Aerostich Mini-LED Lights

“Red ones are of course very good at the back, but it’s the white ones that seem to make the real difference when mounted right next to any low beam headlight.”

Not for the added lumens…but because of how they add a unique visual irregularity which helps oncoming traffic notice you better, which means less chance of an oncoming vehicle ‘left turn’ accident. The scenarios where some zoned-out driver suddenly makes a left turn directly into you. Highest collision risk, statistically. By far.

I accidentally discovered this ‘irregular headlight beam shape’ benefit many years ago because back then all now-vintage BMW ‘airhead’ charging systems weren’t powerful enough to simultaneously charge the battery, run heated grips, heated gear, heated saddles, add more powerful headlights plus any audio farkles and other electrical gadgets.

That problem was solved when charging system upgrade kits became available, but such kits were expensive…so when the first HID headlight bulbs also became available at around the same time, it seemed like they might provide another option which would A) cost less and B) kill two birds with one stone: a brighter headlight beam requiring about half the power of the standard halogen bulb.

Except those HID’s were only a single beam, so arranging the needed hi beam-low beam combination would require a small added driving light. Proceeding with that idea I modified the old BMW airhead’s running light socket (located inside the headlight, on the reflector, just below the main bulb) so it would accept a 12v 20w halogen bulb. I’d hoped this alone might serve as a useful low beam but as feared the resulting light pattern added little direct roadway illumination. It’s odd beam sure looked strange to oncoming drivers, though. A separate 35w halogen driving light was added to the low-beam circuit which (when combined with the unusual 20w ‘running light’) provided just enough overall low-beam for most night riding situations.

What appeared before daytime oncoming traffic with this setup was this strange looking dual-bulb 20w + 35w beam. The irregular-shaped 55w combination low beam, with a blazing-bright 35 watt HID high beam. This nice homemade two-bulb low beam provided a very useful unanticipated additional benefit. During the day, oncoming traffic noticed my bike a lot better. That’s sure how it felt.

Cognitive science research shows that unexpected visual irregularities of any kind stand out and catch people’s attention. This homemade irregular low beam setup did exactly that. When you add one of these bright little 10w white LED’s somewhere near the standard low-beam headlight on your motorcycle, maybe at about a two or four-o’clock position, the two bulbs combined will project an offset illumination effect toward approaching traffic -- without being annoying, glaring or flashing. Just tap or splice one into your bike’s low beam headlight circuit and you’ll see.

PS - Mr. Subjective…Three footnotes

1. One of those improved BMW airhead charging system upgrade kits went on this bike back at about the same time as this homemade headlight conversion (within a year), which meant both lower overall demand and more output. We don’t sell these upgrade kits but if you ride an old airhead, I recommended them. The one I purchased and installed was the first it it’s kind, from a company called Motorrad Electrk. Several other types are also available now. The Motorrad Electrik kit mentioned here always worked perfectly, with over 100k miles since installation.
2. HID bulb technology was so new at the time of this story that road users were literally startled by their output. Testing this new setup on the first or second long dark highway ride I remember slowly coming up behind a car just driving along minding it own business…it was an empty dark highway and there were no other cars around. I hit the HID bulb in the middle of the 7” reflector. Even though I was still maybe 150 feet back, the entire inside of this car suddenly was lit up like the cab of Richard Dreyfus’s utility service truck in the movie ‘Close Encounters’, and that innocent driver visibly flinched, startled and wondering what had just happened. I was just as surprised at this level of illumination as he was. From that moment onward I became very careful with this wonderful new HID high beam.
3. Five or six years after developing this funny offset-combination low-beam headlight for this bike the BMW company introduced an all-new series of GS models with radical-looking (and now iconic) asymmetric headlights. It sure looked a lot like what was on my old GS 80. And since I’d never elsewhere seen a setup like mine on any other bike, I silently wondered where BMW’s design inspiration came from. What they had done didn’t provide the same visually irregular asymmetric beam effect of my three-bulb 20w/35w-low/HID-high setup, but sure looked neat. And familiar. l’ll always wonder if someone from BMW may have noticed my bike’s headlight setup somewhere…perhaps at a BMW motorcycle rally(?). It’s almost certainly just a coincidence…but because over the years BMW did adopt few of Aerostich’s ideas about textile riders gear, who knows?

"Several years ago, on a motorcycle group tour, one of the riders had driving lights with amber lenses (or clip-on covers). I ask him why? And this is what he told me:

"He lives in medium sized town in central California and is friends with several motorcycle policemen, thru a motorcycle club. The officers were having trouble with “pull-outs”, motorists pulling out in front of them because they had not seen the motorcycle. So they added two bright driving lights, mounted in a large triangle. This helped a lot, greatly reducing the frequency of pull-outs, but not all of them. They then added amber lenses to the driving lights. This did the trick, virtually zero pull-outs.

"I have had amber clip-on covers on my driving lights for the last two years and no pull-outs, but I’m not a good test subject; I live in and visit small towns but do most of my miles on secondary roads. However, I often notice vehicles move like they are starting to pull out and then stop and wait for me to go by."

-- Dan N, 2020

How To: Amber colored plastic films are available at craft stores, and coating the lens of these lights with amber or orange nail polish works, too.

-- Mr. Subjective

"There’s a debate about whether or not cyclists should use flashing lights due to the potential effect on people with photosensitive epilepsy, which is particularly triggered by deep-red colors, like taillights. The issue is serious, albeit not common. Active epilepsy of all forms is present in about 3.4 million people in the U.S.—1.2 percent of the population—and sometimes necessitates driving restrictions. Photosensitive epilepsy is rarer still: EEG data suggests that as few as 100,000 Americans have it. But the Epilepsy Foundation cautions that it may be underdiagnosed, with a real figure as high as 800,000. These peoples’ sensitivity to bike lights is real and the potential consequences are serious. The Epilepsy Foundation recommends that to avoid triggering seizures, strobe frequency should be no more than three flashes a second."

-- From Outsideonline.com