See.Sense Ace
£79.99 > Safer lights for you and society too?
IRISH COMPANY SEE.SENSE ALREADY HAS a few innovative lights under its belt, but its latest pairing, the ACE, packs a heap of tricks into a small and affordable package. Rather than lighting your way, the ACE lights are designed to get you seen by others, but when operated in conjunction with the See.Sense smartphone app they also collect anonymised data about your journeys and in time could help improve our roads.
They’re relatively small, 40 x 30mm, and each one weighs just 36g (including mount). For such compact lights they’re impressively bright (150-lumen front, 125-lumen rear), and side visibility is good too. They’re waterproof and come with a variety of mounts for bars, seatposts, forks, seatstays, clothing or bags.
They bounce around a bit when you’re riding over rough surfaces, but their built-in sensors record the vibrations potholes and broken tarmac cause to inform local authorities of the places where roads need repairing. Those sensors also track changes of motion and light conditions. This allows the lights to automatically adjust their brightness and flash rate – make continuous progress along a quiet road and they switch to a slow pulse; stop and start in busy town traffic and they flash faster and brighter. The lights’ sensors and accompanying app enable a few other clever tricks. They let the rear light work as a brake light so anyone behind knows when you’re slowing down. They detect if you’ve crashed and can send an alert message with your GPS position to an emergency contact. They also work as an anti-theft system that notifies you if they sense your parked and locked-up bike is being tampered with. That may sound good, in theory, but we rarely leave lights on our bikes when it’s parked outside and the notification only works if you’re within Bluetooth range. We’ve been getting around 10 hours of life out of both lights from a twohour charge, which is impressive stuff. They may not be the prettiest lights but when the tech is this clever – and can contribute to better roads for everyone – we can forgive the looks.