The use of front fog lights

[steve_earwig]

Which has bigger boot, the devil-fuel motor or the express barge?

[mjb]

Your GF/Wife must be cool, doing an epic road trip to buy tobacco, I dunno it just seems cool* to me

It was just for her baccy - I'm 100% vaping now. Fact is the trip saved us hundreds which is going towards getting a house. Bit of a no-brainer, and gave us a day away from the little one

Which has bigger boot, the devil-fuel motor or the express barge?

Seats up, the devil-fuel barge, by a fair margin. The 5-series is no small car either

Looking it up has proven difficult - with the seats down it seems the 406 runs around 1700 litres of capacity with the bmw around 1500, but I think that's due to the bimmer gaining more from being roomier in the back seat area(*). With the seats up and luggage cover in place, I'd say the 406 has about 6" more between tailgate and seats, and at least 4" extra height. It also has a wider area near the tailgate. Height from luggage cover to ceiling is probably more too, although the 406 is narrower at the top. Both have similarly impressive boot widths and access.

All in all, they're both very capable barges! Could even slap on a mahoosive roof box if you really want to get silly

(*) Folding the 406 seats involves removing the headrests, lifting the bench, moving the front seats forward a bit for a while, then tucking the backs into the bench (while maintaining slack on the centre belt of course!). You then need to find somewhere for the parcel shelf/luggage cover. With the E39, you pull the luggage cover out, slot it in its mount on the front of the bench (handy!), then just drop the back seats flat.

[steve_earwig]

Looking it up has proven difficult

Yeah, I'm finding that, I usually head for Dishonest Johan or Parker's but it seems to be missing, perhaps they delete details off of older cars for space

The boot on that Senator I had was massive too, I can't remember for the life of me how high the lip was but I suspect it would have swallowed a lawnmower of two no problem. The yoyo only has a few inches more with the seats stowed than the Pug has with the seats up. Almost the same deal with the headrests as the Pug, they clear the front seats but you have to move the seats forwards a bit and they roll all the way vertical but have lots of dog unfriendly looking metalwork sticking out the bottom. Also, they have 6 clamps a side, the two foremost clamps are only used when the seats are stowed but it's very easy to miss a set and end up with them twisted half in, half out, that's when it gets annoying. The seats do come out for another 8" or so but then they don't fit in the glovebox. Damn heavy too.

Anyway, I was wondering about, the Pug probably takes a little more but you're only allowed a certain amount and any excess would be easy to spot if you had to fold the seats down to get it all in, while the Bimmer would swallow the lot and be a lot less conspicuous. Or did that change now?

[mjb]

Anyway, I was wondering about, the Pug probably takes a little more but you're only allowed a certain amount and any excess would be easy to spot if you had to fold the seats down to get it all in, while the Bimmer would swallow the lot and be a lot less conspicuous. Or did that change now?

We're talking about two small carrier bags (6x10x50g = 3Kg = a year's worth) of tobacco for £300 (uk shop price £1000). Three times the HMRC "guideline limits" (there's no actual limit for personal consumption, but they like scaremongering) as to what "personal consumption" should be but the woman in the customs kiosk wasn't too bothered by the amount. If I were still smoking 15/day, a year's worth of fags would be around the size of 2x 2500-sheet boxes of A4 paper, so a couple of cubic feet. Would have cost £1350 against a uk price of £2700 and would probably look iffy to customs. I'm saving ridiculous money not smoking!

Now, if we were doing a beer run back in the days when we could still drink heavily, it'd be a different matter given we used to take advantage of cheap Stella at Tesco by cramming several hundred cans in the boot We'd need a Luton, especially as we drink bottled beer now

[Welly]

T'was actually foggy this morning, taken using my professionally* mounted and high quality* dash cam this morning:
It's not dark:

Still not dark:

That's a 30 sign:

No rear fog:

This one was a one-eyed monster but plus the front fogs for good measure:

Well done for the rear foggy but boo to the side-light man coming the other way:


I think those front fogs helped negotiate that dangerous mini-roundabout:


The centrally-mounted rear fog works well I think, that there Hyundai had one and so did an Audi Titty.

[steve_earwig]

my professionally* mounted and high quality* dash cam

You have a mobile phone gaffer taped to your passenger headrest?

Those first three make my eyes hurt just looking at them.

Trouble is there's not much you can do about it. Unless you chuck half bricks at them as they pass..

