Talelight Is Like Facebook for Your Bumper

CARS.COM — Some people love bumper stickers. Bumper stickers can highlight political propensities, academic accomplishments or an adoration of animals. But people are fickle and bumper stickers, much like those tattoos we got when we were 18, are often more permanent than we’d like.

Related: How to Remove a Sticker From Your Car

A new product called Talelight is an attempt to inoculate us against our caprice. It’s a 2-inch-by-8-inch digital placard for your bumper on which you can change the message as often as you’d like — think of it as a status update mini-billboard for your bumper. You can customize your own message or purchase any of the more than 200 predesigned messages from the Talelight store.

As swell as this may seem — especially for the more social-media-obsessed among us — we advise you to stop, deliberate and listen (#AlmostVanillaIce). First, Talelight costs $129.85 up front, then between $1 and $3 for each message you buy or design after that. At those prices, you might swiftly be customizing a final message that reads “#broke.”

Distraction could also become an issue. If you’re someone who is on a constant quest for the perfect status (because status updates are all about validating your existence, right?), having to constantly come up with a clever update for your car bumper that the masses will see at any given moment could literally drive you to distraction.

Finally, a study from the Journal of Applied Social Psychology several years ago determined that drivers with lots of bumper stickers are 16 percent more likely to succumb to road rage than other drivers. Our guess is that this notion extends to someone who drops more than a c-note on the Talelight. So, while you may be inching closer to read the “More Cowbell” Talelight in front of you, your encroachment may trigger that driver’s raging fever for which the only prescription will be you driving away as quickly as you can.