Progressive Brake Warning

Description

Provide a progressive brake warning light depending on how strong you are braking to help warn drivers that are following you.

Competitive/Pricing/Notes

The Model S has two main brake lights and a whole row of LEDs at the top of the rear windscreen. When going over a certain threshold of regen braking or when using the actual brakes, they all light up simultaneously. The car behind has no idea whether you’re just adjusting your speed with a bit of regen (the threshold is rather low) or braking hard.

It would be nice if the brake lights would give some indication of how quickly the car is slowing down. Maybe only light up a few of the top LEDs on light regen, a few more on full regen, even more on actual braking, and all of them on heavy braking (lighting up from the center outwards). The intensity of the main brake lights might also be variable like it is on some BMW models.

On really heavy braking, all brake lights should flash rapidly (like on many sports cars, Mercedes, BMW,…) and when braking hard to almost standstill, hazard lights on European models could be added in as well.

The rapid flashing on heavy braking already exists on many high-end cars, and some also have variable intensity brake lights.

Moderator: This would require hardware changes, as all the brake LEDs are currently wired together with a single driver.

Status

Great idea, unfortunately, here in the USA, none of this is allowed (and European cars have this feature disabled in the USA). It’s unlikely Tesla would engineer this just for Europe, but one never knows!