.
Emergency-vehicle lighting specification discussions are still ongoing because the science is evolving (as is the lighting technology), and because emergency personnel keep getting hit while doing their jobs.
I’d use one of my three wishes to get rid of that noxious thing where raw gasoline is injected into the exhaust tract on lift-throttle to deliberately create pops and bangs.
This clipping struck me as interesting and ironic given that I live in Salinas now.
The idea of dumping mufflers in Monterey Bay is horrifying given that it’s now a marine refuge. But in the mid 1960s Humble Oil wanted to build an oil refinery on the bay, and it almost happened.
The Salinas Californian is no longer published daily.
The CHP has other concerns now. Last month, for example, two different fatal head-on collisions on two-lane stretches of Highway 1, one caused by an unlicensed 16-year-old driver who was drunk. A collision in Salinas where one of the drivers took off running. And yesterday, a road rage incident, that turned into a hit-and-run collision, that turned into a fatal accident when the victim’s Westfalia Vanagon rolled over multiple times. They’re still looking for the other car involved …
I have never seen any blue taillights, however.
Oh wow. Automotive lighting is one of my favorite nerd outs, and Stern is coming through like Chrysler Plymouth!
I’ve never gotten the headlight “glare reducers”. Like, who in the world has ever said “Gee. I sure wish my headlights were less effective! Lemme cover half of ’em up so I can see not better!” It doesn’t even look good in the daytime, so I’m lost. I once had to quickly brew up something similar with gaffer tape when both of my low beams burned out on the same trip, turning the still working high beams into an approximation of low beams, but you can be sure I wasn’t rocking that bodge the next night.
I don’t really dig the blue dot thing either. These things seem to be one of those must have additions to every 1950’s car, along with fender skirts, continental kit, a drive in tray with a plastic cheeseburger and fries attached to a window, a “time out” doll bent over the front bumper, and a cassette player belting out soggy doo wop tunes. Blark! I do remember some early cars (teens and early twenties) sporting blue-green brake lights, which I think were mostly aftermarket; and one particular turn signal from the early 30’s that had a blue-green lens pointing one direction, and an amber one the other. It was all contained in one round housing, and the lights illuminated steady instead of flashing. I had no idea any flavor of solid blue tail lights persisted into the 1950’s.
This all sounds pretty tame compared to what I’m regularly seeing in southern Arizona these days. It’s gotten easier and easier for any and everyone to get their hands on a multitude of different lamps and light sources, the majority of which render the lamp they’re installed in differing levels of useless; and then there’s those LED light bars that vomit light in every direction. And while there are some legitimate products that work in some lamps, it’s beyond the scope of an average person to assess actual lighting performance. And law enforcement in my area seems to turn a blinded eye toward this stuff.
…As they were saying.
…As I was saying.
B+. To get full marks, you’d’ve mentioned the involvement of a poodle skirt; a hula doll on the parcel shelf, and identified the tune as “Peggy Sue” on infinite repeat.