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Seeking amber
- Thread starter DiyNutJob
- Start date
Go on then, explain.Oh I think it'll be pretty obvious...
Because in order to get its type approval (and thus, it's "e" or "E" mark), It will have to go through these tests:
The minute you make any modification to it, you make it different to what was tested, so whatever approval it held, is no longer valid.
Dobbing some random shade of amber paint on it, won't look like a factory-applied coating any more than your efforts at painting the rest of the car did.
The first page shows various coloured bulbs, which one did I paint?
None of 'em but whatever anyone says, you’ll say they were wrong anyway.
You are wrong. How do you know I didn't paint one?
You really think, that if it came to an accident big enough for the investigators to be bothered about bulb colour, that they'd be fobbed-off with a low-res photo of the bulb from an internet forum???!
No runs in the paint, no over spray on the metal bits, no 30 page thread on painting just one bulb. Easy.
It just means I am skilled at painting bulbs. So, you can't tell which I painted?
Don't try to change the subject. Which one did I paint, o'investigtor?You really think, that if it came to an accident big enough for the investigators to be bothered about bulb colour, that they'd be fobbed-off with a low-res photo of the bulb from an internet forum???!
I don't know whether you're a bit "hard of reading", "hard of thinking", or maybe both, but as I've already said, in an accident serious enough to warrant such an investigation, no investigator would ask you to e-mail them a low-res photo and make the call based on that. They'd pull the bulb out of the car, stick it on a test rig and see if it matched the characteristics of the one in the test report. I know you're pretty naive but nobody would just "look" at it (never mind a photo of it!) and take that decision.
Would they really check the shade of amber on a bulb even in the most serious of accidents? Chances are, the bulbs will be damaged or broken. What about a non-working bulb. Should we stop every 5 metres for a bulb check? What about checking all bulbs for 'compliance' when we first acquire a new car in case some master criminal has fitted a non compliant bulb sometime in the vehicles past. Same applies to every other part on the car. Brakes? Steering joints? Nah!
Sometimes, you just have to engage common sense!
The typical small shop that the insurer use for assessing accident damage/compliance wouldn't have this rig, though. Since there is E-mark on the bulb, they'd pass it without a second thought.
Depends how serious and whether an investigator thought it might be material to the case or not. If the cost of the claim is high enough, the resource will be made available. Such cases are extremely rare of course, but that's a different question. Nutjob (characteristically) flip-flops between claiming that "non-genuine parts will invalidate your insurance" one minute and "nah - who's ever gonna find out?" the next. I'm not sure he understand the difference between "genuine" parts and "type approved" parts. They're different things, though there can be overlap). Bulbs have type approval requirements to meet. Steering joints don't. Hence you won't find an "e" or "E" number on a (say) track rod end.
To answer your specific question about non-working bulbs, there's a difference between a bulb that was manufactured out of compliance with its type approval, a bulb that has been illegally modified since its manufacture, and a bulb that has reached the end of its life and has stopped working. The law would treat each of them differently.
Sure, there's the possibility that the bulb will have been smashed in the accident, but a smaller possibility that both of them will have been - plus, of course, amber-coloured broken glass isn't that hard to find at the crash site. They won't need much of it to test the coating. If they can find DNA evidence in crashed cars, they can sure as hell find a bit of broken bulb!