That got me😂😂

I do hope it's a case of Steve teasing people. Because the 'BMW turn signal installers are the people who feel most useless in the world' jokes have been around for a long time..

April Fool?

LMAO i laughed so hard when he said that

It's hilarious just how many people notice this pretty subtle sidenote :D There's a joke in german (and probably other languages as well): If you feel worthless and unimportant, think of the poor souls who put the turning signals on BMWs.

You missed the dig at Apple too.

@Audiocronic Are you a BMW driver?

"If it's really expensive to fix the bug, you could just ignore it, and they'll jump ship to android..."

@Audiocronic I'll forego the privilege of using an indicator if I could have a BMW

I just got a BMW, turns out people behave poorly to bmw drivers. The only way I can get out into traffic now is to fit the stereotype

The Android one too xD

Whoever came up with this stupid self driving car idea should be killed for stupidity. This is stupidest idea I have ever heard of.

@@seanleith5312 whoever came up with this humans driving cars idea should be killed for their stupidity. 1.35 million people are killed by human drivers each year.

@@MrFlarespeed Agree, at least the self-driving car employs some kind of logic

@@seanleith5312 Since we had cars, humans have been striving to be ever more stupid driving them

What I love is that it's a dig at both fanboys really

He would indicate them coming, but the camera is faulty, of course

Mitch Kovacs Lmao, noticed that too

Hmm. What's the sample size, Steve?

6:42 apple burn too XD

True tho

Till this point, I didn't know it was international "meme".

The phosfor idea is a really good one

PWM is fine if it's fast enough - a few kHz at least. But so often it's far, far slower and visible.

you are transferring the time information to the spacial domain. you should be proud

@@fayenotfaye probably not. he was basically saying that if you shake the light back and forth the flickering becomes visible because you are spreading out the flicker in space. kinda like the Doppler effect in a sense

@@fayenotfaye it is changing the wavelength, but not by compressing or stretching like Doppler. instead it is spreading out the time domain into the spatial domain, enough to shift the frequency into the visible range

Amber would certainly be better, but that would require stocking a different part; and at least the two functions are clearly separated. We have a similar situation here in New Zealand; where the preferred colour is amber, but it is legal to use a red turn signal or combine it with a brake signal (which must be red). Consequently, I often see truck trailers with a line of red lamps across the top and three red lamps on each of the bottom corners. These are wired in such a way that the dim filaments of all the lamps perform the tail light function, the bright filaments of the outermost bottom lamps and the three outermost top lamps are dedicated turn signals, the bright filaments of the second and third outermost bottom lamps are turn signals overridden by the brake signal, and the central top lamps are dedicated brake signals. If you encounter this system for the first time, it can be a real mission to figure out the truck driver's intentions; especially if you are queued behind it and are not looking at the top-mounted lamps. I may have even seen one variation that uses a brake signal overridden by a turn signal for the second outermost bottom lamps; but I'm not too sure about that. °°°°°°°°°°°°° I'm a truck! I have more | | lights than you, and I'm | | going to use them all in | | the most confusing way °°°______°°° permitted by the law!

@@BrendonGreenNZL I'm talking about a couple vehicles that have separate brake and turn lights, like the Infiniti QX50. I think the Infiniti uses amber, but there are other vehicles I can't remember that are red with red. They're obviously different parts and all they did to make the turns red was not use amber plastic. 😕 (A bunch of smaller crossovers from various brands jammed the turn signals into the bumper to comply with US laws that they're not allowed to be on moving bodywork, i.e. the hatch)

@@evilspoons Yep. It wouldn't cost any more to dye a plastic lens amber instead of red; just like it wouldn't cost significantly more to fit the aforementioned truck trailers with dedicated amber LED modules for the turn signals. The only advantage I can see of them being red is that the turn signals can be made more prominent when the truck is not also braking. As usual, though, style and form trumps safety and functionality.

RIGHT. Until we are willing to employ all of the possible fixes, we are acting way too dependent on technological solutions which will be never quite good enough. Put another way, how many deaths will be caused in the name of progress, trying to make the perfect driving system? I really think driving itself as a skill performed by humans needs to be here to stay.

Amber turn signals are ugly. I want my car to have red ones, safety be damned.

It not a joke im german and i see this every day, like literally! I always ask myself why the even got them when they never use it.

