Do you have a citation or was that an edgy culture war comment?
But don’t let that stop you from starting your diatribe
Not sure what UK drivers would say about that, though
I don’t mean a simple “normal” flashing light, but the super bright ones that are like a camera flash strobe going off 2-3x per second which hurts your eyes and kills your night vision, making it hard to see anything including the actual cyclist.
I was definitely not taught this as a US driving student. Is this a UK thing?
114 You MUST NOT use any lights in a way which would dazzle or cause discomfort to other road users, including pedestrians, cyclists and horse riders use front or rear fog lights unless visibility is seriously reduced. You MUST switch them off when visibility improves to avoid dazzling other road users (see Rule 226).
In stationary queues of traffic, drivers should apply the parking brake and, once the following traffic has stopped, take their foot off the footbrake to deactivate the vehicle brake lights. This will minimise glare to road users behind until the traffic moves again.
I’m sure that might have been fine 30 years ago when cars had actual handbrakes. I doubt most folks these days can even find the little switch that activates it. Now it comes off as a bunch of monkey business.
That's definitely not true of all vehicles. I helped a friend recently find hers; she'd never used it, didn't even know it existed. And I've never used it on rental cars.
Certainly when I've been stopped on a hill with someone directly on my bumper I've used the hand brake, but that's vanishingly rare for me (probably because I live in a very flat part of the country).
Some do, some don't. Most I've driven try to replicate the bug in ICE automatics that causes the car to creep when your foot's not on the brake.
manual ICE cars (especially diesels) can be held on the clutch just under the 'biting point'
I, too, love the smell of burning clutch plates. Use the brake, that's what it's there for.
Part of how the torque converter works; a feature which prevents the vehicle from rolling backwards on a hill, not a bug.
By learning to drive a manual? Pardon the snark, but that technique should be reserved for severely steep hills, otherwise heel-toe or just be quick on the pedals. I live in the Seattle area, where you either learn to drive a manual on hills, or you get a punch card from the transmission shop for clutch replacements. Even someplace like going up the hill from 1st and Madison (picking a random, extremely hilly intersection in Seattle), I'll roll back maybe six inches. I'm nothing special, my wife does the same thing. And if you live around Seattle and you sit six inches off someone's rear bumper on a hill, that's a "you" problem when they roll back on you.
That only applies for manual/stick shift vehicles. Most of the US drives automatic transmissions, and you don't have to use the hand brake to start on an uphill slope with an automatic transmission.
You sit there with the gearbox in neutral and your left foot off the clutch (or in gear and on the clutch if green light imminent) with your right foot on the brake.
In gear, clutch to biting point (which will prevent rolling backward), right foot off the brake and then gradually on the accelerator while you let off the clutch pedal with your left foot.
The handbrake literally never enters into it, and the vehicle never rolls back.
That is... incorrect.
just consider e.g. the number of people who are driving in fog or rain without their headlight turned on... because nowadays the front lights are always on due to some law... but the back of their car is completely dark. and no amount of flashing any lights makes them realize this.
or the number of people who are clueless about the fact that the headlight agle can be adjusted on most cars today, and what that means and/or how that works.
second, it's the institutions that are failing here, which is *way more concerning* than some clueles people driving around on the roads...
Seems to me that all of this tech to create autonomous driving could be also used to augment human driving.
Earlier in the year I got a replacement rear-view mirror with an anti-glare coating and it's paid dividends. It helps so much at night on dark sections of road when newer cars with bright headlights are around me. Finally decided to also replace my side mirrors with ones that have a similar coating.
Out in the country, you still don't really need brighter headlights. Other cars' headlights will always be visible and they have reflectors, so it's not as if you'll struggle to spot other cars. The road lines are actually reflective, so it's not as if you'll struggle to see the road lines. And generally speaking out in the country, there won't be pedestrian foot traffic, so it's not as if you need the bright lights for them.
So who are they for? I think broadly people may just not be able to avoid excess unless restricted by the facts of their environment. Allow people a plethora of calories, they'll get too fat. Allow them a plethora of entertainment, they'll drive themselves insane. And somehow .. allow them too many bright lights and they'll all just blind each other.
(I'll give you other animals though.)
I still also agree headlights are too bright, by the way, but I'm just providing an example for your question
With current car that has Xenon headlights (+ LED for day), they have a much sharper cutoff at the edge, making it harder to see pedestrians and other stuff near the road.
Probably the LED/laser headlights are even worse in this aspect.
They're so machines can see better, not so humans can see better. There are so many more doorbell cameras, ALPR cameras, fixed building cams, PTZ building cams, dash cams, external vehicle cams, etc than ever before, and they all want to be able to spy on you as effectively as possible even at night.
I'm quite thankful for bright headlights.
The problem referred to in the article is dipped beam headlights being too bright and often too high, which are making things less safe by dazzling other drivers and road users.
Judging from comments in this thread, large numbers of people are suggesting that they are actually entitled to blind others because toggling back and forth is an inconvenience for them, and/or the "smart" cars that are auto-toggling high beams have left many drivers completely ignorant that toggling is actually possible.
Related question, are cars that have completely removed manually controlling high beams actually street legal?
High beam were always blinding, and unless you are completely alone you will not use them, even in the middle of a rural area, so they are out of the equation.
Usually bright headlights / highbeams are useful in there.
Animals, specifically deer. That said, you can use brights when no other cars are nearby, and when there is a car coming its worth a few seconds of extra risk to not blind the other guy and put him at risk.
There really isn’t that much increase; when there’s another driver then you both have the combined the light output of both headlights, coming from two different directions.
I don't think it happened through any plan, if anyone was looking at the specs, they probably just thought "bigger number better".
Have you actually driven in the country?
Out in the country where I live, some roads are single track with no painted lines, cats eyes or street lights. There is occasional foot traffic, sometimes not wearing reflective gear. There are also animals, and 6" deep potholes that I would rather not hit as well.
There's something really obnoxious and antisocial about this that makes me really mad. Test your lights on yourself, people. If your manufacturer did something stupid here it's unfortunately on you to fix it. Usually the mentality of "got mine, fuck everyone else" is self-destructive but maybe not obviously so because cause/effect are a few steps away from each other. But if you blind everyone else on the road so you can see better then it's kind of endangering you directly and immediately!
This is a huge issue in US western states especially, since they are full of long dark drives. You'll literally be blinded for several seconds if you encounter another car even if you're averting your eyes. Bad but not horrible if it's 1/10 of chance encounters that are antisocial, but it's been getting worse for years and odds are now much closer to 1/2.
You think kids aren't running across the street at night out in the country? Chasing a soccer ball?
There are all sorts of things you need to be able to see to avoid. People, deer, fallen branches, large roadkill, garbage cans blown into the road by the wind, the list goes on and on. Not to mention spotting dangerous icy patches at night in the winter.
I take it you don't really drive in country? Which is fine, but it's good to be aware of the many potential hazards.
Only in well light areas, usually with a low speed limit too.
> People, deer, fallen branches, large roadkill, garbage cans blown into the road by the wind, the list goes on and on.
Of those only people are at all common, and not on large roads. I have never even seen roadkill large enough to be unsafe to drive over.
I have only once come close to hitting any of these on country roads in the UK. I have been dangerously dazzled by oncoming bright headlights all the time.
>Only in well light areas, usually with a low speed limit too.
Not something I've commonly seen when driving, but certainly as a kid out in the country I ran around in the dark near the road.
>> People, deer, fallen branches, large roadkill, garbage cans blown into the road by the wind, the list goes on and on.
>Of those only people are at all common, and not on large roads. I have never even seen roadkill large enough to be unsafe to drive over.
>I have only once come close to hitting any of these on country roads in the UK. I have been dangerously dazzled by oncoming bright headlights all the time.
I've seen all of these multiple times (tbf the trash cans were in the city, not the country) out in upstate NY and rural Indiana and Kentucky. Maybe trees don't drop branches over in the UK, but over in the US that is certainly a hazard to be expected during and after severe weather.
To be clear, I agree that excessively bright running lights and people who can't seem to properly transition between hibeams and lowbeams are problem. I just don't agree with the sentiment from the gp that "[o]ut in the country, you still don't really need brighter headlights."
I moved from London out to the sticks ~4.5 years ago and since then have seen deer, pigs, and cows multiple times each year on the larger roads around where I now live. Animals roam. People leave gates open or damage fences. It happens. Plus the named storms frequently bring trees down onto or even across roads.
> Only in well light areas, usually with a low speed limit too.
It would certainly be safer if that were true, but it's not. Kids play in front yards with zero street lighting all the time. And drivers speed.
>> People, deer, fallen branches, large roadkill, garbage cans blown into the road by the wind, the list goes on and on.
> Of those only people are at all common, and not on large roads.
I think there are a lot of places you haven't driven. In parts of the US, deer are everywhere. And who is limiting the subject to "large roads"? Headlights are used on all roads.
Also, we drive defensively because of the uncommon things we encounter. It only takes one collision to potentially kill you or someone else. Over a lifetime of driving, "uncommon" things have an unfortunate tendency to still happen at some point.
