Question about new Ford F-150 premium tail lamps

Question for those who are familiar with the photometric design requirements of vehicle lighting. The higher trim levels of the new style Ford F-150 have a tail lamp that is a strip, which starts at the tailgate, runs horizontally around the corner, swoops down, then runs horizontally back around the corner to the tailgate, and the brake light is a square area inside the strip that illuminates separately from the tail strip.

My concern/question is that when you are directly behind one at night, you can really only see about 2x1" of that strip on each side. The part that wraps to the side of the box is not visible from the back, and is the majority of the area of the strip. It really doesnt make the truck that visible from behind in the dark. Now, I am an enthusiastic layman when it comes to this topic, but to me, these trucks dont seem to really make their presence known to the back. The area of the tail lamp visible from the rear is pretty much the smallest I have seen. Makes that little circle the Ranger generated seem like a spotlight.

Please educate me as to the merits or mistakes Ford has made with this design.

Thanks!
Dave

I've wondered about this too. They probably meet some DOT/SAE regulation, but I really dislike them and find them to be way to dim (just like the engineers at Ford who created them). In my opinion they should be recalled.

There is no minimum-lit-area requirement for the rear position (tail) lamp function. For the stop (brake) lamps and the rear turn signal lamps there is a minimum lit area requirement, called EPLLA for Effective Projected Luminous Lens Area, of 50 square centimeters for vehicles less than 80" overall width, and 75 square centimeters for vehicles 80 or more inches in overall width. But no such requirement for the tail lamp, which has to meet only photometric performance requirements -- that is, how much light they put out through a range of horizontal and vertical angles.

I have seen a fair number of these trucks in traffic, in a variety of weather conditions at night, and subjectively the tail lamps don't jump out at me as being inadequate, but the complaint is a subject of conversation.

I think what's actually going on is that a lot of Ford F-series buyers are repeat buyers, and they're accustomed to older rear lamp designs with one or two incandescent bulbs that light up the whole lens area (or a big proportion of it) for the tail mode, then just get brighter for the brake mode. Pickup truck buyers tend to be extremely conservative and slow to change in their vehicle equipment and configuration preferences, which is why things like HID and LED headlamps, and even projector headlamps, have been much slower to permeate the truck market compared to the passenger car market.

It appears there is already a second-design LED rear lamp assembly for these trucks. I saw one in traffic not long ago; what caught my eye was the yellow rear turn signal, a first on a US-market Ford F-series truck. That lamp is described and shown in the thread linked above.

u mean this ?

Hotlinked Image of Taillamp Changed to URL to Image

Thanks for the reply Virgil, thats the type of info I was looking for. And thanks for find a picture, Mr. Localhost. I find it strange that Ford incorporated the blind spot system hardware into the tail lamp assembly.

I knew about the minimum area for stop lamps from reading some of Mr. Stern's articles at acarplace, but wasnt sure about tails. Subjectively, I am not a fan of the design, but I didn't think Ford would release a design that was non-compliant.

Glad to hear they are going to amber turn signals. I'm a big fan, both based on what I see on the road, and the evidence that supports it. My last few cars have all had amber rear signals, and I wish(ed) they would use it on big 3 half tons.

I don't know why this is the case, but I tend to prefer (aesthetically speaking, I know they all do the job) a larger lit surface, that is then less intense, to a smaller "point source". These for lamps are the point source variety, when viewed from behind. As an example my last car was an Alero, and I always liked the huge rear lighting assemblies. Never much cared for cars with a smaller, single square tail lamp, like my brothers MkIV Jetta. Same goes for trucks, I like the aesthetics of the GM half tons, they have a larger lit area for the tail lamps.

But again, that's just one persons aesthetic sense.

I am going to go way out on a limb here

but IMHO

Ford is far more likely to introduce something to increase safety, not decrease it. They are market innovators for many
safety designs, some they came up with, some they were 'threatened with'...but Ford does bring new features to market
all the time and many are safety related.

that being said, fancy lighting on modern vehicle might be meeting photometrics, but there are many legal assemblies
which are pretty hard to see nowadays. My major complaint is turn signals on the front of a car are very hard to see
on many models. yeah OK they pass photometrics and are distinct enough from the DRL's but damn, 20 years ago it was dead
simple to pick out a turn signal*.

