The Lighting Bug company I first heard about at the spring 2017 workshop of the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance. Company head and Lighting Bug inventor Marcus Boykin spoke briefly to CVSA’s vehicle committee about his tech, which offers a way to avoid ever running with a headlight out by turning the “high-beam side on at the brightness of the low beam” when the low beam goes dark, Boykin says, as briefed in the video up top.
With Lighting Bug working as intended, operators still have high-beam functionality in the affected headlight, too, Boykin says, answering a common question he gets from prospective users.
Boykin believes Lighting Bug could be the kind of low-cost, high-return technology that could give owner-operators and small fleets a way to take advantage of any eventual “Beyond Compliance” effort to achieve positive credit in the CSA safety scoring system for going above and beyond safety-regulatory requirements.
It all came to be when Boykin, who’s trained and has worked in electronics for more than two decades, got off work late one day near his Jackson, Tenn., home base. On his way home in his personal vehicle, he was pulled over and ticketed for having a headlight out, which he’d just not realized was the case.
In subsequent months, he was newly aware of the multitude of other vehicles on the road in similar predicaments, and thought a piece of electronic equipment might easily mitigate such problems.
For truckers, inoperative lamps represent probably the biggest well of inspection violations seen in many states, and a headlight is no doubt a common reason roadside inspectors use to stop and inspect a truck, particularly in states where maintenance violations are a high priority like those in the map below.