Street lighting is consistent enough to be used to define built up areas for speed limits in the UK.
> in parts of the US, deer are everywhere.
which is not relevant to a discussion about car headlights in the UK
> we drive defensively because of the uncommon things we encounter
but its not worth making a common situation riskier to make an uncommon one safer.
I thought we were talking about the country, where things are not built up.
> which is not relevant to a discussion about car headlights in the UK
Nothing about your original comment suggested anything about being specific to the UK.
While the original article is about the UK, it seems very clear that the HN discussion is about car headlights everywhere. HN is a global site, and more US-centric than anything else.
> but its not worth making a common situation riskier to make an uncommon one safer.
This type of thing needs statistics to determine the exact right balance. But the picture you're trying to print of what it's like to drive in the country is just completely false, as many commenters here have pointed out. I don't know why you're continuing to insist on things we all know are not true.
Where there are houses its a built up area. Even a hamlet. If its nota built up area there are virtually no kids playing in "front yards". There will be the odd isolated house, of course, not to many.
> While the original article is about the UK, it seems very clear that the HN discussion is about car headlights everywhere
Nothing in the thread I replied to says that. Most people discussing other countries say so. I am discussing the UK which should be the default and nothing above me in the thread suggests otherwise.
> I don't know why you're continuing to insist on things we all know are not true.
So "we" know better than someone who actually lives at the edge of a small town in England and drives through the countryside all regularly.
I guess the UK is different then. Here in the US, there are lots of houses in the country that are not part of any "built-up area", that have big front yards, and where there is no street lighting.
So yes, "we" know better because we drive too. And this is a global conversation, not a UK one. You were the one trying to making claims about how there's virtually nothing meaningful to collide with on country roads, and we're saying that's just false.
That being said while I don’t struggle much with the glare from oncoming headlights I find that visibility beyond the oncoming vehicle can be severely limited by the bright light. This often causes me to slow down and squint to be careful of any dangers beyond the vehicle.
There are plenty of country side roads in Europe that really dark with normal medium lights.
Now I fully agree that full intensity is too high as shipped in most cars.
I guess you don't actually drive at night in the countryside then.
You need lights to see where the road is, not where pedestrians might be - on none existent footpaths
You really don't need the bright lights. You never have. Slow down, look for movement, and use your brights intelligently.
But only if you don't care about other drivers on the road. And of course, how many of those other drivers on the road care about who they're impacting? A lot of them have your attitude.
If there's a constant stream of vehicles I'm not really worried about visibility all that much. The suicidal wildlife is mostly culled, for potholes you can track the person in front...
And piss all other drivers off around you. This is the whole point of the thread you are posting in, but then if people cant realise or even care when they are blinding people I dont expect them to have fully read or understood the thread article.
>every additional foot of headlight distance certainly helps for spotting the glint of an eyeball on the side of the road.
Only if you are paying attention in the first place. The reality is that most people hitting deer and moose just are not, or the animal ran out in front of them and there was nothing that could have been done.
I dodged many a moose with half burned out incandescent bulbs in shitty sedans in the northest of rural new england.
Meanwhile the silly folks who have duct taped ten massive LED lightbars to their fenders still seem to be hitting moose up north, so I just don't buy the "I need more light" argument.
https://www.mainepublic.org/environment-and-outdoors/2018-09...
Note how the DOT doesn't call out vehicle changes. Note also that despite the raw number being only a few thousand moose hits over a decade, you will consistently find that someone who has hit one moose is much more likely to have hit multiple moose.
They just aren't attentive drivers. Every single person up north has almost hit a moose. Only some of them routinely keep hitting moose. They are being saved by moose population control.
In more open areas it can be quite helpful to have greater throw and flood illumination.
In the American Midwest, being able to spot ice patches or deer on the interstate with your brights is quite helpful.
Normal driving lights have no need for the intensity they have today though
and sure, you don't need to drive over 20mph on a 60mph limit road ...
Then we have pedestrians walking with no sidewalks or crosswalks, because city planning actively hostile to people walking.
Drive faster and you have to have brighter lights shining farther into the distance to be able to see at least a couple seconds ahead.
I'm also not clear why someone would leave brights up once they are close to something that has eyes. The idea is you can see them further away. But, as you get close, drop the lights.
A lot of it is A roads - few pedestrians and they are on pavements.
On country lanes, I think traditional lights are usually bright enough. if not, slow down at might.
It’s the car drivers responsibility to not mow pedestrians down wherever or whenever they are walking.
Somehow we all did ok back then with standard high/low beams from lights which are very dim and warm compared to the harsh white LED lights of today
It seems to me that this is just another example of the arms race of modern cars. You need a big SUV to feel safe on a road full of SUVs and trucks. You need an array of dazzling LEDs to compete with every other car out there. And we all lose.
This is an anecdotal fallacy. We also did fine without seatbelts, with parents who smoked, with open containers in cars, with DDT sprayed in our neighborhoods. Until we realized that was crazy.
Not all improvements are without side effects. Increased headlight quality is one of those.
https://static.cargurus.com/images/forsale/2021/04/17/22/52/...
Just because everyone smoked in restaurants doesn't mean they didn't have other things figured out.
Hey, there were several models.
For a long time you had the two filament bulbs vs single filament. And then around the late 70s, you could have circle or rectangle, so there were 4 bulbs to choose from! Tremendous variety.
I really don't know what everyone's talking about when they swear they need all this extra light.
What I will say is with newer cars where the center console had an LCD screen and far more lighting, it did feel genuinely dangerous to drive through these same areas. Any real solution to this should start with all this being adjustable (I assume it actually is in most models?), or even far dimmer in its stock state with your lights on.
That would explain scenes on TV and in movies with very low "key", which to me are awful and frustrating because I cannot see anything, but maybe that is just how the (dimly-lit) scene would actually look in real life to the cinematographer or editor responsible for the visual design of the scene.
Animals and pedestrians (along with pot holes) are the prime reason.
I have never bought a car with extreme bright headlights, and I never will.
But the choice of headlight is probably one of the lowest factors when deciding on which car to buy, you just live with what the car manufacturers are shoving on us.
You're not wrong, but it's a minor contribution at most.
You would be an irresponsible nutter with a death wish to try through! And if you crashed, "I was driving at / under the speed limit" wouldn't wash - you would be charged with Driving without Due Care and Attention, or Dangerous Driving depending on the consequences of the crash.
It's not as if you cannot see with normal, old-fashioned headlights. That's what I'm confused about; the problem with headlights at night is that they have a distance. So rather than being unable to see, what you actually get is less reaction time. ie, rather than seeing 'til the next hill or turn, you can really only see to the end of your headlight beam. Ultrabright headlights actually make this worse; you have no night vision whatsoever due to their brightness, and and anything outside of the beam is completely invisible. This isn't as much of a problem with old fashioned headlights as they don't trash your night vision quite as badly. In any case, the problem is that you have less time to react due to only being able to see within the beam of the light -- and brightness really does not affect this.
This is totally aside from that fact that the moose threat is NOT that they're in the road 1000 feet ahead of you and it's too dark to see -- it's that they come right out of the woods before you have time to react -- and brightness, again, does not actually affect this.
Moose aren't invisible to a normal headlight.
When you aren't using strong lights your pupils open more. Now we need much brighter lights than traditionam because the lights from other cars leave you blind for too long.
Context: I live in 3rd world country with non lit interurban roads. People must to walk and ride bicycles, only they do irresponsibly without anything reflective, maybe only with their cellphone screens lit because they are using it. I sometimes reduce speed to 30 km/h when a car comes from the opposite direction.
The problem isn't as much bright lights though, it's lights shining in your face.
1) "auto dipping" headlights don't detect oncoming traffic
2) "matrix" headlights don't detect oncoming traffic
3) Headlights are adjusted to point as high as possible, on cars with ridiculous high headlights, so although they are pointing "down" (just), they are pointing into your car
4) My 2005 car's headlights are yellow. Modern ones are white. If I drive with full beam on, I don't even get flashed. Yellow isn't as dazzling.
Of course it's all rather meaningless, nobody chose brighter lights
You are right also especially that there is a good side to it: in countryside roads you will able to see pedestrians/bicycles that don't use refractory lights better. Surely you are blinding everyone else.
A high-trust society that solved coordination problems through legislation, could solve this with a win-win technofix solution where everybody's headlights are as bright as the sun and nobody suffers ill effects.
That technofix solution is polarized headlights, and right-angle-polarized night driving glasses or windshield tints.
There are modest costs (signage & road markings shouldn't be perfectly smooth, retroreflectors work a little differently, and you lose a certain percent efficiency), but they're much less intense than the costs of the current situation.
What is the point of being high trust in the first place if you have to have a government violence backed law for everything?
High trust societies don't have governments dealing BS minutia like automobile headlights. That is expensive in all sorts of ways, assuming you even do it right and don't accidentally create some perverse rent seeking bureaucracy or certification group that has incentive to push things in a dumb direction over time. And high trust societies don't need to do that stuff because they're high trust and collaborative in the first place so those problems solve themselves. The big players identify the problem, mostly solve it with some sort of industry standard, and whatever rounding error is left is a nuisance so small it's not worth addressing.
