Ask HN: What prevents the automotive industry from using safe LEDs?
4 years ago
A lot of you had something to comment about in that submission about Ford’s new electric pickup [0].
All I noticed were pictures on Ford’s website demonstrating terrible headlights. Not all automotive LEDs are terrible, just the ones that emit too much blue light.
Kia has a few models with orange LED running lights. But it seems most new vehicles are designed to blind everyone.
Blue LEDs are great for plants. When used as a balanced portion of a white light they’re fine.
Science knows about the hazards of blue light. Decades ago, scientists studying human response to light figured out that humans do best in low light environments with lights that are red, orange, yellow. This is why our streetlights used to be orange, until the LED companies stole the old light companies’ business without realizing there was a reason behind outdoor lights’ usual spectrum. Or they did know but couldn’t compete with their products, so they pretend their products’ terrible spectrum doesn’t matter.
I think I’ve encountered most the mistakes behind the automotive industry’s switch to defective blue-white LEDs instead of safe orange-biased LEDs.
But before I put my thoughts out there, what are your theories for the mass proliferation of blue-white LEDs in low light environments?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27234039
> This is why our streetlights used to be orange, until the LED companies stole the old light companies’ business without realizing there was a reason behind outdoor lights’ usual spectrum.
Ah... No... The yellow streetlights were not yellow because the particular color was a choice, or because "yellow" was better for humans in some way. They were yellow simply because those were sodium vapor lamps and the sodium emissions spectrum is in the yellow range. And they were sodium vapor lamps because sodium vapor lamps were more energy efficient that mercury vapor lamps (the whiter looking street lamps as compared to the yellow sodium ones).
And both mercury vapor and sodium vapor were used because they were the high energy efficiency offerings for street lighting before LED's came along and offered even greater energy efficiency.
And when you count out how many street lights exist, even small amounts of energy efficiency improvements per lamp multiply quickly into large cost savings in paying for the energy usage (street lamps are not free, someone, typically the local government, is paying for the energy consumption).
I have the report behind Phoenix, Arizona’s early-1980’s lighting ordinances. Orange sodium lights had many advantages over the lights they replaced beyond the energy improvements. There are LEDs that retain most of the benefits of the sodium bulbs. I think they’re not used because of humanity’s tendency to forget.