Automobile rear light warning display

Details Automobile rear light warning display Automobile rear light warning display

2000-08-07

2001-06-05

Hofsass, Jeffery (Department: 2632)

Communications: electrical

Land vehicle alarms or indicators

External alarm or indicator of movement

C340S464000, C340S479000

Reexamination Certificate

active

06243008

ABSTRACT:

FIELD OF THE INVENTION
This invention relates to the safety of automobile design, in general, and to increasing automobile safety through the design of its light warning displays, in particular.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
As is well known, and understood, recent years have witnessed many advances in the lighting displays of automobiles to enhance safety of operation. One such development, for example, concerns the automatic turning on of the car's head lights once the ignition is turned on and the vehicle put in gear, while a second adds lights to the back end of the automobile to illuminate when the car is shifted into reverse. A third advance adds a system of fog lights to the array of high and low beam head lights and parking lights at the front end of the car. Color coding is frequently also utilized to distinguish turn signal lights from tail and stop lights, for example, and a high mounted stop light has been added as a display at the rear windshield—commonly, at the eye level of the driver of a following vehicle. Thoughts have even been given to modifying the stop light construction in an attempt to distinguish a driver applying his/her brakes “hard”, as in an emergency situation, as compared to tapping the brakes lightly or “soft”, when just slowing down.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
As will be appreciated, however, rear end automobile accidents continue to occur, oftentimes with devastating results. Illustrative of this was a recent reporting of a car being stopped before a railroad crossing, only to be struck from behind in a manner propelling it forward onto the tracks in the path of an oncoming freight train, resulting in the deaths of all occupants of the automobile.
In view of this, and as will become clear from a consideration of the following description, the present invention extends this area of light warning automotive safety by modifying the high mounted stop light construction to automatically pulse on-and-off at spaced time intervals once the vehicle's speed falls below a predetermined threshold. In accordance with a preferred embodiment, such display automatically pulses once the speed falls below 5 miles per hour—and continues even while the vehicle slows to a complete stop, as long as its engine continues running. Only when the automobile speeds up beyond such predetermined level does the high mounted stop light pulsing disappear. In other words, in the preferred embodiment of the invention, depressing the brake pedal produces the usual “red” stop light and high mounted stop light display, until the vehicle slows below 5 miles per hour, when the high mounted stop light display automatically is converted to its pulsing mode. In accordance with such preferred embodiment, the pulsing can be selected at a rate in excess of four (4) pulses per second, as providing a stroboscopic effect—while in a second embodiment, to call further attention to the slowing automobile, the strobing could be at a different color than the “red” displayed when applying the brakes at speeds above the threshold.
As will be appreciated, the overall effect is to call immediate attention to the driver of a following vehicle that the automobile equipped with the invention has slowed below the 5 mile per hour threshold, or below whatever threshold is selected by the automobile manufacturer, or has stopped—as, for example, at a traffic light. Analysis has shown that following drivers frequently become distracted and visualize a stop light as being nothing more than an additional taillight, misreading the information of the applied brake, and continuing forward. As will be readily appreciated then, the pulsing effect available with the high mounted stop light of the invention serves as an enhanced alternative to techniques used by some stopped drivers of tapping the brake to provide an alert to an oncoming vehicle that a full stop has, in fact, occurred.


REFERENCES:
patent: 4983953 (1991-01-01), Page
patent: 5119067 (1992-06-01), Adell
patent: 5345218 (1994-09-01), Woods et al.

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