This is how like the overwhelming majority of automotive (and a million other industries too, computer stuff being a particularly relevant one here) stuff was done before regulation and how a lot of the more cutting edge stuff is still done now with the added step of the regulator saying "hey that thing everyone's mostly doing, it's law now, errybody do it" once things settle.
I don't mean to pick on you specifically, the questionable take you're peddling is pervasive all over HN.
Successful government regulation is the operationalization and protection of self-regulation by legal bonds against defectors, more often than it is totally opposed by capital.
High-trust societies are not some Moldbug-Thielian neofeudalist-libertarian ethnically homogeneous blob, they're just societies that try to fight against their coordination problems with social norms, and when social norms prove insufficient*, by collectively bargaining with each other on a code of conduct. We call that government.
*Money is the root of all evil - it is historically synonymous with an attempt to bargain with opponents who refuse the same social norms, with wergild, with denominated debt-slavery, with foreign trade interactions. Monetary exchange is a mode of interaction for when trust breaks down. In the other direction, money is what poisons relationships and wrecks norms; Consult The Social Network or Treasure of the Sierra Madre for examples.
There is also some dispute over the direction, because polarized sunglasses filter out horizontal light, but we would want this system to filter out vertical light because of the way things reflect. I guess this wouldn't be a showstopper to turning it into law, but it was loud at the time.
I don't know about the UK, but out here in France, this is wrong on most counts. Many country roads have no lines, reflective or otherwise. There will be pedestrians walking around. Also, roads are not always in tip-top shape nor clean, so you need light to be able to see.
However, I do agree that maybe extremely bright lights mounted high are a nuisance.
But I find that bright white headlights actually make that second problem worse. The bright white light means your eyes don't adjust as well to the dark, so you can really only see straight ahead. So it's much harder to spot deer standing in the relative gloom along the side of the road than it is with older halogen headlights.
I think that there's some kind of middle ground. Older cars used to have pretty dim lights. When my dad got a Citroën C5 with Xenon lights many years ago, it was a game changer. That car and one almost identical one (Peugeot 407) were fairly popular around these parts when they came out, and I don't remember ever having issues with their headlights blinding me.
But something started to shift some 5 years ago: more and more cars started having blinding lights. Combined with taller and taller cars, it started being a pain.
I also think that people pay less attention to the state of their cars. Some (like that C5) have auto-levelling lights, and the Xenons seem to last forever (never had to touch them in almost 20 years of service). However, I have the impression that there are more and more cars with headlights which are simply out of whack. I base that judgement on the fact that most of the time, only one of the headlights will blind me, while the other seems fine. And I'm mostly talking "basic" cars, not some high-end mercedes with matrix lights or whatever they're called which may be misdetecting something.
You very much have to worry about that in europe as well in the conditions GP talks about (source: hit a deer in the dark not two weeks back).
These may actually be part of the problem. My dad's 2022 Toyota has "smart" high-beams. That means that when it detects a car in front, it'll switch off the high-beams (as opposed to adapt their pattern).
This is supposed to work with cars going both ways. In my experience, it will detect cars going the same way about half the time, and incoming cars about 3/4 of the time.
Now, since it's not completely broken, I suspect many people who only pay the minimum attention to their driving, and the rest to their phone, will simply leave the high-beams on and figure the car will deal with traffic. So, when the car fails to detect the oncoming car, its pretty bright lights will completely blind the driver.
I wish it was usable, but I think it’s not.
When the lights are essentially so bright that I need sunglasses at night, so my eyes don't hurt, the additional brightness definitely makes me see less, not more.
I don't think so.
If you are driving at normal speed (100 kmh in most of Europe) on an unlit country road, with a low beam, maybe with oncoming traffic, you have 0 (zero) chance of spotting a deer by the road jumping out from the dark in front of you. Zero. Nada. Null. LED or halogen lights, doesn't matter.
But regardless, I still remember driving with a halogen low-beam, it wasn't any better in that regard than with LED. At least with the LED I can see the road properly now, unlike with the halogen.
I guess it is more likely they crash into the car behind you or just run off the road themselves. Unfortunately being a selfish pays off most of the time.
Reading these comments is a reminder that a lot of people aren’t familiar with the diversity of roads and environments across the country and around the world.
Painted reflective road lines in good shape are a luxury, especially in areas with heavy snow and snowplows coming through a lot.
Pedestrians aren’t a concern, but deer and other animals are. The deer are much worse than pedestrians because they move faster and don’t understand how to avoid cars.
Country roads also have very different conditions across the world. In some places you have clear visibility 100 feet to the tree line. In some places I drive, the trees are dense right up to the road with only a couple feet of clearance to the car. Some roads are also so rough that the biggest hazards are avoiding pot holes. Some roads I drive are up against mountain faces and the road may have large rocks that have fallen on it.
I personally don’t feel the need for brighter headlights because I keep my headlight lenses clear, washed, and waxed, and I’m young with good eyesight. I also use brights in the countryside and toggle them off when other drivers are coming.
However, downplaying the challenges of country road driving is weird.
This is a total non sequitur, but we live in the country, and we had a few friends who had only ever lived in the city. A few of them independently expressed anxiety about visiting us due to needing to drive on "curvy country roads." I'm not making a broader point here, but I'd never heard this concern expressed before and was really surprised that it was a big obstacle for some people.
Only if you cant drive very well.
I have always lived in the sticks and drive fast fine on dark lanes with old headlamps. I have never hit anything, never even a near miss. These new headligfhts are a nuisance and completely unecessary. Driving on country roads at night is not hard.
And, in the UK at least, you don't legally need to use them either. If it's lit and the speed limit is no more than 30mph, you only need sidelights and taillights on in the dark.
Unfortunately most people will flash their lights at you if they see it as they assume you've forgotten to put them on.
Headlights don't illuminate far enough to stop in time at 40 or 50 miles an hour, let alone at highway speeds. Snarky view is you may wreck your car, but at least you'll have a year's worth of venison.
The tuner community naturally started retrofitting those lights into their cheaper Hondas and Toyotas, as they were signals of luxury and performance. Those times were bad, since those folk were not aiming them properly.
Mainstream brands followed shortly afterwards, and now they are standard equipment. Honestly there is no going back. People won’t want a car with dim lights when every other car has “nicer” ones.
I agree it will take regulation to fix, and I am not at all confident in that ever happening. What used to be a $30 part at the auto store is now at least $300 in special parts and labor to replace a headlight, on the low end
So I can see a powerful motivation to fit bright headlights in the cars, regardless of the other's comfort.
The first time I used the hi-beams in my life was when I came off the ferry on Manitoulin Island and drove to my hotel from there. This is what that road looks like: https://maps.app.goo.gl/L7JajQbGQA7Fog1g9. No reflectors, the road lines aren't reflective, no ancillary lights from civilization to be aware of, and of course since it's so rural, you get to deal with all of the wildlife running around. I turned my hi-beams and realized for the first time in my life all the things I wasn't seeing before.
And I NEED those lights, especially this time of year where it's getting dark earlier and the deer, moose and elk are moving around during light transition hours.
Not correct on all counts. Depending upon "where" out in the country, you can very well be the only car on the road for as far as you can see to the horizon.
A very many country roads do not have any reflectors (those are often only installed on highway roads, not the roads you use to get to/from your destination to the highway.
Some country roads will have reflective paint lines, but a good many will have non-reflective paint lines, and/or no lines at all or the paint is so worn down that they may as well have no lines at all.
And while the rate of encountering pedestrians will be way less than in a city, it is very much not the case that there "won't be pedestrians". There very much will be pedestrians, sometimes. And for those rare sometimes you very much want to be able to recognize them from as far away as possible.
The purpose of high beams in the country is not "brighter" (calling them "high beams", while correct, causes many to believe that "high" refers to "brighter"). The purpose of "high" beams is longer throw (the light goes further down the road, so you can see obstacles from a greater distance). The "high" in "high beams" refers to the fact that the angle of throw is set "higher" to cause the lamps to illuminate a greater distance down the road.
So, headlights are still needed in the city, even if the streetlamps are good enough to see the road, and even during the day.
Running lights help, but it's still easier to identify a car with two (normal, non-blinding) headlights on than one with just running lights on, and much much easier when compared against a car with no lights on at all.
Marketing.
This is the same kind of useful advice as the one to brake check those whose driving style you don't like very much, fight (real or perceived) road hazard with deliberately creating more hazard.
That's with simple high beam assist. The matrix ones you refer to actually have another feature which makes things even worse; they progressively dip the light in parts, but combined with the first effect this means that you have a few seconds of being blinded before all of their component leds have been dipped.
Not to mention that they are only reacting to something directly in front of them for the most part -- meaning you can be blinded on curves, or when turn around and looking at them off axis (say as they wait to turn into a road).
Additionally, car designers should leave headlights and indicators alone, unless they are making the vehicles safer. The first time I encountered an oncoming car with a horizontal LED strip between the lights, I had no idea what style of vehicle was oncoming.
Even if the dip angle is the same (1% gradient or so), this can still dazzle most people nearby.
