robin1234

It's a matter of degree ... I found sometimes the fog lights would help you see where the edge of the road is under all sorts of adverse conditions, just because they were lower down. Country roads with no lighting and no lines, that is.

Pulaski

You probably haven't as they weren't legally mandated until around 1980 +/- in the UK, and a 1980-81 car I owned had rear fog lights bolted on underneath the rear bumper to meet the requirement without redesigning the whole rear light cluster (ya got to love those BL cars! )

hungryhorace

Those were front facing fogs, which aren't as dazzling as the rears. Personally, I have no real problems with fronts being used in general. It's the rears which irritate me.

Jerseygirl

TIO actually young man.

SultanOfSwing

Oh yeah.

Bloody hell, I'd forgotten there even was a TIO for a while, there.

Southy_SWFC

My 2001 Honda Accord has fog lights, didn't do me much good this morning though.

robin1234

CT, ME ... You have fog over there this morning? Up here in northern NYS, it is exceptionally warm, 45 degrees, and very high winds this morning. Temp is supposed to keep going down, 25 this afternoon, low of zero tonight. Sunny at the moment, twelve inches of snow forecast later. Weird weather in 2014!

Jan Alaska

My daughter in law is borrowing my Mercedes while her jeep is being worked on. Yesterday she came over and said she thought the brake lights were stuck on as they were really bright, turned out she had turned on the rear fog lights without knowing. She was really surprised the vehicle even had rear fog lights but said they were definately a good idea with all the blowing snow around.
The ML is a German car but built in the US so it looks like they keep German specs even though they are not required.

hungryhorace

I read this statement and it depresses me. How can your average joe American NOT know about fog lights, and be so stupid as to think they're brake lights 'stuck' ?!

Jan Alaska

Because she is an average joe American, bought up in Detroit on a diet of GM, Ford and Chrysler none of which have rear fog lights. Her previous cars include an Oldsmobile sedan, Ford Contour and Jeep, all old and in various states of disrepair. For now the loan of the Mercedes is temporary but I have a feeling it will become permanant when we find out how bad the jeep actually is.
For me, I'm happy knowing my grandies are being transported in a well maintained safe vehicle.

SultanOfSwing

I can count on one hand the number of days where we have severe fog where visibility was less than a few hundred yards. When we do, it's usually in the transition from winter to spring when the snow evaporates during the day then condenses overnight due to the lower temps/increasing humidity, maybe for two days, in the morning until the sun gets high enough to disperse it. Yearly, what, ten hours total? It was the same back in NI as well. Rarely was there a day I was driving when fog impacted my trip. I can think of two days in five years of driving off hand, as I lived near sea level and the worst of our fog was in the hilly areas.

Outside of San Francisco, there's probably very few areas of the US where you'd even need foglights, so it's a bit unfair to hold an entire nation to task over such a non-issue.

As I said, I'm British and I have never used a foglight once in my life ...

Nutmegger

Sorry, but your intelligent fellow countryman here had no idea about rear fog lights, either. Why on earth would or should someone here know about vehicle requirements in another country? I'm still figuring out what they are used for -- to prevent people smacking into the rear of the vehicle in front of them, or angled to light the verge for the car behind?

hungryhorace

They're for use in heavy fog so other cars can see you. They are often misused by idiots who don't know when is appropriate to use them, unfortunately.

Southy_SWFC

There's a lot of flooding going off around here due to it being nearly 50degrees. Then theres a sheet of ice under the standing water. The hot rain on the snow is causing a lot of fog

When the temps go back down again later it's going to get very messy

Cardienscarf

How can someone be an idiot because they don't know how to use something? You can't know what you don't know.