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This is the full transcript for season 7, episode 1 — Tail lights: Smart signals — of the Quartz Obsession podcast.
Gabriela Riccardi: If you drive, you’ve probably seen thousands, maybe millions of them. Spent hours in traffic staring straight at them. But what do you really know about tail lights? Buckle up, listeners, because today’s episode is one bumpy ride. From the wrecks, to the riots, to a golden age and beyond. Jason, on a scale of one to 60 miles per hour, how obsessed would you say that you are with tail lights?
Jason Torchinsky: Oh, that would be at least a 120 miles per hour. Fiercely, fiercely obsessed with tail lights.
Gabriela: I’m Gabriela Riccardi, the host of Quartz Obsession, Season 7, where we’re taking a closer look at the technologies and ideas that define our lives. And today I’m talking to Jason Torchinsky, who co-founded car culture website The Autopian.
He is deeply, and may I say a little bit too deeply, obsessed with tail lights.
So Jason, the average person might think that tail lights are maybe a little boring or standard. They provide a level of safety, yeah, but to most people they’re just light bulbs for your bumper that you have to replace before you get a ticket. Could you take us back though to 1916? It’s Augusta, Kansas, and tail lights are having a bit of a moment among the city’s denizens.
Jason: You’re referring clearly to the tail light riot of Augusta, Kansas in 1916, because this is the only time in Western letters and human history that’s been recorded of a riot caused by tail lights. I’ll probably explain how this happened, because this was a flat out riot. There were injuries and people and property destruction and all kinds of madness.
It was caused because there was this little town in Kansas. And they had crappy roads that would bounce your car around. And the most common kinds of tail lights you’d find in this era in 1916, early in the mass distribution of cars, were oil-based tail lights. They weren’t electric at this point. They were an oil lantern with a red lens, usually there’s only one of them on the rear of a car. And if you’ve ever done anything with an oil lamp, you know, you can bounce around, it will put it out. They called it “jarring out.” So the oil would splash around. It would maybe splash on the wick and the tail light would go out. So. The local cops, they knew that the roads were bad and they knew people’s tail lights would jar out.
So all these little old Model T’s would be trundling down the road. They’d bounce around. The tail lights would go out and the cops would leap in and give them an expensive ticket. And the cops were taking cuts of the ticket. And it was one family that was kind of running the entire law enforcement of this town.
And everybody realized what was going on. This was all just a big money grab, and it was tail light-based. So, the cops actually got run out of town, and the jail was torn apart, and people were set free, and there was, you know, a horse that paraded through, and I think there were many tail lights being, like, lit and held as they, you know, ran around and shrieked and did whatever you do in a good tail light-based riot.
But yeah, this was a riot, a genuine riot caused by tail lights, kind of a viral story back in the day, because this got distributed to newspapers all over the country to such a degree that a follow up story had to be written where they attempted to try to backpedal that it was a riot, and in the end, they just kind of reinforced this was a riot.
Gabriela: Who knew that tail lights could inspire such a thrill and, you know, uprising.
Jason: Oh, yeah.
Gabriela: So this passionate, semi-violent chapter is a far cry from how you personally view tail lights, Jason. And we might be getting a little philosophical here, but what do you believe that these little lights reveal about human nature?
Jason: They’re a communications tool, fundamentally. That’s what they really are. They’re a way for us to communicate to the people around us for reasons of safety. They’re altruistic in a way that a lot of other things aren’t in life. In that they are there for the betterment of everyone. They’re not a selfish thing.
They’re there because the entire system of driving doesn’t really work well without them. If we can’t communicate our intent to stop or slow down or reverse or turn to the people behind us — people we don’t even see! — then driving just doesn’t work. So it’s an altruistic thing. It’s every time you use your tail lights, you’re expressing a little bit of your faith and participation in this grand experiment of society and civilization that we’re all in.
When you hit that switch for a turn, you’re doing something interesting. You’re announcing your future plans to all the people behind you. You have an intent to turn left, and if they so desire, they should be aware of your future plans to turn left so they can adjust their lives accordingly for everybody’s betterment.
It’s a beautiful, achingly beautiful thing, I’d say, tail lights, and what they do.
Gabriela: You know, I never would have put car parts together with altruism before, but you have made a totally compelling case to me.