[oh and not a Ford fan, I only buy toyota... for what it's worth. ]

*I just wondered...if the fact I surf the net a lot (who doesn't nowadays) and my brain is always trying to filter out
any type of animated or blinking advert. I use ublock and have very extensive filters so most animated crap is not happening
in my browsers...but maybe i am trained to ignore small blinking stuff and perhaps that makes a little blind spot
for these practically hidden turn signals on newer cars and I am 'tuning them out'...much like everyone tunes out telephone poles
and wiring and you only notice them when 'you notice them'

Adblock can also be your friend a stopping all those very annoying flashing and auto playing ads.

127.0.0.1 said:

IMHO Ford is far more likely to introduce something to increase safety, not decrease it.

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Wellllll...I think it's more accurate to say Ford's far more likely to introduce something to increase corporate profit than to decrease it. Same for GM, FCA, Toyota, Nissan, Volkswagen (witness recent news), Volvo, Geely, Tesla, Apple, Microsoft, AT&T, Facebook, Google, and all the rest of the world's corporations. That's what they're in business for, that's their management's fiduciary duty to their shareholders. Any claims to the contrary (We're putting this feature on our cars because we care about you, etc) are just the marketing used to activate the profit potential of the decision.

They are market innovators for many
safety designs, some they came up with, some they were 'threatened with'

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That limb of yours is making some distressing cracking-about-to-break noises. Unfortunately, Ford's history with regard to safety leadership, innovation, and regulatory citizenship is not a good one. Even if we don't even look at stuff not related to lighting (and that's a lot of really bad stuff we're ignoring), their lighting "innovations" over the years have tended to be heavily skewed towards "Make it cheaper and prettier and cheaper but still legal" rather than "Make it work better". A lot of the "lowlights" of vehicle lighting on American roads are a direct result of Ford foisting cheap and nasty junk on the public via a regulatory body that's easily convinced to issue rubber-stamp OKs.

Recently, in the last five years or so, the lights on Ford vehicles have been getting better in fits and starts. Same with Chrysler and GM and others, all dragged along, sort of against their will, by what they call the "curse of Audi" (that is, Audi started putting deluxe lights on their cars, so the whole industry has to at least make a show of going along or get left in the dust). It's kind of amusing to see the shoe on Ford's other foot...after years of leading the industry in a race to the bottom (cheapest, nastiest possible lights) they are now being led by their noses in the other direction. But it is just not realistic to say that Ford has been some kind of beacon of lighting and safety innovation on American roads. That's just not what happened.

that being said, fancy lighting on modern vehicle might be meeting photometrics, but there are many legal assemblies which are pretty hard to see

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That is true, across all automakers. The regulations really do not adequately address reality. Today's lights are physically and technically different almost completely from those that were in use when the standards were written in the late 1960s (and most of FMVSS 108 was just simply codifying what the American auto industry was already doing at that time). The standards really have not kept up.

My major complaint is turn signals on the front of a car are very hard to see
on many models.

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They can be, that's true. One interesting thing, though: assuming a turn signal nestled right close to the low beam headlamp, have you noticed how much easier it is to spot the front turn signal if the headlamps are HID versus halogen? The color contrast with the blue headlamp makes the amber turn signal very much more apparent.

I just wondered...if the fact I surf the net a lot (who doesn't nowadays) and my brain is always trying to filter out any type of animated or blinking advert. maybe i am trained to ignore small blinking stuff and perhaps that makes a little blind spot for these practically hidden turn signals on newer cars and I am 'tuning them out'.

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Interesting idea!

dave_b said:

I find it strange that Ford incorporated the blind spot system hardware into the tail lamp assembly.

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They may have made that choice to minimize the likelihood and the repair cost of blind spot camera/sensor damage (versus putting it in body sheetmetal or the bumper, etc). Now here's something interesting: I can't quite tell, but it sounds like trucks with the blind spot monitoring system get the all-red stop/tail/turn lamp, while trucks without the blind spot monitor system get the lamps with red stop/tail and yellow turn. I'm tempted to say this is a "left hand gives, right hand takes away" collision-avoidance con/shell game, but that's just a guess; if nothing else if that's a correct statement about which trucks get what lights, it would make a nice data pool for looking at the safety effects of yellow rear turn signals vs. blind spot monitoring.

KXA said:

Adblock can also be your friend a stopping all those very annoying flashing and auto playing ads.

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not any more, adblock has been bought by the advertizing 'man' and is no longer what it once was

same with ublock

ublock origin is the current leader in opensource and free ad blocking, and has huge customization ability. using the defaults works fine too.

ublock origin... accept no substitutes