Who said he did one take?

i love your pfp

@uncletigger for a channel dedicated to explaining stuff, this was a perfect comment.

He makes some valid points. Very nice video indeed.

i was just about to comment this!

The yanks love their primitive, outdated and dangerous infrastructure. The whole country is like that. It's like travelling back in time!

@@Nilguiri So you're just going to ignore london, then?

​@@zenatsuryouichi Haha. Cool story. Nice try.

You make a good point! Actually the main thing is reliability I think.

Do you mean the average Corolla uses over 100kW of energy in the form of fuel? If the average car would need 100kW output at the wheels to just cruse at highway speed, there would be a lot of cars which could not even reach that speed then. So let's say a car has two H4 headlights which use 110 watts of electric energy. Because of the average efficiency of an automotive alternator (70%) and a gasoline engine (30%) you need about 500 watts worth of gasoline. That is about 50ml of gasoline used just for the headlights for one hour.

@Cody'sLab While your calculations for total energy usage are generally correct, the application is not... most of that wattage was likely converted directly from horsepower which is a mechanical form of energy used to physically move the car along... (not including losses to heat and friction) the electrical power generation takes a fraction of that mechanical energy and converts it to electrical and yes, efficiency in the electrical system means less power taken away from making the car move. especially since Mantas Vaitkus pointed out the further losses in efficiency above. Just something to consider..

Though I love incandescent bulbs & Cody's channel, the switch to LEDs is probably more due to manufacturing, not energy efficiency. Yes, LEDs use a lot less power for light output, but its semiconductor production costs, and the economy of scale, that now favors LEDs. And its ultimately the $$$ that car makers are looking at. I'm a big color organ freak, and incandescent output vs input power are friendlier to deal with, with incandescents. An incandescent at 10% max power, will barely glow, while an LED at 10% (of its own max rating) will still be pretty bright to the human eye. For pure illumination, that's not an issue, but in color organs, and other dimming applications, it can be a real pain ! Plus a barely glowing incandescent filament is a thing of beauty, where a barely lit LED is just .. eh.

@@michaelmoorrees3585 couldn't agree more :) I'm color organ freak too!

I can confirm that. And I hate it. Especially when driving at night. Those flickering red lights are very annoying and disturbing. At least for me. The frequency should be mandatory at least in tens of kilohertz, ranging from 30 kHz to 40 kHz at least. Then I would not mind. And cameras would not mind either. As during each captured frame, the light would be clearly recorded.

@@erikziak1249 'Strobing' at such a rate would basically negate the entire reason they do that to begin with. It's called PWM (Pulse Width Modulation), not "strobing". It's how a lot of circuits handle supplying a smaller overall voltage to a lamp, which can save on energy. The lower your rate, the more energy is saved during the off time. This lengthens the life of the diodes, and isn't particularly noticeable to the average person. You can see it if you move your eyes, yes, but the lights generally aren't bright enough to leave a lasting mark on your retina (like the sun does). So, dude, shut the fuck up. It's not hindering your existence

@Tyler jeeze mate calm down lol you're both right; PWM works by strobing so the terminology is same diff we all know what he meant.. And some people (myself included) have hyper photosensitivity or something where we see lights differently than most - I do a lot of Arduino projects with PWM LEDs and I always have to set the pulse duration much shorter than typical just to make it bearable to work with... I see it in cars, LED room lights, alarm clocks, microwave displays... Sometimes useful but usually just annoying so I agree with Lift Pizzas lol

@@davisdiercks It doesn't work BY strobing. The strobing is a product of it's function. PWM is used in applications where lights aren't even involved in the first place. So no, it doesn't work "by strobing"

@@tylergarza8695 oh my gosh is this seriously worth arguing over 😂 Oxford definition of "strobe: verb. flash intermittently" So no obviously PWM itself is not strobing, as it could be applied to anything like motors, speakers, transistors, etc, but in this specific application the PWM causes the LED by definition to strobe. Also to my original point: calm down we're all just chilling here there's enough crap going on as it is without people like you seeking destructive attention

Please, what "burns" mean in this context? Is it like joke/insult? English is not my first language.

@@dronillon2578 yes

@@dronillon2578, burn is an insult in this context. examples from the video: - BMW drivers not indicating - users having problems with (presumably apple) phones and moving to android

@@dronillon2578 yes yes 🍄🍄

@@senorVAC1, Lets ask Steve what he was referring to. shouts* Hey Steve, what were you referring to?

