How many of you actually NEED your fog lights?

Just curious. I see so many people driving around night or day with their fog lights on, regardless of whether there's any fog.

Around here we get fog so thick that you see better turning off your headlights(even ECE beams) and driving on your fogs alone....which isn't legal. Obviously when the fog is like this we're creeping along at 15 mph and praying we don't get rear-ended by soccer moms driving H2's at 60mph with 10 feet of visibility.

I don't mean that my experience above should be the benchmark of whether someone actually needs fog lights or not; my fog lights also help lots of times when the headlights help too instead of being a hindrance.

I use my fog lights on my work trucks for work lights sometimes, too. They can usually shine under a piece of equipment quite well.

I don't have fog lights, but I do know this: If the fog is thick enough for fog lights, it's thick enough to SLOW DOWN!

This is a pic of us in the woods 11 days ago; we found a place to stop that was relatively fog-free.
We seldom are going much more than 3 mph in the rough stuff though and 20 on the tamer terrain.
My HID fogs are wonderful in the pea soup.


click for fullsize

For on-road driving, the answer is "almost zero", as in "almost nobody driving on public roads needs fog lights". See this data which was collected in a 2001 real-world trial involving five conditions in fog+rain conditions:

US low beam headlamps only ("LB" on the charts)
Fog lamps only, conforming to old SAE spec J583 ("583" on the charts)
Fog lamps only, conforming to new SAE spec J2510 ("2510" on the charts)
LB + 583
LB + 2510

As you can see from the charts, fog lamps -- even ones built to a modern technical spec rather than an old one -- contribute very little to the safety performance of a lighting system. The low beam headlamps used for the test were halogen, not HID, and all lamps were aimed correctly. Participants were all members of various SAE lighting committee working groups, so they had some reasonably solid grasp on what to look for and how to describe it. Basically these charts show what Alaric is saying: fog lamps are not magical devices that let you keep driving at anything near normal dry-weather speeds. They are only capable of helping you grope your way safely along at very low speeds in very bad weather.

(The J2510 fog lamp standard was to have been SAE's harmonization with the newly updated ECE R19 Class F3 fog lamp spec, but eventually document J2510 was cancelled and the new specs were just incorporated into SAE document J583; that's the current state of affairs with regard to tech documents. There's no requirement in the US that fog lamps meet the newer specs; they can still meet the older specs which are still in document J583.)

i think we get about 2 days of fog here a year.
I have 3000k HID fogs, they help a little, but are mostly for show.
pic of said fog lights

One useful thing is that my fogs shine farther out to the sides allowing me to see road debris a little better but only if I'm pulling off to the side or making my way through a dark parking lot. I see nothing special while driving faster on the road or in fog conditions.

I'm actually thinking about re-wiring my fogs to switch over to a series (50% bright) when the low beams are off (day). Then when the low beams turn on at night, they automatically switch back to stock. This way, the fogs could act as DRLs in the day, but they'd still maintain their normal brightness for night. This would squeeze one more use out of them.

I have a ford ranger with yellow fogs, last week I was driving through the densest fog I have ever seen, 30ft visibility. The actual fog lights did nothing to help. High beams was the most useful even though you are no supposed to use them in fog, they did help me see further. I just keep the fogs because the yellow looks cool on the snow.

Just once, in 29 years of driving.

hayze said:

One useful thing is that my fogs shine farther out to the sides allowing me to see road debris a little better but only if I'm pulling off to the side or making my way through a dark parking lot. I see nothing special while driving faster on the road or in fog conditions.

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The wider beam pattern on my old vehicle that had them was useful to me when there was absolutely no fog. Driving in northern MI well before sunrise through the middle of nowhere it gave slightly increased range to identify the deer standing at the side of the road. There were a couple straight desolate stretches where the biggest threats to my driving was off the road in the form of suicidal deer. Maybe the extra fraction of a second to start reacting didn't make a difference. I do know I had a number of very close calls even with the greater identification range.

Were they actually useful in fog? Not so much.

Yes, I do need my fog lights. But not for the reason you'd think. We get almost no fog where I live. However, on my car (1995 Volvo 940) there were two different types of headlights that the US market cars got. The cars without fog lights have composite headlamps (Cibie) with plastic lenses with 9004 lamps. After 15 years, these had yellowed into uselessness. The cars with fog lights had the lights between the headlamps and the grille. This required that the headlamp be narrower. These narrower headlamps were made by Bosch and have 9004 lamps, but they do have glass lenses. The difference between the old headlamps and the "new" ones (which we pulled of a car in a junkyard) was night and day.