Then there's the height of the hood, headlights are so much higher than they used to on average. Amplifies that pain.
We went from the road is visible to everyone, to the road is only visible to some people because the rest of us don't have ultra bright lights and are getting blinded.
I don't drive much here in Switzerland but I haven't noticed a problem when I do drive, but in the USA when I drive, especially in rural areas it's a pain.
[0] https://mattersoftesting.blog.gov.uk/the-mot-headlamp-aim-te...
LED white lights are the actually the problem
"Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 108 (FMVSS 108) regulates all automotive lighting, signalling and reflective devices in the United States.
In February 2022, FMVSS 108 was amended to allow automakers to install adaptive driver beam (ADB) headlamps on new vehicles. However, carmakers have not implemented ADB because of contradictions in the rule.
As of December 2024, FMVSS 108 has not been updated to adapt to widespread use of LED headlamps, which are criticized for being too bright and blinding other drivers. Some manufacturers have reportedly engineered headlamps to have a dark spot where they are measured according to the regulation while being over-illuminated in the rest of the field."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Motor_Vehicle_Safety_S...
"Adaptive Highbeam Assist is Mercedes-Benz's marketing name for a headlight control strategy that continuously automatically tailors the headlamp range so the beam just reaches other vehicles ahead, thus always ensuring maximum possible seeing range without glaring other road users.
This technology is also known as Adaptive Driving Beams (ADB).
Until February 2022, this technology had been illegal in the US, as FMVSS 108 specifically stated that headlamps must have dedicated high and low beams to be deemed road-legal. An infrastructure bill enacted in November 2021 included language that directs the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to amend FMVSS 108 to allow the use of this technology, and set a two-year deadline for implementing this change. In February 2022, the NHTSA amended FMVSS 108 allowing adaptive headlights for use in the US. However, the new regulations are quite different from the ones in effect in Europe and Asia and prevent car manufacturers from easily adapting their systems to the US market."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headlamp?wprov=sfti1#Adaptive_...
It relies on the camera recognizing what should be excluded from the light pattern, for one. Easy for oncoming cars as well as ones in front of you. Less easy for vehicles that are perpendicular to you (like just showing their nose and driver, waiting to turn onto the road you are already on). And then there are pedestrians.
They do try to mitigate that by turning off the adaptive high beam whenever the car detects that you are in a well lit area with lots of ambient lighting sources (i.e. the city), but it's not foolproof. And since you just leave it on all the time, you end up using the "high beam" light far more often than you'd probably choose to when controlling it manually.
Public roads are not race tracks; they are for people.
The solution would be to overtake people with tinted windows. Unfortunately, the type of people with tinted windows are exactly the type you shouldn't overtake.
So every soccer mom SUV?
Aftermarket tints are dark and people get both the rear window and windshield tinted.
Put on tint.
Get pulled over (hopefully) a while later
Police demand you remove it and usually write you a ticket for ~50 eur
Maybe you plead that the car is your dad's if it's not registered to you and get to keep the tint if they decide to do you a favor
Otherwise you remove it and go pay another X eur a week later to have new one put on
Since there's no license point deduction, it's just a money/inconvenience issue.
I too wonder why these are legal.
I believe flashing lights are actually less safe as it encourages the driver to look AWAY from you. I certainly don't keep staring at a flashing light.
The old halogen-warm colors were better, too. You don't want "area denial" lighting on your everyday ride.
- In many new cars the headlights do indeed appear as very bright. In the Xenon era the headlight height adjustment per occupancy was done automatically but at least in a few new cars I've been in with LED headlights this is not the case and the driver needs to adjust it by hand and I'm pretty sure the vast majority doesn't do that.
- Many new cars offer automated switching of high beam lights and the results vary to say the least.
- Small experience from UK highways gave me the same impression, the middle strip is not a solid one which is a huge issue when the lights from the other side blind you and I'm talking about normal headlights just because of road curvature or height difference of the opposing lanes while there are no overhead road lights.
EDIT:format
The number of people who don't use their lights judiciously is surprisingly large. Besides high beam issues, I've also observed people who think that their daytime running lights are headlights. This is especially obvious because their taillights will be off.
I'm pretty sure that, like "taking control of [their] borders by leaving the EU", this is a course of action that will make everyone happy.
Granted, my Yaris with full LED lights and their atrocious cool white light is a part of the problem, so I'm in no position to complain, but at least my lights are aimed correctly, so there's that.
The old light regulation actually had a limit on how bright the running lights could be.
The new LED light regulation says you can have it as bright as the manufacturer wants it to be.
So now there is the problem of misaligned headlights that don't point at the road but instead point at cars, and are as bright or brighter than the old incandescent high beams.
I have to have my rear-view mirror permanently flipped at night now. I never needed to do that in the past except when some idiot actually was using their high beams.
There’s someone in my neighborhood who has an imported Toyota Sequoia. Magnificent machine. His car could be mistaken for a small bus. When he vacates the spot, two normal sized cars can park in it. Our actual buses and semis often have lower headlights than that thing.
In recent years I've started being unable to tell who's intentionally blinding traffic and who's just got misconfigured lamps (shining at eye level instead of angled down at the road). It used to be feasible to also let people know when their lights are misconfigured, I'd probably decide 1 warrants a signal across several hours of driving (also because of avoiding collateral targets), but the most recent time I drove, I think there was always at least one car in sight that had the issue. It's completely constant. It was worsening a few years ago but it's really getting out of hand now, in Germany and the Netherlands at least. Some people's lights are even piercing by day! Thankfully that is quite rare yet
(I'll say it looked cool even if we didn't need the gimmick, other drivers did occasionally flash us when they were at the edge of its detection range, and I can't imagine it improves the wildlife situation that's already not exactly thriving with habitat areas cut up by roads and light pollution from towns and cars everywhere around it)
I haven't seen this type of headlight as a third party yet. I've been on the lookout for where another car might light up areas around me but never noticed it. Not sure it's that common in Germany or the Netherlands
I also assume that few people complain to the manufacturer so they're probably not even aware that people find it a nuisance. While one complaint won't do anything, it could be doing anyway just in case you're not the only one who does
With what? Another set that has the exact same problem? Short of replacing the whole car, there's no good solution for the consumer, given that the problem is part of the design.
It's really up to regulators to put something in place though, I don't understand why it is taking so long. It's not like they want those super-bright headlights, they just come with the car...
Still, obviously, nothing you can do, or the driver in general. And I guess the manufacturers aren't incentivised. Regulation is the only thing that I can think of that will work.
I helped a friend with aligning the headlight after changing the bulb some years ago, I hear newer cars don't let you change the bulb yourself necessarily but then surely the mechanics can be asked to do this when they change it anyway, or upon the next inspection or so?
For the cars I owned, only one set of official lights existed. Aftermarket would be nearly guaranteed to be worse quality and poorer alignment. And no changing them in the warranty period either.
Car parts are not like PC parts, where you can buy your own and mix-and-match.
No, things with car lights are not as you think. In many modern cars there are no bulbs, but laser diodes and complex lenses and god knows what else. I wouldn't trust anyone to fiddle with mine and do a good job, including the dealership.
Evidently that includes the manufacturer, since he wasn't able to give you proper lights to begin with.
> When I got my Honda van with stock LED headlights about a year ago, people started flashing me that my brights were on.
They then proceed to adjust them to spec, which is what they were already at, thus not fixing the problem.
This was my initial thought too, but thinking about it for a second, I'm sure it's some absurd proprietary connector or housing, with a DRM chip of course, and only comes in the one variety to protect their brand.
You could... fix it?
All headlights can be aimed. Even the "auto-levelling" ones have adjustments. I'm sure there are some where it requires some dealer-only programming tool, but a lot still just have little knobs and things. If they don't go ask the dealer to do it.
I drove behind a friend and they told me after that my headlight was shining in their side mirror and blinding them. I put my car in the garage and spent 15 minutes with a screwdriver adjusting the aiming on the auto-leveling sealed LED headlight units so it was lower and wouldn't blind people.
But if it's a newish car, I assume it is factory tuned to whatever standard it is supposed to be, and if you change it, at the very least it will get changed back when doing MOT.
I do this here in the UK too, it happens a fair amount in the countryside where people will forget to turn off their high-beams as they reach a junction, and some of them driving older vehicles that won't detect oncoming traffic and auto-dip.
Like you, I increasingly have the issue, in the city, that some lights are so damn bright I literally can't tell if they're using high-beams other than the fact I've grown to know which models are the worst for it. Flashing them is pointless because they won't understand unless someone actually stops to tell them one day.
Legislation needs to fix this, they never should have been allowed to be sold like this, and I hope mandates for changes to the annual inspections (MOT here in UK) come in to correct it for existing vehicles.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fRjMHtnShs
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZJoPbk53ug
(all his videos are good)
As a long-time walker in the US, anecdotally, I've noticed some especially blinding car headlights, and they seem to be among the whiter ones. "Hey, thanks for ruining my night vision and my sleep cycle." But I usually can't tell whether the cause of the problem is the the aiming, brightness, or temperature. I thought headlights were carefully regulated.