What is your proposed alternative? You can't reduce the current because of threshold voltage. If you dimm the current the different colors inside the white LEDs would dimm unevenly and you would get green front lights. Unless you control the different colors individually, which would be way more expensive as you would not only need a more complex dimmer but also LEDs where every color CAN be controlled individually.

@@iamcurious9541 alternative? use LEDs with different power levels for each task, just like it was done with incandescent/halogen bulbs: tail light→low-power LEDs, brake light→high-power LEDs

An alternative could be a random shutter opening. On average it would pick up the intended led brightness, it would not over expose the camera sensor and it wont sync up with any pulse modulated light source

//don't delete this tomato. I don't know why but removing it causes the level to break.

Seconded.

Volvo’s are the worst. Very distracting when I’m driving.

Or they could keep the LEDs continuously on and control the brightness by varying the current. It's just slightly more expensive but so much nicer to look at.

Thirded.

Fourthed. My spouse thinks I am mad because I can see cars' lights flickering.

You guys watched to the end of the video right?

@@bosstowndynamics5488 Yep, I think that makes sense The OP's idea would be prone to a similar issue though

Or, you know, just use colour coded lights for different signals. Like amber for turning and red for braking.

@@Anankin12 This also requires changing the environment and making sure all cars do that.

@@bosstowndynamics5488 how hard would it be to make the cameras just detect the actual event of the object decelerating/stopping? you read my mind with the 2 camera solution there

N L r/woooosh

Moving your coffee cup from the kitchen counter to your computer workstation... :D

Current problems

Your commute is the trip you take to, and from your work.

@@buddyclem7328 : Did you duck, or was that one just flying too high?

Ed Pankeko he’s not wrong

The drivers in the U.S. are narcissistic idiots.

@@UltraGamma25 The drivers in the U.K. all have bad teeth

@@pauldzim I don't live in the U.K. so I don't know.

@@UltraGamma25 Tell me where they are *NOT* narcissistic idiots, because I want to move there

There is a solution but car manufacturers are greedy.

Pretty much the same reason the US stuck with those god awful red turn signal. I mean they're not really a problem... most of the time.

Fundamentally problems are rarely solved, they're mitigated.

This seems to rely on the assumption that there is exactly one such problem, and I don’t see a reason to assume that?

@@drdca8263 Actually, it seems to rely on the assumption that humans solve all problems, or at least very very rarely fail to solve a problem, which is simply not true. In fact, problems are scarcely solved at all.

Bastian Springer Only a very small percentage of people will understand what you are talking about.

@@mikeuk1927 😂👍🏻

???

@@EggBastion you're seemingly not one of them

@@EggBastion Apple make bad phones and crap software, is basically the point.

My exact same experience, except for the motorcyle part: It also happens on cars with a slightly shaky/vibrating centre mirror.

Same issue with my AMOLED phone at night when driving on a bumpy road. The screen strobes to lower the perceived brightness and text becomes unreadable.

Top nerdiness level reached.

"Milud, the defendant says that he has had no issues driving and that he has a clean driving history. But I present to you this online post posted by him on the 3rd on March this year in the comments section of a popular video sharing website, KZfaq. In this post he clearly states he is at a reduced driving capacity due to poor vision. Mr. Seiden, do you deny that this is you that has posted this comment?"

Yes in deed, it is very annoying, and I hate it. Manufacturers should use much higher frequency for the PWM generator.

Volvo particularly bad I find.

@Troll King Edited

@@betabenja Alternatively, "On April 2, 2020, Mr. Seiden posted a comment about his problems with the brake lights of Cadillac SUVs, and numerous other people replied indicating they have similar problems with this issue as well. Your Honor, we'd like to make this lawsuit a class-action suit, and increase our request for damages to $250,000,000."

Yes and standard cars for everyone in the world, so no more problems like this will happen. It's radical, but it can saves lives.

That would be ideal but then you'd have people installing cheap lights from China (assuming things go back to how they were not long ago) and having, or causing, accidents.

My TV regulate brightness with PWM. At low brightness i see multiple images when i look around the screen. Especially on subtitles, it's like stairs of text everywhere. Backlight should be solid light !

