Headlight or Fog light performance on E350
We just got a 2008 E350 which has the base model sealed headlights (see image below), and no fog lights or driving lights. Driving it home at night, the visibility was miserable even on the interstat...
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What are you comparing the illumination to when making it out to be "miserable"? I haven't found that the lights on my '98 E450 chassis are terrible (nor are they exceptionally fantastic). They seem rather normal and perfectly adequate for safe night driving at appropriate speeds. I certainly wouldn't describe them as miserable, but rather normal or typical.
Fog lights are not helpful at all for highway driving under normal conditions. They are designed to only illuminate the area directly in front of the vehicle so you can see the line at the edge of the road when traveling (very slowly) in dense fog such that normal headlights more or less completely wash out your vision. When there is no fog, illuminating this bit of road is generally counterproductive because it draws your attention away from things further down the road, where you should be looking, and the extra ambient light tends to cause the pupils to close down a bit and make everything else less visible.
Driving lights, if you mean DRLs (daytime running lights), are intended to make your vehicle visible to others when you don't need the headlights, and generally don't provide any significant road illumination. If you mean off-road driving lights, those aren't generally legal for highway operation, though some do provide very powerful illumination that's blinding to other drivers.
Maybe it's a stupid question, but are you sure you had the headlights on, and not just the parking lights and (possibly) DRLs which may well use the headlight filaments at low power? Were the high beams better than the low beams (or was there too much traffic to use high beams)?
Fog lights are not helpful at all for highway driving under normal conditions. They are designed to only illuminate the area directly in front of the vehicle so you can see the line at the edge of the road when traveling (very slowly) in dense fog such that normal headlights more or less completely wash out your vision. When there is no fog, illuminating this bit of road is generally counterproductive because it draws your attention away from things further down the road, where you should be looking, and the extra ambient light tends to cause the pupils to close down a bit and make everything else less visible.
Driving lights, if you mean DRLs (daytime running lights), are intended to make your vehicle visible to others when you don't need the headlights, and generally don't provide any significant road illumination. If you mean off-road driving lights, those aren't generally legal for highway operation, though some do provide very powerful illumination that's blinding to other drivers.
Maybe it's a stupid question, but are you sure you had the headlights on, and not just the parking lights and (possibly) DRLs which may well use the headlight filaments at low power? Were the high beams better than the low beams (or was there too much traffic to use high beams)?
