I agree with ok4450 about sticker shock as I darn near fainted when I was told the price of one at the dealers for my Wife’s Nissan Altima. I did not realize that just because the plastic cover was cracked the entire headlight assembly had to be replaced. Being an Old Geezer I fondly remember how easy it once was to replace the headlight on a car. Just replacing the bulb is a major operation nowadays.
Time for the stylists to work the sealed beam back in-Kevin
How about a very compact sealed beam of standard size that can fit behind the various custom plastic outer housings?
In regards to the CLA . . .
It might look cool, but in the Consumer Reports review, it went head to head against a VW
The VW blew the CLA out of the water
Personally, I wouldn’t take either of them
Every time I see a Nissan Juke, I think “Bug eyes”
One of my grumbles with CR is that they overvalue size. I want a car that is big enough for my needs, but any extra space beyond that is of no value to me. When CR tests cars they routinely ding them for being cramped, when there are plenty of people who would find that car the perfect size. Otherwise we wouldn’t have so many happy Mini drivers, mostly short, with few of them using the rear seat. The problem I have with the CLA (and many others) is that it could easily seat four adults if they hadn’t made the roof swoop down in back. That turns it into a much less useful car, good for people who only put children and short adults in back. The VW Golf isn’t a big car, but it has excellent headroom and just enough legroom for four average men. All because the roof is flat.
Well Circutsmith,good try anyway,@db,those things look like tree frogs to me-Kevin
The sealed beam is dead, you’ll have to get over it. The new regulations on beam patterns are almost economically unfeasible to do with a forward lens alone. I suspect that if they were to design a sealed beam lamp that met the standards, it might be easy to change but be cost prohibitive to replace. People liked the old versions of them because they were easy to change AND relatively inexpensive. Easy to change but wicked expensive? Not so much…
This might win the ugly “face” contest:
Hideous . . .
it does look like a bull frog.
Yes, the Fiat Multipla (that car) was horrid. So bad they redesigned it a few years later to a more conventional design.
Geez, that car reminds me of the saying, “you’re about to see something you can’t easily un-see”…
The rest of the Multipla’s styling was similarly odd, with side glass that was almost vertical and an ugly tail end, too. They were trying too hard to be different. The idea was OK. People carriers (known as MPVs) have been popular family vehicles in Europe for years. Most are much like the Mazda5, with three rows of seats, with the rear ones quite small. Fiat decided to make a six-passenger MPV with two rows of three across, much like any older big American car. It’s pretty tight for three across, but these are family cars, so some of the kids are probably small. The styling makes some sense, but was weirder than it had to be.
“Geez, that car reminds me of the saying, “you’re about to see something you can’t easily un-see”…”
Yep, looks only a mother could love.
Fiat Multipla, the later models have a more van-like front end. There was one parked in the car park at Stonehenge when I was over there last year. Actually a somewhat practical vehicle. Seats 6 in a vehicle roughly the size of a Ford Focus.
I'm also curious what's going to happen when one of the MANY LED lights on cars such as the Audi burns out. If one of the 20 or so goes south, can it alone be replaced? My guess is that they must be replaced as an expensive unit. Will cars with one bad bulb fail safety inspections? Will one bulb allow a police officer to write a ticket for an unsafe car?
My guess would be that in the S-class-type vehicles, yes, they’ll need to replace the whole unit at a cost that would make the HID lights seem cheap. But, by the time the Civic-type class vehicles get them, they’ll be able to replace a single bulb. And we can only hope the LED headlamps won’t be anything like xcmas tree string lights where one bulb goes, a whole string goes out.
No reason they’d be made like old xmas lights. For LEDs it’s important to control current precisely. They typically have control circuitry that is like nothing you’d see on an incandescent light. Anyhow, other than initial failure, which should be caught in testing, LEDs last a very long time, ultimately slowly fading. There is no filament to burn through or cathode that loses a small amount of material every time it is used. Their enemy is heat, but with adequate heat sibks that shouldn’t be a problem. As they’ve become more efficient they’ve given off more light and less heat, so keeping them cool is easier. All the other LEDs scattered around the cabin of the new S-Class are low wattage designs of the same basic sort that have been made for year. They run for years without burning out.
It’s absurd what sort of lights are street-legal these days.
Was on my '84 VF700 Honda Sabre…one of the LED-festooned Mercedes was right behind me…and everything in front of me was lost in the shadow cast by those lights shining off my bike. If there was a pothole or roadkill in front of me…I’d have been powereless to avoid it. (Normally this cured by throttle, but I was following traffic).
My state has a “max candlepower” reg: time to start enforcing it!