(There's something about LED lights that brings out oblivious or indifferent behavior. Maybe involving efficiency improvements, and people not reassessing requirements (e.g., when you couldn't get a too-bright light, or it would be too expensive to operate, you didn't have to think about other not-too-bright requirements). In recent years, we got municipalities installing miserable bright white street lamps, prompting complaints from walkers and people who don't have blackout curtains anywhere that shines in at night. And the last couple years, some individual residential properties in my very dense neighborhood are installing crazy-bright white LED floodlights outdoors, shining at sidewalks and adjacent property windows, brighter than even the new street lamps. I'm starting to see walkers at night going out into the street (which isn't very safe), just to avoid the blast. The first too-bright property lights to appear on a block's street are very easy to spot, because they're obviously the brightest thing there.)
After all, even in the countryside the darkness usually is far from complete. You still see quite a few meters without any headlights. Though the tradeoff would be different for cars with their much higher speed.
Even during the day, the other week I was driving and some small mini had super bright white lights on, no need for them, it was bright day out. Even just the normal "day" lights on new cars can be too sharp/bright. It's ok if I don't look at them directly, but if I accidently check that way it's distracting.
PSA: Turn off your automatic high beams, they aren't worth it the damage they do to the rest of us.
1% said they were sometimes distracted by incoming vehicles, and that was fine.
Instead, they are too high, because the idiots with new cars rely on the automatic beam positioning which is always too slow.
Or they are fitting led bulbs in an halogen fixture and never bother to make the adjustments
But I don't necessarily have a problem with the headlights just because they're too powerful.
I'm happy my Tesla does a decent job of having the screen be quite dark at night but the headlights are quite bad with the horizontal cutoff style that only lights the first few feet of horizontal ahead of the car. I need to see those deer and elk on the side of the road, damn it.
My saabs, of the 5 I own, only have working lights in about 2 of them. One has no tacho (from factory), one no speedo (broken)
Turns out you pretty much dont need any of that stuff anyway.
Maybe this is missing from your Tesla, but in my poor VW the "screen" has a dark mode which is automatically turned on when the lights are turned on - including Android Auto and Google Maps, which is pretty much the only thing I ever use it for.
Previously I had a rusty Toyota with a very pale orange display, it was always either too dim or too bright, terrible contrast, and changing brightness on it was a pain. I hated that with a passion.
Tesla seems to do dark mode on sun rise / sun set.
Doing it with the lights seems like a strange decision - sometimes I want my lights on when it’s bright - e.g. fog, rain or when the sun is low and I want others to see me.
I made a complaint about it to the service department and was told that it was intentional so that the internal camera could see me better to ensure compliance with my eyes looking at the road. That might be true, but since I could still manually turn the brightness down after starting self drive and self drive would continue, it's obviously not required and there should be some way to disable it.
As for LEDs, to me, the Tesla Model 3 headlights are the worst offender, but not all of them, just the majority. I can look down a column of oncoming cars and pick out the Model 3s from a few blocks distance. I suspect that the Model 3 headlights are often maladjusted as they have a user/driver-accessible headlight aiming menu and it looks to me like a lot of Tesla owners get in to that menu and do some freelance aiming. Plus, a lot of Model 3 drivers around here—and there are a lot of them here (Seattle area)—seem to turn on everything, brights, DRLs, fog lights, every lamp.
Another egregious offender is the Acura Jewel-Eye headlights although I am seeing ever more cars with headlights set to stun.
The worst situation is waiting at an intersection where the pavement is crowned to drain the intersection, making the headlights on the cars opposite just miserable to contend with. Sometimes so bad I can’t see the traffic lights.
I am not sure what the solution is but the situation is getting worse and quickly.
The only thing that turning the headlights "on" does differently is enable high beams.
Your vision may be good enough to see ahead of you by candlelight, but other drivers are not going to expect a nearly invisible car approaching at night. Turn on your headlights.
Properly repairing your car might make it less distracting/infuriating.
Typically the DRL lamps switch off or go to a dimmer setting when the headlights are on.
That omnidirectional nature makes them pure glare at night.
One might consider taking the 5 minutes to align your headlights? Even if you're alone and don't have a helping friend with a tape measure it's not difficult to just make them a little more properly adjusted.
Thankfully it was easy to adjust.
Source: live within a few miles of the Tesla factory, so I get more than my fair share of them. MOST of the drivers seem completely oblivious to this.
>I am not sure what the solution is but the situation is getting worse and quickly.
The solution is legislation and enforcement. Driving at night now makes me afraid for my safety because I'm literally blinded by oncoming traffic, and I'm sure that many other people share the same sentiment. I would happily argue that driving with lights bright enough to impair other drivers counts as wreckless driving and ought to be treated as such, but as far as I can tell, there are no legislative limits on directional lumen output or directional calibration for front-facing lights on cars, which leaves "wreckless" open to interpretation. This issue requires legislation that affects car manufacturers to prevent them from putting dangerous lights in their cars, and legislation that requires regular inspection of cars regarding their lumen output and headlight calibration. Most US states already require yearly inspections for emissions for most cars in order to re-register them; there are already means and methods in place for this to happen, it just needs to be done.
I'm sick of feeling like im going to die every time I drive home because some asshole wants to see everything a mile in front of him.
CNN writes about why headlight brightness is worse in the US than in other countries:
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/15/cars/headlights-tech-adap...
Just turn the damn maximum output down.
However, from a safety point of view, I'm not convinced the trade off is actually in favour of reducing illumination for everyone.
The point I was trying to make is that reducing the brightness isn't a simple trade off. How many accidents are caused by people being "blinded" vs people not seeing something until it was too late?
If it needs regulation to fix then that regulation should try to balance those things. Perhaps by automatically adjusting the headlights when another car is detected (maybe matrix style headlights, or a simple angle adjustment).
Look at the output of a car from 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and 30 years ago compared to today.
Each is progressively dimmer with their low beams. Modern low beams are brighter than the high-beams of yesteryear!
The (2017) Ford Galaxy has actually pretty decent auto-main-beams. Importantly, the stalk controls don't stop working but also if I'm just a fraction of a second late in turning them off manually and the system beats me to it, they stay off. They also stay off when driving on roads with street lights.
This is one of my pet peeves.
I've categorized it into what I believe are the main causes:
1. People just don't know as well today that the blue indicator means you're blinding people
2. People with newer cars which will automatically turn off the headlights, including the brights, when you turn off and leave the car.
3. People with older cars where the low-beams are burned out or broken
I've been tempted to purchase digital billboard space to raise awareness. Eg., "If this blue indicator is on, you're blinding everyone".
And/or, get a mirror on my trunk that I can adjust the angle of from inside the cabin to reflect back high-beams at the driver.
Mostly I'm hoping that automatic high-beams, like some Ford trucks I've seen do well, proliferate more!
For those behind me, I've discovered that my side mirror has an angle where it reliably bounces the beams back. I've gotten more than a couple of drivers to turn their beams down with this method (but they have to be tailgating for it to work, which usually means we're already in an adversarial situation).
At this point I put full blame on car manufacturers and lack of government regulation and enforcement. Lights will keep getting brighter because lights are getting brighter. It's a death spiral.
If you have OEM headlights, I can understand your frustration - neither you nor the other driver has control over that. I think this is what OP posted this whole thread about.
If, however, you've installed third-party LED headlights, then you're sort of on the hook for this.
I'd add that whoever it was that 'incorrectly' flashed you is long gone by the time you're leaving the highs on and blinding everyone in your path. That's aggressive and uncalled for.
Or worse, they're accustomed to "automatic" lights and don't even know where the switch is, so they're driving around at dusk or in fog, rain, or snow in a white, gray, or black vehicle without their lights on.
I have also been tempted to purchase digital billboard space, but not on the side of the road. I want LED signs on my roof rack (one forward, one back) with column or two of buttons on the dash to call up a slate of messages:
1. TURN YOUR BRIGHTS OFF! BLUE MEANS BLINDING.
1b. OW! YOUR HEADLIGHTS ARE MISALIGNED.
2. TURN YOUR HEADLIGHTS ON! THOSE ARE DRLs.
3. TURN LIGHTS ON TO BE SEEN EVEN IF IT'S NOT DARK.
4. MY SAFE FOLLOWING DISTANCE IS NOT A SPOT FOR YOU.
5. YOU ARE TAILGATING. I WILL NOT SPEED FOR YOU.
6. YIELD DOES NOT MEAN STOP.
7. I AM ZIPPER MERGING, NOT CUTTING THE LINE.
8. DRIVE CAREFULLY! I JUST SAW A DEER.
9. GO AHEAD, I SEE YOU.
10. YOU HAVE A PROBLEM WITH YOUR VEHICLE, PULL OVER.
11. THANK YOU!
Plus a few spare slots to be implemented as needs arise.
I've been unimpressed with the automatic high-beams on my wife's newer Toyota and on other rentals I've driven, they usually depend on a direct line-of-sight to the other car's headlights, which means they stay on just long enough to hit the windshield of another car cresting a hill and blind them. Then they courteously turn off a few camera frames and vision analyses after the low beams become visible. If a __competent__ driver is controlling the high/low beams manually, they'll see the headlights of the other car illuminating the trees and such and turn off the high beams a couple critical seconds earlier. But I admit that the automatic systems are miles better at managing it than the __incompetent__ drivers who are all too common.
