There could be a situation where there's a sea if blinking taillights in front of you & it hide/mask a genuine turn signal, particularly at night.
Good point, flashing brake can be mistaken for a turn signal, thou stock red turns are not flashing at the same rate as preflash brakes, but few would tell a difference right away, and make a correct decision quick enough.
Having seen these things in the wild a few times, a ~2s burst of >2Hz flashing high-center brake light is a
very different animal from a lower-mounted ~1Hz continuous turn signal. It's about optimal to draw your attention to the
edge event of braking beginning, and quite effective.
There is a good argument to be made that there should be a minimum rate of deceleration
(or more simply brake pedal depression) for the pulse to trigger since they're marginal in stop-and-go traffic and for drivers that are in the unfortunate habit of decelerating on the highway using brakes rather than throttling down.
a) those are something else that needs to be gotten rid of ASAP. They're not even legal but nobody's doing anything about them. I've been blinded before following an ambulance at night not running code just driving because they're using bright, flashing strobe lights for brake lights.
Seen a few of those myself - albeit not strobe lights, just steady-state
yet bright enough to be a beacon - and that's an experience for sure.
The strobes / flashing lightbar lights during an emergency call are simply ... part of the territory ... and mercifully mounted high.
b) If it really is 2 Hz that might be OK, I believe the threshold is around 4-5Hz for most people. NFPA 72 limits strobes used for fire alarm visual signaling to a range between 1-2 Hz. In practice it is almost always 1 Hz to synchronize with Code-3 temporal horns.
I'm gathering from
some sources (pg 2-3) that it's as high as 5Hz although much of the testing looks to have been at 3.6Hz. And since it's a brake light of ordinary intensity I suspect that
context will further dampen the impact - as opposed to fire strobes that are by necessity quite intense.
c) the whole concept just smacks of "looka me! looka me! I'm doing something different!" like putting green bulbs in your parking lights or headlight halos. And I can tell you from experience that drawing attention to yourself is not always good; people tend to steer at what they're staring at.
Of all the lighting bling that one can engage in this is too subtle to be bothered with of its own sake - as opposed to underbody lighting, color-changing halos, conspicuous rock lights, lightbars, scads of non-compliant marker lamps, foglights under normal conditions, animated pixel displays, etc. Since we're all accustomed to center brake lights it attracts attention to the fact that a braking event has begun then terminates.