What’s included in the definition of a tail light?
Gabriela: So Jason, I don’t know if you know this about me, but I tend to take the train. I don’t drive much on a day to day basis. I know we just talked about turn signals, but can you break down everything that’s included in a set of tail lights? I had kind of just assumed that they were headlights for the back of your car.
Jason: Minimum for a tail light, of course, is just a simple tail light just to illuminate the back of the car. But I think in this set of tail lights, you generally now have a tail light, which just marks where the car is. You have a brake lamp, which lets you know when you’re slowing down. Turn signals, the reverse lamp, the clear light that when you reverse comes on, the center high mount stoplight, which is that third brake light that you’ll see. If it’s a communications light that happens at the rear of the car, it is within the greater set of what makes a tail light.
The history of tail lights
Gabriela: Bring us back to the origins. Tell us where tail lights began. I’m a total novice on the history of cars and automobiles in general. How did we figure out that we needed tail lights?
Jason: Early, early on, you know, like the first thing we would call an automobile came around in 1769. It was Cugnot’s steam drag and it was basically a truck to haul artillery, but it was self-propelled and it ran into a wall almost immediately because no one knew how to drive.
And at first, tail lights weren’t such a big deal because there just weren’t enough cars around to justify it. You didn’t really need it because there wasn’t traffic. The origins, though, kind of go further back to the rail era, go to trains.
Cars and trains are fundamentally the same thing. They’re both automobiles.
They both started from the same root source, that 1769 steam drag. And then they kind of split in the very early 1800s into use of rail and then into road-going machines. But the rail part took off quicker because it wasn’t something that needed to be privately owned. It was like big companies and it could be introduced to people much easier.
Rail, of course, didn’t rely on public roads like, you know, you would have with traffic, but they still needed to signal other trains and other, you know, people working in train yards. So they did have a series of lanterns that had a code associated with them, and red was often used at the tail end of a train on the caboose or whatever you know as it was leaving. And red kind of had this association of like, stop or warning that goes way, way back, all the way into biological things, where like a red insect or snake usually meant something that would probably kill you, so you avoid it.
Red, you know, blood red. Oh, you have all these associations with red that kind of get us on alert. And I think that’s where the red color for tail light initially started. So, it started in the rail era, and then once they started to make road-going cars, and they needed something to mark the rear… At first, you know, there weren’t any standards.
Sometimes you just have clear lights in the rear or whatever. But pretty soon, it became obvious that it made sense so you could see the direction a car was heading, if it was coming at you or going away from you by color. And of course, you would want to illuminate your way ahead with something like a white light.
And red, of course, made sense to have it at the rear.
Gabriela: Mmm, that’s fascinating.
Jason: In the case of, like, that riot in 1916, by far the most common car in America were Ford Model T’s. There were plenty of cars before then. You had to be wealthy, or, you know, they were very fussy. But the mass production of the Model T really brought cars to the masses.
That’s what really put people on the road, at least in America. And so by 1916, whenever that riot took place, chances are the most common car you’re talking about was a Model T. And at the time, the Model T had acetylene lamps in the front. They used, like, a gas generator, and they were not electric. And then at the rear, they had an oil light for the tail light. Later on, they went to electric lighting and you got actual light bulbs inside a tail light. And then slowly from there, you had things like brake lights, which initially just was a physical, mechanical thing that moved a reflector just to let someone know you were slowing down. And turn signals actually didn’t come until a great deal later.
Most cars weren’t required to have two tail lights until the 1950s. It was pretty late.
Today’s most exciting tail light innovations
Gabriela: So let’s speed forward a couple hundred years to the present day. How would you describe the current state of tail lights? What are some of the most energizing developments that are unfolding right now?
Jason: I do think we’re all extremely lucky because we are living in a golden age of not just tail lights, but of automotive lighting design in general.
I’m extremely fond of past tail lights, especially tail lights of the 60s and 70s, but you can’t argue that right now there’s not some brilliant work being done in the tail light world. Automakers have resources now that they never had before with LEDs. If you look back at old cars, often a car company would have some set of tail lights that they would make and kind of reapply them to different models.