If there is one thing that tend to cause conflict and trigger dangerous situations in traffic, it is when someone driving at 0.001% faster than the next car enter left lane while maintaining the exact same speed, basically matching the speed on the right. That is just as illegal as speeding.
And then there are the drivers who are in the centre/right lane who, when you try to pass on their left, speed up to try to prevent you from passing them.
Here in the UK, it is pretty much universally the case that if there are buildings, there are street lights. (Maybe there are occasional exceptions where there's a single building in the middle of nowhere on a rural road; I'm not sure. And I suppose there must be occasional outages of street lighting even in e.g. dense city centres. But such things are rare.) Having high beams on in almost any context where there are buildings around is therefore unnecessary, against the Highway Code, and quite possibly criminal under RVLR reg 27.
You sometimes see a very clear boundary. The more middle-class housing is subdivisions built all at once somewhere in the 1960s-2000s, with underground utilities and street lights. This infrastructure was mandated by the city, when the developers were looking to get their newly built neighborhood annexed into it. Around the next corner, darker streets with overhead utilities and more spread out lots with oversized "McMansion" houses. These are following the more relaxed county building codes and had the space available for such construction.
These roads are also more likely to have expensive new cars with all the computerized functions. Walking in this limbo world at the edge of our town, I've also noticed being blinded by cars as a pedestrian with more dynamic effects. I suspect are the car's system actively painting me with more light. It is a little bit like the "fringing" you see when the cutoff of older HID projection lamps sweeps over you due to road undulation. But it happens too quickly and both vertically and horizontally. It feels like being hit with a targeted spot light.
I wish the engineers spent the same care to put a dark halo on a pedestrian face as they do for oncoming drivers. Even when carrying my own flashlight, such encounters can be dazzling enough to basically go blind and not be able to see the dark paving in front of me for a minute. My light is more to make me visible to the cars than to really illuminate my path for myself. It doesn't stand a chance against the huge dynamic range of these car lighting systems.
#7 You're either doing something good or something very bad, so I hope it's the former. If you're trying to pace the lane next to you, then it sounds like it's at least an honest attempt to get things zipper merging. If you're telling yourself that cars need to be in both lanes to zipper merge, while zooming to the end and then hoping maybe a zipper merge will happen, you're getting a big benefit to yourself while still causing slowdown for everyone else.
#7 In many states (e.g. [1]) if two lanes are merging you're expected to merge at the last possible point. This allows more cars to fit on the road to reduce congestion, and it reduces sudden stops.
[0] https://www.monash.edu/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/216475/An...
[1] https://wsdot.wa.gov/travel/traffic-safety-methods/work-zone...
Maintaining smooth merging is far more important than where the merging happens.
The page you linked even says "It is legal to wait to merge until the lane closure devices (cones or barrels) start, but we recommend merging sooner than that to give more time to find a gap, complete the merge, and avoid getting in a pinch when the devices make the closed lane too narrow. Merging sooner also avoids the risk of hitting a closure device or ending up inside the work zone."
It recommends zippering, but nowhere in there does it recommend waiting for "the last possible point".
Someone that has it in their head that zippering is best and zippering needs to be done at the end is likely to cause more harm than good, even if they're working off the purest intentions. Keeping both lanes in use is a distant second priority to making sure the merge is smooth.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merge_%28traffic%29#Late_merge
Tell that to the site linked above, because even though they say "like a zipper" they want it to happen early.
> The problem is that if some cars merge too early, other cars will keep driving down the road and then merging in front of the early mergers, it ends up being disruptive in heavy traffic conditions. If everyone consistently merges at the same point in heavy traffic conditions it's more predictable, leading to better through flow.
I don't blame the early mergers there. If someone zooms down the empty lane then they are not attempting to zipper merge, they are bad actors.
A proper zipper, at the last moment, is slightly better than early merging. But again smoothness is the important factor. Smoothness is 90% of the solution. Do not give up smoothness for the sake of being more zipper-y. If people think you're cutting in line, you probably are cutting in line.
-
Also, anywhere we want to make sure there's a zipper merge, how about we stop having a favored lane? Cut off half of each lane at the merge point.
Good point, even in a situation that necessitates a favored lane, could still setup this half-of-each-lane merge point well in front of that.
if im biking and waiting at a stop sign: without fail, the last car in a long line of cars will slam on the breaks and insist i go when they have no stop sign. it would have been faster for everyone if they just kept driving and i cross after they pass, like the rules of the road prescribe
The worst: automatic headlights required by regulations, but no corresponding automatic taillights. At least before those regulations one would notice the darkness in front and turn on (both) lights, but now you have drivers thinking their rear is also lit because the front is.
I've always expected that in the future when all cars are fully self-driving, they would have some kind of communication channel to improve efficiency. Why can't we have this for humans too before that.
ONLY IF YOU'RE LIVING IN THE '90S! THE REST OF US HAVE MATRIX HEADLIGHTS! ALSO TURN OFF YOUR CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL!
I have a 2021 Tacoma, and its automatic high-beam adjustment is terrible. It does a reasonable job of turning high beams off when a car approaches, but it has a number of problems that make it unusable. After the car passes it waits too long to reactivate the high beams. That's when they're needed most; my eyes have already adjusted to the other car's headlights, now the road is dark again, and I'm still on low beams.
It's way too sensitive. When a car approaches from a long ways away, it sometimes turns high beams off for minutes at a time. It turns them off when there are widely-spaced streetlights on long empty rural highways.
I finally took the time to figure out where the switch is to turn off automatic high-beam adjustment. I do a much better job knowing when to dim and reactive the lights than the vehicle does.
Though from a game theory point of view, leaving them on for a couple of seconds is probably ideal to remind anyone who forgets to dim their own headlights.
That said, I'm still not convinced your truck isn't doing the right thing. Even a mile a way you've got perhaps 30 seconds before you are passing each other. Is there much to be gained by leaving them on for a few more seconds? Seeing another car heading towards me is a much clearer and less likely to be forgotten trigger than "ok, about now my lights are probably getting annoying".
The feature seems to be poorly implemented by all manufacturers. I see Teslas driving around flashing high beams every night because they trigger on/off really quickly and the drivers seem oblivious to the rapid change.
On a purely practical note from someone who is very light-sensitive, a combination of partially closing the eye closest to the light and fixing your gaze on the the outer edge of your lane (such as lane marker or eode of road) almost eliminates this problem, even for modern stupid-bright headlights.
Added benefit of letting you see more of your own lane in spite of the oncoming lights.
Ironically, digital billboards are often 10x more obnoxious than even LED high beams in my area (and those are plenty awful, FWIW). We've got a few nearby that are so bright they could be used as stadium lighting when they're set to white. Naturally, half the ads running on them feature a white background, so it's like a stadium light that flips on and off every 15 seconds. Considering they're pointed directly at drivers' faces, I genuinely don't understand why there isn't more opposition to them; they're absolutely blinding. I'm seriously considering bugging local and state reps about it until they pass light intensity ordinances in my area.
One way to implement would be to mount a thin object , like a toothpick thickness and 1 or 2 cm long say on the mirror 90 degrees vertically to mirror surface , then (auto? ) adjust so their is no shadow from car's headlights that is behind.
Like lots of my other ideas , when i search for them , they already exist .maybe this one too
Found similar ideas already exist for car rear view mirrors .... ie Google finds ... ".... auto-dimming rearview mirror automatically adjusts to reduce glare from incident light by using sensors and an electrochromic gel layer...." However my google of words "...auto adjust reflecting mirror to face incident light...." FInd there is much discussion on Faceboot and REddit for people asking for "...mirrors that reflect very bright high been lights BACK at the driver BEHIND ...: Could not find a implementation though ... Maybe it should be an Arduino project ....
I was in a mates car recently and it scared the hell out of me, he was tail gating for most of a 3 hour journey. Eventually we got to a bit with chevrons and he wasn't obeying the rule staying N chevrons away from the car in front. I told him and he replied "nonsense, my car beeps if I'm too close to the car in front" I didn't have the energy to point out that is a collision warning not a safe distance measurer type device.
And yeah, I don't let tooling on my car replace common sense driving habits. I still turn my head when reversing, even if I can see what's behind me on the camera. I think it's crazy that people rely so much on unreliable tech on their cars.
On another note- I feel sad that you could tell your mate "the way you're driving is making me uncomfortable" and be met with basically "your discomfort isn't valid because [technology] so I won't change my behaviour".
Recently heard from a friend that also continues to mask when sharing air, they had arranged car pooling for one of their children. And just this morning the other parent texted saying "your child wearing a mask makes me uncomfortable so we can no longer car pool".
So … yeah. Entirely unsurprised by that attitude. "Every person for themselves but also not if it's something I personally dislike."
But I'll offer one reply at your word that it's genuine and not passive-aggressive.
