OEM headlights have nearly always been rubbish, there are a few reasons for this,
As most buyers don’t know any better, it isn’t a high priority for manufacturers to provide anything better, they would rather prioritise cost and styling fashions.
And as most people spend most of their nocturnal driving in urban areas with plentiful street lighting, they don’t really have much need for a well defined low/dipped beam pattern. Which is why they don’t know any better.
It’s at low/dipped beam when you’re on a busy rural road without street lighting, which is the acid test for lighting design.
Add to that the situation in the US was made worse as there was for many years the legislation that required sealed beams, resulting in imports having to have their halogen lights removed and cheap and nasty sealed beam junk being awkwardly shoved in their place.
With the US being such an important market, this also influenced other markets.
If the US Customer was lucky the manufacturer chose either 7” or 5” round units which could easily be replaced with quality halogen inserts to improve things but more often as not they chose those awful small rectangular units which by the inherent limitations of both their size and shape posed limitations on what could be done to improve the situation. The small rectangular pattern didn’t work very well with the incandescent technology of the day as that tech worked best with an evenly round reflector and the lighting element placed in precisely the right place, this as a generalisation meant bigger was better, lens design could go some way to counter this, but yet again there were compromises, and bigger light allowed more room to achieve this.
The beauty of the old 7” and 5” round headlights was that due to the generic form of these they could easily be binned and better quality inserts fitted. Try that on anything built in the last 30+ years!
Now technology has moved on, projector head lights, HID and of course LED, which is the buzz word these days.
And those old requirements don’t necessarily apply, but as in everything there are good and rubbish designs, and as as always the rubbish out numbers the good!
But the average consumer still doesn’t know any better, if you tell them they have LED lighting they’re happy, doesn’t matter that the actual design of the lights they have is rubbish….. “they have LEDs so it must be better!”
So don’t mind my cynicism at those “25” lights in the TR25 are anything more than a styling gimmick, concept cars don’t actually have to work, indeed most don’t, and if they do they don’t do it very well.
If by chance this thing actually goes into production I bet they will be the first casualty of putting it into production and even if they make it that far, they’re probably going to be next to useless.
"Keep calm, relax, take a deep breath, focus on the problem & PULL THE BLOODY TRIGGER"
'80 Triumph TR7.
'97 Ford Falcon Longreach 'S' ute,
'98 MG-F.
'83 Jaguar XJ6 Sovereign S3.