That's exactly the idea I had while watching the video! Surely 2 cameras with slightly different frame rates could be compared to determine really quickly and easily what the light is actually doing.

But then you are left with trying to analyze two different videos of the same object. Which one do you believe?

@@teddyruxpin3811 You don't use either. You use the knowledge gained from both and combine it to decide a most likely scenario. Or if you could find a combination of parameters that allow you to theoretically rule out all other possibilities, then you are able to settle on one.

You could also use multiple sample rates on one camera if the sensor had a wide enough sensitivity range and throughput to "see" all pixels at once.

I've heard Tesla's doing something like that. They have two chips on board, linked with their own power supply and fed by their own set of cameras. In the end their conclusions are compared. I'm unsure what happens when they drastically differ though.

its because of the heat

It's made out of socks and favourite jumpers.

The short version is that the tube is heated up while being stretched and then cooled in that stretched position, when you heat it back up it shrinks back to the original diameter

Actually, shrinking the heat shrink doesn't provide enough evidence. Heat shrink is the process of storing a low-temperature compound as a high-temperature solution in a highly porous structure (called a porous membrane). To see how this works, take a baseball bat and light the end on fire.

Maybe it doesn't shrink, and just loses it's stretch instead. Like a soft drinks bottle made from PET.

A lot of those systems acutally flicker in my peripheral vision. It is super annoying.

Is that an Italian suppository?

Just go over the audible range. LEDs can be driven with 100khz PWM no problem. But why not ditch the PWM entirely? There is no need to vary the Brightness of the Lights (If you want cool effects you can still have the maximum brightness be full on, no PWM).

@@Ultrazaubererger Higher switching frequencies require more specialized components to reduce losses. The transition from off to on and on to off is where most of the losses come from. So you want as few of these transitions as possible, especially when driving a whole array of high power LEDs. If you don't vary the brightness then how do you differentiate between tail lights and brake lights?

@@superdau True but 100KHZ is not that high, I guess it would not be a problem at all. Might cost 0,1$ extra. "differentiate between tail lights and brake lights" Just make two lights like it was before with incandescent. Yes, even more cost, but cars are fucking expensive so it shouldn't matter. Also this is a matter of safety.* An extra 100$ or even 1000$ should not matter. *Flickering lights can be very distracting in your peripheral vision, I often confuse them for emergency vehicles and almost start braking before I notice its just a normal car. This might loose me the second I need to see a child run onto the street or whatever.

Ok we could standerdize framerates in car LEDs and don need to put even more expendive tech in it

Or you could use the most basic of common sense. I here your comment repeatedly, it is such hand-holding dribble. If you can't tell the difference between a flashing red light and a bright steady light then you shouldn't be driving period. There isn't any ambiguity. Red bright steady light = brake, Red flashing light = turn.

In my view you should be paying attention to the actions of other cars, not their indications. While indications can be helpful they should never be relied on. Think of firearms, safety are useful, but should never be relied on. When I took my license test I forgot to engage the safety, but only 1% was deducted because it should never be trusted.

@@TheOwenMajor you do realize that the amber is in addition to the flashing right? Do you have objections to seatbelts, antilock brakes and airbags as well?

Oh my gosh bro you just made me understand something. Ok so I've been working on my car for a few days now and I have a problem with a solenoid that controls fluid pressure inside the transmission. I've been using a standard multimeter to test the connection between the ECU and the connector I've been getting 12v for each connector in the series that leads to this solenoid. I've been on a coupe car forums asking questions and one guy said I need an rms capable meter because the solenoid uses a PWM VOLTAGE which was complete gibberish to me until this video along with your comment just helped me out a lot thank you Piers

There is nothing wrong with the PWM, the problem is cost cutting. All these manufacturers are ignoring the output filter between the PWM driver and the LED to save a few cents. Some theory around this: www.allaboutcircuits.com/technical-articles/low-pass-filter-a-pwm-signal-into-an-analog-voltage/

Lights are PWM because heat becomes a serious problem when operating devices in the linear region. Mosfet transistors have very little resistance when full on, so they don't dissipate much heat even when controlling large currents. If you were to bias it on at 50%, you'd melt the mosfet. Maybe what you need to do is put a low pass filter after the mosfet to smooth out the PWM to a lower average voltage.