1. I am currently dealing with the after-effects of a previous Covid infection that requires expensive, ongoing medical treatment. I'm not anxious to test what additional infections may cause.
2. Wearing an N95 respirator is a cheap and easy preventative measure that is highly effective.
3. I adjust my habits based on measured risk. In my part of the world (Alberta), the current risk forecast for November 8-21 is that approximately 1 in every 81 people are currently infected with Covid. I relax my masking when it's 1 in 10,000 or less (which is not an unreasonable number; it's been there in the past).
4. Recent medical studies suggest that repeated Covid exposure is particularly harmful for children. Long Covid is now the #1 chronic condition in children in the US (displacing asthma as the top chronic childhood condition). As a parent, I see it as my responsibility to give my children the best chance at a long, healthy, medical-intervention-free life.
A few links (or just use Google):
- Covid monitoring in Canada: https://covid19resources.ca/
- Long Covid overtaking asthma as top childhood chronic illness: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
- Rolling Stone on Covid's affects on children: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/long-c...
- Remarks by Violet Affleck: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBTjCqIxorw
- Tom Hanks: https://whn.global/youve-got-a-friend-in-me-tom-hanks-shows-...
- A longer answer than mine: https://whn.global/yes-we-continue-wearing-masks/
However as with the bright headlamps, there's no real solution coming anytime soon. I mean there are solutions - nasal vaccines and proper NHTSA regulation, but I have no hope in any of those to materialize.
I consider outdoor air to be unshared, except in cases of large dense crowds (such as say outdoor festivals or sporting events).
I consider risky shared air to be indoor air with one or more other individuals that are not known to be taking infection-prevention precautions.
One can measure CO₂ as a proxy to rebreathed air fraction.
For example, a CO₂ reading of 2300ppm (common in a small or medium room with a few others, or larger rooms with a crowd or conference room, or in a car) means 5% of your air is rebreathed (5% of your intake is output from another person's lungs).
A way to think about this is we take ~20 breaths a minute on average. So in that scenario, it would be equivalent to one breath every minute coming directly from someone else's lungs. If they happen to be contagious with an airborne contagion (such as Covid, or influenza, or RSV), there's a high likelihood that you will catch it if you're spending more than a short time in that environment.
There are nuances, such as maybe the air is being scrubbed (eg by a HEPA filter) which won't affect the CO₂ levels but will drastically lower the infectious risk of that environment.
More reading: https://www.energyvanguard.com/blog/what-a-carbon-dioxide-mo...
On this topic, I got a CO₂ meter fairly recently and was shocked how quickly it spikes with a couple of people in a car with the windows up and on recirculate. Easily over 2000 after a few minutes. I have to remind myself regularly when it's really hot or cold outside to keep the vent setting on fresh air.
What about that could possibly make someone uncomfortable. How does it have any effect on the other parent?
As I get older I've realised that most people in my life react negatively if I express emotion that what they are doing is upsetting. It is only recently that I've realised my sample size is small and this kind of gas lighting behaviour is not ok. I've actually reached a point where I'm thankful that the internet popularised the phrase because it had helped me diagnose shitty behaviour that I've tolerated my whole life.
Right. I guess they feel accused, as though you're attacking their behaviour rather than sharing how it makes you feel, and instinctively become defensive in response?
It's wonderful to meet people who don't think this way. My partner is incredible at this, I can tell her "when you X I feel Y" and know without a doubt her reaction will come from a place of trying to work together to understand whether the problem and solution exist in X, Y or both.
I get it. Maybe you're not interested in it. You’re at A, you want to arrive at B, and driving is just your tool for getting there.
But to misquote Trotsky, you may not be interested in driving, but driving is interested in you. Driving is the most dangerous thing most drivers do on a regular basis. Probably by a significant margin. Even if you hate it, respect it. Put in the effort to do it well.
So once you restore your following distance, that person has cost you less than 2 seconds.
Is it a bit annoying? Sure. But it's not a reason to start tailgating (not that you were necessarily claiming that).
The fact is, you can have only so much space in front of you as other cars allow. I had to reduce the distance literally because of this. It then stopped happening.
Did we all get subtle brain damage?
https://www.sabre-roads.org.uk/wiki/Road_Markings/Chevrons_(...
It’s a UK thing:
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/national-highways-urges-d...
I don't even need to keep an eye on my cooking anymore, the smoke alarm beeps when I get too close.
Same. I've also noticed that people entering the interstate seem to _expect_ that cars already on the interstate move over, or change speed to let them merge. Usually at 10-15 MPH slower than the speed of traffic.
I've made a point to, when I cannot move over, remain in my lane at the same speed. And I've had people just absolutely wait until the last moment of a long on-ramp to speed up, or slow down to merge. It's bizarre.
The thing is, IMO, there is a growing psychopathic trend of not giving a shit about other people. You can tell them "you're blinding everyone" and they will not care. They can see better, and the fact that you can't see at all as a consequence does not concern them. It's not their problem.
In many modern cars with auto-dipping headlights, this is not true (or at least not intended by the manufacturer to be true).
Your information is outdated. My Tesla with matrix headlights keeps the high-beam indicator on but oncoming drivers are not blinded.
Still, the idea that you should give headlight illumination control to the idiot behind the wheel is insane to me. Is it not a regulated height? Maybe that explains why it's a nightmare to drive at night anymore.
It seems vastly less necessary now to have that control in the hands of the driver.
I’m just mentioning that headlight automation was being done back in the 1960s with simple electronics. Just a photo cell and a lens. The driver can adjust sensitivity.
Look at a large vehicle like a bus. The lights are mounted low. This should be how it is for all vehicles.
Something has changed in how we use headlights, and not for the better.
Historically, drivers behaved very differently. When "brights" were actually rare and reserved for dark stretches of highway, you'd dim them the moment you saw another car approaching. Often that meant switching to low beams when the other vehicle was more than a thousand feet away. Courtesy and safety were the norm.
The technology has come a long way. Early headlights in the 1880s burned oil or kerosene. Acetylene gas lamps followed, and electric lighting appeared in the early 1900s. For decades after 1940, U.S. regulations froze headlight design into a two-lamp, 7-inch sealed-beam configuration. That rule unintentionally limited improvements in beam shape and brightness. Only in the 1970s and 1980s did halogens and replaceable-bulb designs become widely permitted, which opened the door to much brighter and more varied systems.
Then came the xenon era in the late 1990s and early 2000s. High-Intensity Discharge (HID) lamps felt futuristic at the time, but they were also infamous for their glare, especially when installed into housings not designed for them. This is where "riced-out" aftermarket kits made things worse. People would drop cheap HID or later LED bulbs into reflector housings built for halogen. The result was scattered, unfocused light that looked bright from the driver's seat but created a wall of glare for everyone else. That trend never fully went away.
Today, Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 108 (FMVSS 108) governs headlamps. It sets minimum performance requirements and basic definitions for high and low beams, but it does not impose strict limits on maximum brightness or color temperature. The old "300 candlepower requires a dimmer switch" phrasing still floats around, but there is no tight federal cap on lumens or color warmth. States can enforce aiming requirements, but in practice they rarely do. Nobody is pulling cars over with a light meter.
Modern LEDs changed the equation again. They're efficient, crisp, and extremely "white" (actually "blue") which makes them appear even brighter to human eyes at night. Complaints about perceived glare have been climbing for years, and there's no shortage of real-world examples of it in the wild. https://old.reddit.com/r/fuckyourheadlights/
Automakers tried to help with automatic high-beam systems, but these were designed to detect oncoming headlamps, not pedestrians. If you're walking your dogs at night, the system may not dim because it "sees" nothing to react to. Many drivers rely on auto mode and never manually intervene, so they cruise around blasting full brightness without realizing it.
My workaround is simple. I carry a high-power flashlight and give a quick shine toward cars running high beams. The auto-dimmer interprets it as another vehicle and drops to low beam. It also alerts the driver that something is off. Plenty of neighbors have told me they had no idea their headlights weren't dimming. (Teslas are by far the worst offenders.)
This is the flashlight I use:
https://www.costco.ca/infinity-x1-7000-lumen-flashlight.prod...
Maybe Corey Hart had the right idea … sunglasses at night
The quality of the auto-dip implementation varies enormously as well.
They do. Also, the ones with matrix LEDs (most newer Models other than the Cybertruck) automatically create a circle of darkness around anything they detect to be another vehicle.
It's not hard to know when a car is approaching from corners / hills; there's light before they get there. I have fun manually adjusting the brights; I drive automatic transmission, lighting is the only fun I get.
It's quite magical and weird to observe in real time. When driving past oncoming cars, you can see a halo of darkness around each car. There are videos on YouTube that show the effect pretty well.
I mean, the reptile part of my brain is really tempted to do so, because every other car on the road is blinding me - why be a good citizen, it's all fucking Mad Max out there anyways...
(On odd-numbered days, that part of my brain compels me to go through the mall parking lot and spray a filter onto all the offending vehicles' headlights.)
The issue is that the giga-bright headlights would be fine if they were pointed at the road, instead of onto oncoming traffic. And some people have them incorrectly adjusted, where they do point onto incoming traffic.
