tail lamp bulbs question

[Gary Stark <redbakstark@xxxxxxxxx>]

This is not specifically i-car nor Alfa related, but I do believe it
may be of interest to many of us, and if anybody can provide more
detail, I'd greatly appreciate it.

A friend recently experienced sudden acceleration in her '89 190E.
What happened is that she turned on the motor, applied the brake and
then selected reverse to back out of her garage. At that time the car
accelerated and his a brick wall, demolishing the wall and causing the
car to be totalled.

Fortunately, no people were injured. 

In looking at the NTHSC site, I can see that there is a number of
other instances of this sort of thing happening with this and other MB
models, as well as with other makes of vehicle. This leads one to
suspect a possible manufacturing or design defect of some sort.

In talking to the Mercedes rep about the incident, he is reporting to
her that there is a way, within either the taillamp or the bulb, to
determine if the brakes were actually applied at the time of impact.
The way it was described to me is that it seemed as though this was a
designed-in feature. Based upon this evidence, it seems that MB will
say that this is driver error. 

Possible of course, but given that there appear to be more than 40
similar cases documented with this and similar models (260E, 280E,
300E), my tendancy is to believe that something other than the driver
may have been amiss in the car at the time of this incident.

I have never heard of anything like this (the lights being designed in
the manner described) at all before. Can the collective wisdom of the
digests add anything to this? 

Thanx for any and all responses.

Obligatory Alfa cup-holder content: the little black square fold-up
cup-holders that clip onto the door are available at your local
Wallyworld for around $3!

They also carry another type, around $5, that has a clamp-in/clamp-on
base, driven by a small thumb screw that turns a worm drive mechanism
to close or separate a pair of jaws in the base. This permits the
cup-holder to be placed in or on top of almost anything you wish:
centre console or arm rest in your car, or the arm rest on your
favourite tv watching or computer desk chair at home or the office. I
would recommend that we each buy at least one for each of our cars,
plus one for our office chair, another for out home office chair, and
one more for watching tv. 

Perhaps one for the waterbed frame too! :)

g.
Gary Stark              74 Alfa Spider
gstark@domain.elided  87 Alfa Milan (truncated)
http://redbacksWeb.com  91 Mercedes 190E
Up over in Dallas from down under in Sydney.



==
g.
Gary Stark
gstark@domain.elided
http://Redbacksweb.com

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