@@stargazer7644 right. And LEDs have a very limited range of current limiting. They are not resistive, they are diodes. And even samples all in the same lot, they dim at very different currents. PWM is the only solution to LEDs. btw you would use bipolar for current limiting, not mosfets. We only filter to limit spurious emissions. You CAN hybridize current/pwm, but NOT on a diode. The most reasonable solution is to just increase the frequency to beyond what anybody would use on cameras -- 50K. Make it a law!

or require multi-phase multi-bank LED arrays so that there's no visible flicker?

I would imagine that you could have one camera using a longer shutter speed to read turn signals, etc. while another camera is used to read road signs.

As far as I'm aware, those are for mains AC frequency (ie 50/60hz depending where you are), and work by syncing up the shutter speed of the camera with the appropriate frequency. Much harder to do that when the frequency is totally arbitrary and could change at any moment, e.g. a gentle fade in/fade out with an LED which is actually a series of pwm frequencies

Edward Hobbs i wonder if similar algorithms to that used with autofocus could be used to calculate the amount of “flicker” seen in an image and just adjust the camera frame rate accordingly. Try a couple nearby frame rates -> get the gradient for the amount of flicker between those frequencies -> then perform gradient descent to determine the optimal frame rate to reduce flicker

Those are targeted towards A/C powerline electrical frequency flickering 50/60hz. LED's have variable frequency PWM depending on the LED controller.

As others have pointed out, this done by syncing the shutter speed and/or framerate and therefore it can only be done for the AC grid I'll give one more reason: even if there were more than these two options, what would it help if you're trying to monitor multiple cars simultaneously? You would need different speeds for different parts of the image...

Ain't capacitors stupidly fragile?

Problem is that there are already a lot of these cars on the road, so even if you made this change to new cars, AI/self driving cars would still have to deal with the problem for years to come.

rgbii this isn’t really a suggestion for a fix. It’s more of a question of why this was never done as it doesn’t really increase the cost and makes the car more photogenic

@@Anankin12 depends on the capacitor tech. But you can also use inductors. And they are very resilient.

What is the need to dim the lights anyway? You want the brightest lights, why would you want to dim them?

I'd also make it mandatory to have an extra pair on the side mirrors. Those really improve visibility.

You managed to find another of the differences between US and EU regulations. In the EU you have to have side indicators but in the US you only need them at the front and back.

In the EU, where daytime running lights may interfere with indicators (i.e in the same lamp unit) the daytime running lamp turns off while the indicator operates. At night the issue is much less of a problem.

@@hebl47 Except everyone stopped putting the side door/fender lights on when the mirror lights became cool.... Which means you can't see them from behind the car. There's literally 3/4 of the car length that's an indicator blind spot. Bizarre how we allow that one.

@@tin2001 And who said you'd ONLY put them there? It's just one additional spot.

The problem is that these lights are already out in the wild. Even if you made manufacturers pay for replacing the lights, you can't enforce it because police wouldn't be able to see the flicker, and many people simply wouldn't bring their car in for what they consider a "minor issue".

For real. The unregulated LED headight market is awful, it gives a bad name to LEDs and legitimate technology. They should use linear or properly regulated drivers rather than resorting to PWM.

Pwm can be easily filtered, maintaining effeciency with same result as a linear regulator

@@daviXD18 indeed. Kinda scary the op thought process lol.

It really annoys me too... I though I was the only one...

We need the *FULL BRIDGE RECTIFIER™*

The eye's refresh rate isnt comparable to digital refresh rate at all.

@@nugget6635 This is true, and why I put "refresh" in quotes. It is, however, true that for a given spot on your retina, a changing signal takes 40ms longer than for example, a changing sound, or a changing touch, to be registered by the brain. Setup a circuit that randomly flashes an LED and have a person react by hitting a button, and time the response. It will ALWAYS be slower than a sound-based reaction. This is due to physical limitations in the makeup of the retina rods and cones, and turning light into electrical impulses in the back of our eye.

​@@catsnorkel That's why I put it in quotes, you goober. To the lay person it is very comparable. Generally speaking, you cannot see (brain included in this system) changes faster than x Hz, which is the whole reason why engineers modulate the LEDs, why TVs work, and how mp4s work on this very site you're on.

BMW drivers confuse people driving cars...

Xmass tree RGB LED decoration on wheels :-/