We’ve just wrapped up another massive Galpin Car Show with a fantastic Autopian section (lots more on this to come), and I’m not going to lie: I’m pretty exhausted. In fact, I came to my room with the intention of writing up a Cold Start, then made the amateur’s error of laying on the bed, just for a moment, at which point the world went black and I bolted upright hours later, yet another victim of a drive-by sleepinating. But Cold still gotta Start, so let me share with you something unusual I noticed at the show!
I’m sure the image up above there gives it all away, pretty noticeably. It’s that David Bowie-style mismatched-eyes look sported by that ’66 Beetle. I’m bringing it to your attention because for whatever reason, I don’t believe I’ve ever encountered a car at a car show, or, really, in any other context, that deliberately used mismatched headlamp colors. That sort of surprises me!
I suppose I’ve seen mismatched, asymmetrical lighting on show rods and very radical sorts of builds like the famous Orbitron, of course:
…but those are special cases. I mean for an otherwise production-type car, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone make the simple modification to have one side with a conventional white headlamp and one side with a Selective Yellow headlamp.
Also, if you’re not familiar with Selective Yellow, that’s what headlamp geeks call those yellow lights that were used by the French from sometime around WWII to 1993. Allegedly, these yellow lights work better in the fog (and, I guess, smog) by removing the shorter blue/violet wavelengths of light, which causes less glare and other light-casting side effects like dazzling and bouncing back.
I’m not sure if these claims have ever really been proven to be true, but yellow foglamps are definitely popular, and I use some on my Pao and I’ll admit, I do like the light they cast.
Anyway, they’re not exactly legal in California, from what I can tell, which still requires just white light for forward-facing lamps, unless they’re turn indicators, in which case they must be amber.
As far as having two lights with mismatched colors, I’m not so sure there is any law against it, because California law only really allows one color anyway. But what if you had a bluish-tinted white light from an LED-type headlamp and a more yellow-cast white light from a halogen lamp on the same car? I think that’s legal enough?
I wonder what the effect is like when driving down a dark road in this lovely little ’66 Beetle with it’s mismatched lights. I bet it’s not all that bad, really. Maybe it’s even a little bit better, if we believe the claims of the Selective Yellow lobby?
I’m still sort of surprised at both how I’ve never seen this before, and how I kinda like it? I guess I should be thankful for these moments of self-discovery, so, thanks, David Boweetle.
The word you are looking for is heterochromia. Surprised that you didn’t use it given your penchant for choosing the perfect words to describe the most obscure things and such.
French selective yellow does reduce the output greatly. I’ve driven in France a several times before prior to the 1993 “bleaching”. I was tired of French drivers thinking I had the high beam then flashing at me. I flashed them back.
Why France chose the selective yellow is something the readers at Curbside Classic have been waiting for a several years for Daniel Stern who kept teasing us about his “upcoming” article on this French idiosyncrasy that probably never comes. Perhaps this video would be satisfactory…
I considered it with my last car, it had a vinyl decal under the passenger side headlight to match the eye tattoo and logo from the game Mirror’s Edge. I always considered blacking out (or at least darkening) that headlight to further cement the effect. Never got around to it and probably for the better.
My puppy has Heterochromia. (two different eye colors) She’s adorable on one side and ghostly looking with a nearly white-blue eye on the other. It’s like an eye-mullet that swapped business/party for cute/scary.
The French did have mandatory yellow headlights from the 30’s (when they mandated yellow lights to be able to distinguish French military vehicles from ennemy ones, of all things) to 1993 when Euro rules got them back to sanity.
Yellow is indeed better for fog, but there’s yellow foglights for that, and nothing prevents people from having yellow foglights with white headlights.
Yellow headlights had as only plus the fact that they blinded oncoming vehicles less, at the cost of illuminating less as well. It also had the side bonus of making yellow lightbulbs that would illuminate almost as well as the white ones a unique, very French, and very expensive market. Norma, to not name them. Giving the user the choice between very expensive yellow bulbs that illuminated decently well (they were some complex for their time iodine fingermagingers) and crappy ones.
The same circus was played with HID headlights, when German manufacturers had to hold them on the French market for several years (till 1995), because they were forbidden, till Valeo released their own version – then they suddenly became ok.
I have a brown eye and a blue eye and just like this Beetle I didn’t come from the factory that way.
I have two different headlights in the 356: One slightly yellowlish due to not much bang in the 6 volt system, and one is slightly more yellowish due to the same AND a bad earth connection.
As a kid we moved to Switzerland. Not exactly my fondest childhood memories. Not exactly a very friendly place. Nearly every weekend we get out of the country and drive our VW Squareback elsewhere, someplace with food that didn’t excite dogs. This ment a lot of time on Autobahns and Autostradas or Autoroutes. Rains a lot in Europe, coming from SoCal it seemed to be pretty much all the time from my perspective. I found the yellow lights nauseating in the rain. There also seemed to be a correlation between jerk factor and light color, with yellow showing heavily on the jerk side of the graph. So you start to put together, the yellow color in the rain causing nausea, the tendency to be jerks and the final nail in the coffin in my opinion of jerk/driver/unpleasant association: where they tended to be dominate. Yes there are some countries that are also a bit jerkier than others and…they like yellow lights.
They seem to have lost their way with the headlights. If only they would have some sort of Bowie-approved, lighting-based way to direct them…
Aw, “David Boweetle.” The Bowie stan here approves.
I always thought of selective yellow headlights as Citroen Citrine. There is some support for the argument that reducing the blue end of the spectrum in lighting results in less scattered light, less dazzle, and somewhat sharper vision (for humans, anyway) which is why driving glasses tend to have amber lenses, but whether those marginal gains offset the reduced throw distances of yellow lights is questionable. Looks cool though.
So with the Orbitron do the RGB lights mix to project a usefully white region in the center? I’d love to see what that looks like from inside the car.
If you showed any normal person those two beetles parked side by side they would definitely comment on the one with the human skeleton on it, and not the one halfway through a headlight tinting job.
We should use this as a test image for Autopians.
That’s just Halloween decorations.
One of the useless bits of trivia stuck in my head is that David Bowie’s eyes are the same color are both the same color. One of his pupils was permanently dilated due to an injury, which compresses the tissue of the iris. The combination made it appear darker than the normally functioning eye.
Yep! The actual condition of having two differently colored irises is called heterochromia. I knew a lady in high school that had one green eye and one blue-and-green eye.
a very groovy mutation
My Mom had this as well.