Like, for example, in the 70s, a Ford Pinto and a Ford Maverick had basically the same tail light, or a Volkswagen Beetle and a Volkswagen Thing had the same tail light. They didn’t bother making separate tail lights for every different model, but now everything has its own unique tail light. They are all styled to really fit in with the lines of the car.
Carmakers are actually concerned about their cars having what they call a lighting signature. They want their cars to look distinctive at night, so you can identify whose car is whose just by looking at the signature, the graphic of the tail lights as they illuminate at night. We’re also seeing more things like matrix lights, where you have grids of LEDs that actually animate in various ways, so you get these sequential turn signals.
Sequential turn signals have been around since the 60s when they were done with, like, mechanical cams, but now we can do it electronically and technically have much more elaborate kind of illuminations. There’s still legal rules of, you know, they have to flash a certain number of times and it has to be a certain area, but you could do so much more.
You can get really interesting fading in and out lights. The way and the evenness of the glow can be handled in ways that couldn’t be before. They can wrap around in sinuous curves. I mean, we really are seeing some amazing lighting design from a lot of car makers. And, uh, you know, it’s a good time to be alive.
Presenting, tail light fanfiction, noir style
Gabriela: As I alluded to in the beginning, you are deeply, deeply obsessed with this topic. Besides being an authority on tail lights, you’ve also written about tail lights in a different way. So we have an excerpt here from your original work, “Murder by Amber Flashing Light: A Noir Taillight Mystery,” which we’re about to dramatize for our listeners.
Is there anything we should know about this scene and this work before we listen?
Jason: Well, I should probably explain the whole reason I started this. I was writing about tail lights a lot, and I thought, I’m not unaware about how people see this, and I thought a lot of people might think this is just, like, why would they read about tail lights?
So, I thought to goose it up a little bit, I’d start making up this whole idea of a tail light subculture that would have things like seedy tail light bars and clubs and, and tail light enthusiast bathhouses and all kinds of things that, and the kind of the seedier the better. And there’d be a lot of goings on in different groups and subgroups within the tail light community that were at each other’s throats, and infighting and intrigue.
So, I just wanted to make it a little more exciting. So, whenever I’d start writing about a tail light I would talk about how I was talking about this tail light at my local tail light bar, like the Lumiere Rouge or Blinking Ambers or something like that. And it just kind of snowballed into this whole subculture that I made up of the tail light community.
But as it happened, it started to become real as more and more people got into tail lights. And then, you know, I’m still hopeful that there will be real tail light bars springing up at some point.
Gabriela: I hope so too. You know, if you build it, they will come, Jason. Listeners, I hope you’re ready for “Murder by Amber Flashing Light.”
Jason as narrator: The door swung open to reveal a chaos of red, orange, and white light. The trio found themselves in the middle of a brutal bar fight, which looked to be primarily between the Ambears and the Trad Reds, with some Altezzas, Darkers, and others antagonizing from the periphery.
Mack used his heavy glove to dispatch an approaching, screaming Trad Red, swinging a trio of Jeep Box tail lights by their wires like a flail, while the Constable hacked away at a shrieking Ambear, and Clamworth beat a path through the crowd with the heavy bench lamps.
The three pushed and fought their way through the melee until they got to the far wall, where a bouncer let them into another room. A room for drinking and other debauchery, but no fighting. Fights had become so common at the Rouge that the management eventually just gave up the front room for just fighting.
It was easier to let the battles play out for 30 minutes a night instead of trying to stop it. Mack gave a wink, and turned to march toward a woman sporting a vibrant orange mohawk, and talking at a table with two men with similar hair.
Actor: Jesus, Shoshana, how could you let this happen? Mitzi Bakshi was probably the only chance you morons ever had for guaranteeing amber rears and putting the beeping Trad Reds in their place once and for all. The beep went wrong.
Actress: You think we haven’t been asking ourselves this for the past two days? We don’t beeping know. She drank a couple of beers. I saw her open the bottles. Then, about an hour later, she was on her knees, vomiting blood. We even got the whole Rouge rented for the night. It was an all Ambear crowd.
We even had guards patrolling the lot to make sure no trad reds tried to show up and start beep. They saw nothing. Every car in that lot had orange in its tail.
Actor: If these guys had a lot full of amber rears, no Trad Reds were here. At least not by car…
Gabriela: That was spectacular. Listeners, for the rest of Murder by Amber Flashing Light, head on over to theautopian.com.
