I’ve tried to start this using embedded images, but since the board won’t let me, I’ll have to use links.
Many Ford pickups have stacked headlights, and I often see all four of them on, even in daytime. Traditionally, when all four lights are on, the high beams are on. I can’t figure out if the high beams are on or not – sometimes I see only two lights on, and the other two off (sometimes, the top row are amber, like parking lights–I’m talking about 4 white lights). If these are not high beams, why are all four lights on, and how would high beams work? If they are on, why are the drivers so assholish as to drive with high beams on?
Or are the high beams automatic (that doesn’t make much sense to me, because some cars have sensors to turn off high beams for oncoming traffic)?
The only part of your question I can answer with confidence is that the light bulb you provided a link for is a 9007, which is a dual beam bulb: both the low beam and high beam are produced from the same bulb.
The associated picture, however, displays a Ford pickup which as you note has stacked headlights with high and low beam being seperate units. I’m not really a car guy but I don’t think the blub that you linked to actually fits the accompanying picture. That’s advertising for you.
Oh, and yes, asshole drivers happily drive everywhere all the time with their high beams on while enjoying a complete disregard for other drivers because being an asshole is what assholes tend to do.
In theory, yes. In my experience that never happens.
Side rant: Friday I was driving to work at oh-dark-thirty and some jerk was driving through the city without his headlights on – not even his running lights were on. He was in the lane beside me and in front of me is a county sheriff patrol. Blackout jerk pulls ahead and merges in front the sheriff’s patrol car and drives with the cop on his tail for several blocks before turning off the main highway onto a side street. In a move that didn’t surprise me in the least, the cop did absolutely nothing and kept on his merry way.
This is surprisingly hard to google but it seems like many newer Ford trucks do have all four on for low beams as well as all four on for high beams (dual bulbs). Especially superduty trucks.
Some Ford trucks have a sensor to automatically dim high beams when they detect oncoming headlights.
Your picture of course also shows the fog lights on just to be extra assholey. (Sorry, one of my pet peeves is fog lights on when it’s not foggy). It also shouldn’t be possible to have both high beams and fog lights on, but I just saw some youtube videos on how to mod your truck to make this possible.
In my experience, cars with no headlights at night are driven by idiots who forgot to turn on the headlights, not assholes who don’t care whether you can see them.
My experience includes being the idiot.
And high beams are great so long as there isn’t any oncoming traffic.
Ditto. The car I’ve driven for 13 years has lights that turn on/off automatically. When I borrow my daughter’s car, they don’t turn on or off automatically and there’s no warning beep when I turn off the car. I have to use a post-it note to remind myself, which I still manage to often overlook.
I always flash my lights at cars who don’t have their lights on at night, but only rarely do they notice. I wish people would flash their lights at me when needed!
I turn my fog lights on any time I need some extra light, especially during heavy rain (which here in western Oregon is quite frequent.) Sometimes I forget to turn them off.
My 1990 Mercedes 300E has factory fog lights that stay on regardless of headlight switch position: they don’t turn off with the high beam. I don’t really understand why the designers made them this way but to me it isn’t a big deal. If its foggy enough to need fog lights I won’t be using my high beams. If its raining hard enough to need fog lights the high beams will be useless. The fog lights on the Mercedes are also amber, which makes a huge difference in visibilty. The amber light is much less reflective in the fog or rain so it simply illuminates the fog lines better. I wish my other cars had amber fog lights.
With vehicles getting taller and taller, and with a very sharp vertical cutoff in the light beam, I’m finding it harder to tell if someone has their high beams on or if they’re just on a slight incline. You can’t tell just by which lights are on (hence the OP). You used to be able to tell if it was the inner lights versus the outer ones, but even that fell by the wayside pretty quickly. Now with daytime running lights that are sometimes also turn signals, LED arrays, and dual-mode lamps, all bets are off.
Have you tried pushing the headlight knob in to turn off the selective yellow lights? The control knob on my 88 300e had what seemed like a couple of dozen positions to control the outside lights… I pushed it in to turn off the frog lights. MB used the same switch for the w124 from 86-93. Just depends on the market the car was sold in as to what functions work on the switch.
Different trim packages often have different lights. It’s not uncommon for fog lights to not be available on the lowest price package.
ETA, here’s the three trims the F250 comes in. If you’re familiar with the truck, you can probably tell which package the person has, based on how blinding it is to drive towards them. Or at least they may assume you can.
Looking at the details, the middle one has Halogen Fog Lamps and “Quad beam halogen jewel effect”, the second one has LED lights. There’s still three more trim packages after these, but I didn’t look into how different their lights are.
These days, with cars equipped with intense, dazzlingly bright LED headlights, many of them look like high beams even when they’re on low, especially on higher vehicles like big SUVs and pickups. I can’t believe these damn things are legal, let alone being standard equipment on almost all new vehicles. Sometimes when one of these abominations is driving by I literally have to shield my eyes with my hand to see where I’m going. I don’t have such headlights, but I had a rental car recently that had them, and yes, they’re incredibly bright even from the inside looking out, not just from the standpoint of the poor victim they’re blinding.
I appreciate the responses, especially Lancia and Folly. So it does seem that all four lights are both high and low. The unanswered, possibly rhetorical, question, is why? Why the hell would Ford (and/or other manufacturers) make the lights this way?
I’ll save my rant for the asshole drivers who leave their high beams on for the pit.
I drive a 2017 Corolla, and other drivers have occasionally flashed me to turn my high beams off when the low beams are on (so far as I know, my lights are adjusted properly, but I’m not sure if the OEM lights are HID, LED, or halogen…I suspect not halogen, but they could be one of the other two).
The amber lights inboard of the headlights are the fog lights. The corner marking lights are standard marker lights that can be switched off (although interestingly each side can be switched on separately).
The lights below the bumper on the car in the pic I believe are custom/aftermarket as those are not standard equipment on any of the W124 models that I’m aware of, certainly not the 300E.
IME, and I have a fair bit, driving the length and breadth of Mainland UK, a fair amount in fog, fog lamps are useless. They either fail to penetrate the fog, or throw back reflections that make things worse.