I suspect the police (doo doo doo, dah dah dah) won't do much about them as it's actually foggy and the law is preposterously vague:

Driving in adverse weather conditions (226 to 237)
226
You MUST use headlights when visibility is seriously reduced, generally when you cannot see for more than 100 metres (328 feet). You may also use front or rear fog lights but you MUST switch them off when visibility improves (see Rule 236)

236
You MUST NOT use front or rear fog lights unless visibility is seriously reduced (see Rule 226)

The Highway Cod says 100 meters for fog lights, which seems like it's confusticated over which lights it's talking about. Also, do you have to keep stopping your car and getting the tape measure out of the glove box? One thing I did come across while I was a-googling was this on Pistonheads:

The Highway Code does indeed confirm 100 metres, it doesn't specify if that's front or rear so I assume it's both. A good rule of thumb is to use them if you need to (or are close to having to) reduce speed because it's foggy. If you can drive at normal speed it's not foggy enough to use them.

(From here http://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?t=1094712 ) which seems eminently sensible and could probably do with being included in the Highway Clod. Morons will still ignore it thought. Plus there are plenty of idiots who don't slow their repmobiles down whatever happens.

[mjb]

My rule is if I think there's a chance of me being rear-ended, the rear foglamps go on (can't have rears without fronts). 100m visibility or not, I'm not the arsehole that keeps his foglamps on in bumper-to-bumper traffic

Still the case that I've only once come into a situation where front fogs help

[Welly]

In those quality* pictures my headlights are on (I don't get much choice in that anyway) but you can see that I didn't need the headlights to see where I was going, the headlights were needed so that others could see me coming. The front foggies serve NO PURPOSE they are designed to help the driver see in pea-soup conditions, in the dark, and pref with the headlights off as we've discussed before.

Nearly every other car this morning had the FFL on, morons all of them.

[Doggy]

Take a seat before reading this everyone.....

I actually used my foglights, briefly this morning.

In places the mist was thick enough to make using the rear fog advisable, (at least until someone's close enough behind you to see you regardless). I'm with mjb here - rear fog lights are to help avoid getting rear-ended, but shouldn't be left on to annoy anyone who is following at a sensible distance. Normally, this causes me a bit of a dilema, since you can't use the rear fog without the fronts, but since I didn't need the headlights to see by, I was OK with using the front fogs instead of headlights.

Needless to say, these freak conditions only lasted for a mile or two, after which I reverted to dipped headlights / no fogs / visualising a slow, painful death for all the other idiots who's fogs have now been activated for another 3 months.

Carry on.

[KozmoNaut]

I used my front fog lights today, and it wasn't even foggy out!

One of my dipped beams had burned out, and Danish traffic law allows us to use front fog lights as driving lights during the day, instead of the headlights. So headlights off, front fogs on and no one would ever know the dangerously illegal condition my car was in!

Now, I've never ever heard of anyone ever getting pulled over for a burned-out headlight, but I figured since I basically never use the fog lights, I should at least take the chance to get some use out of them.

I was also pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to change the headlight bulbs on a 406. Nothing like my parents' C5 where you have to remove the battery and/or the bumper to change the bulbs.

[Welly]

A late contender this morning, no fog, must have left them on from yesterday, then I saw another one-eyed car coming at me with TWO rear fogs blaring away from yesterday.

[willy wave]my Volvo turns everything off when you remove the key so you can't leave any fog lights on by mistake [/willy wave]



Note my excellent* headlights.

BTW if anyone wants me for freelance photography work please PM me.

[Doggy]

Meanwhile, a few leagues to the East, the fog, (and many motorists), were thicker than yesterday.

Today's prize goes to the dizzy cow I followed from Brigstock to Thrapston who had no lights on at all, (or so I thought). Finally overtook Penelope Pitprop's Corsa on the A14 - it did have DRL's on the front.

But who am I to criticise, maybe she fancies 44 tons of artic up her tailpipe?

[Welly]

They reckon a lot of people are doing that, they 'see' the DRL's reflecting from the back of the car in front, or a shop windah, and assume their lights are 'on' .... as in ALL of them I've seen it times, especially the super-bright DRL's they're almost as bright as headlights.

[trem1]

Also on the Astra i had last year the dashboard lights were on as well as the DRL's so it was quite easy to forget to turn your lights on

[OllieNZ]

I decided it was finally foggy enough to use mine this morning and found that I cant turn the rear fog on without the fronts is this typical with newer cars (307) ?