You’ve, like, totally shifted my thinking from tail lights being some sort of auto part, just a light, to sort of a communication system. And if we think about it that way, it’s like the communication system seems to be getting much more sophisticated. Like, we’re moving from the age of the telegraph to the landline to the smartphone.
It just feels like the sophistication of the technological advancement is even being reflected in these lights.
Jason: I mean, that’s sort of true, and it’s also still doing basically the same stuff they’ve been doing for awhile. You take a tail light from, you know, the 80s, and it’s communicating effectively the same stuff.
Which is also something impressive about tail lights. Nobody’s using a phone from like 1992 and getting away with it, but your car from ‘92 has effectively the same set of tail lights, and even though the technology is different, it’s simple incandescent bulbs and maybe they don’t look as elaborate or whatever, it’s understandable to everybody else on the road. And that’s the mark of a really effective communication system, is something that is flexible enough that things can have a lifespan like that. And it’s still easily interpretable to people who are driving today. That says a lot. You know, it wasn’t always the case.
These things got added over the years. So, you know, like a car from, like, the late 40s might only have one tail light and no turn indicators, no reverse lamp, whatever. But it’s the kind of thing where it works back. Whatever they do have, we can usually interpret and understand.
Gabriela: We communicate differently in different places. We don’t just have these variations in tail lights from car to car. But also from country to country and region to region, there’s some pretty big regional differences.
Jason: Yes.
How do tail light and all car indicator standards differ across the globe?
Gabriela: How are tail lights different in the U.S. than in, say, Europe or Asia, other parts of the world? How did those differences come about?
Jason: Well, the strange thing is, you can kind of break the world into America and everywhere tail lights, which is a strange thing. Maybe it’s the way America is like one of the only countries that still uses the old imperial system instead of metric or whatever. We are the only country in the world, for example, that does not require amber rear turn indicators. You can have red turn indicators in America, and that’s pretty much it. Everywhere else in the world requires amber because they’ve done tests. They actually are safer because in America, you could have tail lights that are basically one bulb that handles your brake light, your tail lamp itself, and your turn indicator.
And if that bulb goes out, you lose half the functionality of your tail light or all the functionality of your tail light. And it can be confusing. European drivers would come to America and see a blinking red light. That doesn’t immediately feel like they’re indicating a turn. It could be someone stepping on and off a brake. It’s not clear.
But America still does it. Partially because a lot of fussy car designers don’t like incorporating that extra color into their very carefully designed graphics of how they want the rear of the car to look. So they prefer just to have to deal with red and maybe some clear. Even if it illuminates amber, but the thing is they still have to do it for the rest of the world. It’s baffling to me. I don’t know why there’s not a global standard for tail lights. Like we’re so close in so many ways and the differences are so strange. Like in America we have a specific area that your turn signal for example, or your brake light has to illuminate, and the sizes are different between America and Europe’s.
You get all kinds of strange workarounds and they have to make some kind of separate tail lights for the U.S. market, or for the European market. Sometimes they can make something that’ll work for both. And I don’t know why that doesn’t happen more often, but you’d be surprised. It really doesn’t. And it’s not trivial to engineer a tail light. They have to meet all these requirements and they have to get approved by federal agencies or governmental agencies.
So it’s not cheap. It’s one of the more expensive parts of a car to engineer in a lot of ways. So it really baffles me. In anything like the U.K. and other parts of Europe, a rear fog lamp is required. It only has to be on one side, and they also only usually require one reverse lamp, although I think the U.S. is the same way, even though most cars have two, because we like symmetry. You only really need one.
So in a lot of British cars, you’ll see the reverse lamp on one side replaced with a rear fog lamp. It’s a strange thing. Like, there’s Byzantine rules about all these things. Side marker lamps are required in America, but not necessarily required or sometimes illegal in other countries.
Like, you can’t even just have them around, but they do require things like indicator repeaters. It is, oh, there’s so much. There’s so, so very much.
Gabriela: There’s obviously ramifications that have cascading effects.
Jason: Oh, sure.
Gabriela: And wouldn’t you think it would be a lot easier if we could just have global cooperation in this specific thing?