My "fog" lights are actually hella 550 driving lights fitted with amber hella lamps. I find the amber much less fatiguing than the original "white" lamps and in comparison the amber lighting is less reflective in snow and fog-like rainy conditions. The lamps are mounted below bumper hence the angle is also low and very directed due the driving light design. I live in a rural area and use these far more than the high beams as their range is comparable but more focused. I do not use these in traffic. The typical fog lights provided by the manufacturers are in my opinion bling and just an annoyance to oncoming traffic.

I think most fog lights are needed by other people. Have you ever seen a production car with fog lights bright enough to be used for driving?

I always turn my on in the fog so other people don't run into me.


Now I used to have some after market fog lights when I had a car. I had them turned out a little. When driving through the country my high beams did a good job of lighting up the middle of the road, but my fog lights lit up the sides. I could see all those turns coming when driving faster than I should

I normally turn my fogs on at night to illuminate the side of the road better or when it's foggy (whoa, radical ).

This past week I have had them on all the time at night because one of my headlight bulbs burned out and I haven't had a chance to tear half of the front end off of my car to change the bulb in the lovely freezing weather.

Hilldweller said:

This is a pic of us in the woods 11 days ago; we found a place to stop that was relatively fog-free.
We seldom are going much more than 3 mph in the rough stuff though and 20 on the tamer terrain.
My HID fogs are wonderful in the pea soup.


click for fullsize

Click to expand...

I like the "fog" lights on my truck so that I can see the hill/rocks as I go up it.

Around here you may switch on your fog lights when visual range is below 50m. Which happens every few years. When someone comes toward me with fog lights on i switch to high beam to thank him for blinding me.

I have a set of Hella Micro DEs that I thorw on the car when I drive to areas with lots of fog. But since they are proper designed to be fog lights with a sharp vertical cut off optic and generous spread, they are utterly useless for normal driving. For that I have a set of Hella XLs which gives a generous band of light for the sides.

I am guessing that 90% of aftermarket "fog lights" are poorly designed bulb+reflector in a housing, and most OEM "fog lights" are just as bad in their glare. Funny thing is when I drove through the Pajaro Valley to go to Monterey a while back, on highway 156, there was tons of fog and I used my Micro DEs for low speed driving.

When I stopped on the side of the road for some food a man in his late model sedan with those glary "foglights" pulled up and you can see the whole space in front of his car was lit like a giant light blob.

he looked at my lights and said, "eh Homes, your fog lights are terrible, they don't light up nothing."

I politely nodded and thanked himn for his advice.

rushnrockt said:

I like the "fog" lights on my truck so that I can see the hill/rocks as I go up it.

Click to expand...

The Jeep came with stock foglights; I swapped out the bumper and reinstalled those lights. They're 9145's and do a reasonable job of lighting obstacles 0'-15' in front of me.

The HIDs are now tinted yellow and aimed a bit off to the sides. I commute on rural twisty/hilly 2-lane roads, two dirt roads, deer filled and foggy.
30' visibility? At least once a week in winter. Bad days are more like 10' and really bad days are the ones where all you see are tail-lights and reflectors. But that's just in the low spots by creeks.

This shows the "rock lights" pretty well. Since I don't use them while driving, I've been thinking of putting in a fast/dirty/cheap HID kit...

I just traded in a five year old Subaru and I never used the foglights once. My new Audi has both front and rear foglights. If I ever find myself in really heavy fog, I'll probably turn on the rear foglights, but the front ones probably won't see any more action than the Subaru's did.

Boy, it was one foggy ride to work today. I sure wish I'd gotten around to putting my old pair of Cibie series 95I yellow fogs on my Suzuki DL650. Of course, were I live, I'm only sharing the road in the dark and fog with a lot of logging trucks and the occasional giant log handler... ...and deer, and elk, and livestock that get out...

An interesting quote on the subject from Audi's chief of exterior lighting systems (speaking a couple of weeks ago):

"Fog lamps are relics of the past. They lost their right to exist after the glare control problem of headlamps was solved."