Originally Posted by ItsJustMe

It's questionable whether this is much of an issue anymore anyway. Even with my first generation light, the only time it failed was a year after purchase, after hundreds of uses. It was a bad connector, I replaced it, and it's up to dozens of uses again since then and I expect it to last many hundreds more uses at least.

With the new generation, the wires are more reliable (so expect problems less than once a year under constant use) and the battery has been fully waterproof for the last two entire generations of lights. And in any case, the solution was "put battery in heavy plastic bag, put a zip-tie around mouth of bag with wire coming out, tighten. 10 seconds, and it's fine in heavy rain now. I don't think it's particularly worth harping on, and it's especially not now that it's not been an issue for this light for over 6 months now.

Talking to someone considering a new light purchase about shortcomings that have already been fixed with the current generation of lights is not helpful to anyone. It really makes it sound like you're just grasping at straws.

There are many things to consider when purchasing lights. One thing is that, honestly, hardly any person who's just getting started riding is going to go right out and spend $200 to $400 on a headlight. Even $80 is probably pushing it. Now that really good, bright lights that car drivers notice and respect are available for < $100, I think it's sensible to try to convince people who otherwise would be buying $35 wimp lights to make the extra investment in safety.

If the message being pushed is that the $80 light is a complete piece of crap that will fail when you most need it, and they really should be buying a $250 light instead, most people are not going to buy the $250 light, they'll buy the $35 light instead. This is not doing them any favors.

I don't personally feel that ANY light, even a Lupine, is reliable enough to not carry a backup anyway, so I may as well save the money. I carry a P7 flashlight on my bar at all times as a backup. The one time my MS failed a few weeks back, I just reached down and hit the flashlight switch. I was without light for 3 seconds.