It feels like a metaphor for a lot of global cooperation. It would be a lot less. difficult and probably costly if we could all just get on the same page about our tail lights.
Tail lights in a future that could include autonomous vehicles
So before we wrap up, Jason, what can you tell us about the future of the tail light industry? What innovations, what advancements do you think that we can expect over the next hundred years or so?
Jason: I think the biggest advancements coming in the future of tail lights is a transition from just simple lights to something maybe a little more complex.
Actual screens or displays to convey the concepts that are needed to be conveyed while driving. And there’s always going to be an upper limit though. Like you don’t really want to have to do anything too complex because part of the job of the tail light is to convey information very rapidly because you’re driving, you could be going 60, 70 or more miles an hour, and you have to be able to understand what’s happening instantaneously and react to it.
So if we have displays that are something more than just a color that’s illuminated, I think it’s going to have to be symbols that are things that we can identify very rapidly. But I think this is coming, and I think there might be also tail lights that are designed to be read by autonomous vehicles.
Things where autonomous cars can read intent of tail lights. Perhaps we’ll have QR code-style lights that are specifically for autonomous cars that can convey a large amount of data in a very short amount of time, even in situations where we can’t always guarantee that wireless communications are in place or anything like that, because if it can see the pattern, that’s enough. And that actually requires a lot less handshaking than a lot of other methods.
For example, a car could be driving in front and a tail light designed to communicate not with humans, but to another machine could convey information about the road ahead, about traffic that’s changing, about weather conditions, and it could flash this to the car, the car could read it, and then it would have some preparation for what’s coming up. This would require car-to-car communication and an approach to autonomy that maybe we’re not doing now, but one I think that makes a lot more sense. A more unified one that kind of treats, like, all the cars are actually working together for the common goal of everybody moving around.
Which, again, just brings us back to the beginning. Fundamentally, that’s what tail lights have always been about. The common goal of everybody getting to where they’re going and safely and happily, and tail lights are just a fantastic way to make sure this happens.
Gabriela: I love that. So our robo-drivers will read our robo-tail lights on maybe our robo-roads.
But it comes back, it circles back to your philosophical idea about tail lights as altruism. It’s totally changed my perspective. I’m going to have my eyes totally glued to every car that I see on the street, but when I’m safely on the sidewalk, because I am a city dweller and I am a pedestrian. Jason, this has been such a treat to talk about all things tail lights with you.
Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
Jason: I really appreciate it and I just feel good being able to get the news about tail lights out there to everybody and let you know if you’ve been obsessed with tail lights, you’re not alone. There’s plenty of us out there, so come to your local tail light bar and let’s talk about it.
Gabriela: I’ll meet you for a drink there. Jason Torchinsky is a co-founder of and writer for The Autopian. This episode was produced by Ready Freddie Media. The role of Shoshana was played by Jen Wong. Additional support from Quartz Executive Editor Susan Howson and Head of Video David Weinstein. Our theme music is by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex Suguira.
If you like what you heard, follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you’re listening. And tell your friends about us! Know someone who’d love Jason’s tail light fanfiction? Text them this episode right now to give this gleaming, literally, magnum opus the audience that it deserves. Then head to qz.com/obsession to sign up for Quartz’s Weekly Obsession email and browse hundreds of interesting backstories. I’m Gabriela Riccardi. Thanks for listening.
Jason: Mack could almost hear the constable’s brow furrow at this, and turned to him in time to see his mouth open as words of confusion and disbelief began to form in his larynx. Before he could speak, however, Mack grabbed Clamworth’s hand and jammed it in the constable’s mouth.
Actor: I know what you’re gonna say, Bladderford, but believe me, the Ambear’s method is sound.
Trad Reds take a blood oath never to drive or even ride in a car with amber rear indicators. Ever. I once saw a Trad Red miss his own son’s birth because the ambulance that was about to take him and his wife to the hospital was a 1993 Ford Econoline, which, as you know, had amber rear indicators. Pitched a fit and punched an EMT and demanded a 1995 or newer Econoline which used red rear indicators.
Jason: As Mack finished explaining, the constable finally yanked the valet’s saliva soaked handout and noticed Mack’s furrowed brow.
Actor: Does the Rouge have a camera on the parking lot?