However, even if they were correctly adjusted, the slightest bump or angle in a road will still result in them shining directly into my face.
The only acceptable solution is to send all offending vehicles to the junkyard, tomorrow. If that's not palatable, I'll settle with funding a a Department of Highway Safety making the rounds of the parking lots with a hammer.
The automatic wipers are even worse: They frequently come on when it's not raining and they don't come on when it is. Yet somehow the automatic wipers on my 2011 Audi work perfectly. WTF?
I agree with this and believe it due to something parallel to the India litter crisis. In india people may freely throw garbage anywhere. Because garbage is everywhere. They did studies "clean up ALL garbage on this street" and now people are more respectful. So there is a sense "garbage is everywhere, who cares if I add to it"
The same thing with headlights, "everyone seems to be blasting their headlights, might as well" - it's a slippery slope. Kind of like if a workplace reaches a crucial saturation of assholes, everyone is tempted to become an asshole and it becomes toxic. All of this, some facet of human nature I suppose.
My suggestion would be steep fines for excessively bright headlights with some significant portion of those fines funding police departments. This would yield rapid and effective enforcement.
I suspect this is because more and more people don’t know how to turn it off and/or don’t know what the blue indicator on the dashboard means.
As you mention, Tesla model 3 seems to be the worst offender. Could this be caused by a bad interface in that car? How does the brights indicator look in a model 3 and you turn off the brights?
There's just no way that more than 0.5% of drivers of any model are going to this level of tinkering. I have a Model 3, and I've never seen that menu. And I post here!
One contributing factor to people noticing "the blue light means you're blinding people" is that it's just a blue light outline on an already blinding white dash screen (and in the case of the tesla, an OFFSET dash screen).
"Back in my day", the blue high beam light was the brightest damn thing on the cluster, so you KNEW when your brights were on. Now you have to _look_ for the indicator.
I'd never give my money to the mass-fire-people-at-DOGE billionaire.
What I did, however had, notice, is that people are a LOT more easily distracted these days. Smartphones play a big role, but I also think something changed in the brain. This may be better or worse, but it definitely is very different now from, say, the 1980s. It almost feels as if humans are now +100 years different from the people in the 1980s rather than +40 or +50.
edit spelling
Don't get me started on lifted vehicles and their lights...Dept. of transportation needs to figure out a way to enforce a standard height for headlights from all vehicle shapes and heights. Driving after dark is getting more and more dangerous, not less.
We don't just need DOTs to set regulations on these things, we need cops to actually write tickets for this behavior and for judges to get confirmation that these after market modifications are removed.
It's another example of a company not considering the effects of their actions
Tesla didn't have the big screen (which heralded the current stupid trend) until 2012, and of course it took a number of years for Tesla and the giant omni screen to be popular. Thumb in the air I'd say 2018-2020.
You want brighter headlights so you can see better and drive more safely. The interior brightness is a separate independently evolved problem.
The horizontal cutoff is a tradeoff that comes with the bright lights (Xenon tech anyway). And there is plenty of low light leakage to reflect off of animal eyes. The problem IMO isn't pure brightness but rather these intensely bright lights (itself a benefit) coupled with poor aiming or poor maintenance of aim. Some states in the US have a mandatory annual vehicle inspection which includes headlight aim checks.
That big stupid bright-ass LCD screen which smugly ruined my night blindness by trumpeting constantly how fuel efficient it was made me feel less confident driving at night. Toyota is a smart and good company, and seems to have addressed this in newer Priuses (Prii?) by putting smaller, less bright LCD's and moving them further out of the way of your field of vision.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Tiguan/comments/1hq2hae/changed_ove...
I can drive all night long with no strain or issue, unless I have a flashlight glaring in my eyes.
Turn on your fog lights? At least in my 2018 M3, they illuminate the sides as well.
People say the headlamps on my model of Landrover is too low. But I had good visibility at night driving down country roads. The side lights are useless though.
I believe this is intentional to avoid blinding oncoming traffic and pedestrians
The screens are a good point, but nothing about LED headlights require a single bright point. That's done for style and cost saving - old reflector headlights had to be big, so small looks "modern", and small means less material.
Cramming it all into one tiny spot just means cooking the LEDs, which are much better suited for either larger lens assemblies or multiple smaller lens assemblies to distribute the load, both of which increase the size of the light source and massively decrease the blinding and glare it causes. You could easily cut the glare to, idk, a quarter by just changing the geometry a bit while maintaining the same light output.
Steering them away automagically from oncoming traffic is a better solution than abandoning them altogether.
(And yes, I do have cataracts. So oncoming lights _are_ a problem for me.)
only recently did i realize, it was the regular headlight LEDs being shined directly at me as they went over a speedbump
I'm thinking a mandatory recall order / fix-it ticket for all offending makes/models. The sticker shock alone might get manufacturers attention.
That and contributory liability in any associated accidents.
(Insurance costs / liability is a highly under-appreciated regulatory mechanism.)
I don't think this is the main issue.
I drive a compact SUV, it has perfectly reasonable headlights, pointed downwards like you'd expect, with more of a dip towards oncoming traffic, like headlights have been for decades.
Despite being in a somewhat high-ish vehicle, I'm constantly blinded when driving at night by what is typically, low sports cars with headlights that are indistinguishable from high-beams.
I have no idea how manufacturers got away with this, and I hope something is done soon to make sure a mandate for them being fixed comes in new vehicles, and as part of MOT for existing ones.
I'm in my 30s, with perfect eye sight, and typically have no trouble driving at night or low light, or even low visibility, but it terrifies me that one day I might hit someone after being blinded by these idiotically bright head lights.
How would you know?
My local sunglass shop had some yellow fit-over safety glasses. I found they cut out enough of the blue from the bad headlights to take the shock out of the experience of driving at night. https://cocoons.com/shop/safety/lightguard-medium-fitovers-l...
Harbor Freight's $2 yellow safety glasses are almost as good. I intend to stock up the next time I notice they're on sale for $1: https://www.harborfreight.com/yellow-lens-safety-glasses-668...
4 years ago I asked HN why the automotive industry wasn't using safe LEDs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27334405
The activists at /r/fuckyourheadlights figured out that the weaponized headlights put a little dim spot at the center of their headlight beams, exactly where the regulators measure the light intensity.
2nd picture clearly shows the dim spot: https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckyourheadlights/comments/1hefn86...
Summary of research: https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckyourheadlights/comments/18lrf3d...
My car has 3 headlight settings, low, mid, hi.
Hi is when you are alone at night and want to see farther.
I used to use low in the daytime (to signal other drivers the car is on), and mid at night (to signal other drivers and gain some visibility.
But maybe the opposite is sensible, using mid lights in daytime (so they are more discernible from the daylight), and using low lights in nighttime (if you are in an already illuminated city, you don't need to light up the road, and since it's night, any small headlight will have enough contrast with the darkness)
One thing doesn't need to exclude the other, especially as you begin to go above 50 and your eye sight isn't as good as it was when you were twenty-five.
Strong headlight that makes night go day saves lives, just remember to shut when meeting another vehicle or pedestrian.
2. The color temperature of modern headlights is worse for the eye than previous generations'.
3. Automatic high beams still blind the oncoming traffic for the first 1-2 seconds or so, before the vision algorithm realizes that maybe it's time to turn them off.
I would see light behind me and go "why do they have high beams on" but then looking ahead it didn't look like they had their high beams on, I was just in a short car.
The economically efficient way to get the fuel economy result would have been to increase gasoline taxes, but that's a non starter politically. Higher gas prices would allow people to choose to keep a cheap gas guzzling truck/car, buy a new more efficient and expensive car, or buy a new slightly more efficient slightly more expensive car. It would have been simpler though and given consumers more choice.
People’s desire to sit higher up and be in large vehicles, which have always been more expensive than smaller, lower vehicles, is what causes them to be bought. And once a significant portion have them, it becomes safer to be in one yourself, further incentivizing their purchase.
But 99% of the time, it’s just because people like the feeling of sitting higher up than others, and the ego boost from taking up more space. The simple evidence is the popularity of Suburbans/Sequoias/XC90s/etc over minivans, like Sienna/Odyssey. There is absolutely no functional benefit of the former over the latter, yet the former is more popular.
It makes no sense to buy a GM Suburban or Ford Expedition because you think a Stellantis Pacifica is low quality. The Japanese minivans have always been there for purchase, if you wanted a quality minivan.
People have been choosing to pay extra for bigger, taller cars because they want bigger, taller cars to signal ostentatious consumption, not any other reason. I’ve heard this direct from many, many people on why they chose an SUV or pickup truck over a minivan (though they will couch it in terms like “cool” or “sleek” or whatever).
There are very few countries where pedestrial fatalities have continued to rise, and the US and Canada are two of them, driven in large part by auto obesity.
You point to popularity, but I will mention that it is impossible to buy a sedan from US automakers today. The reason why is simple - profit. Larger cars are more profitable. When combined with incessant marketing that a pickup truck makes you more "manly", you can manufacture "desire" and "preference".
Toyota/Honda/Subaru/Mazda/Tesla/Volkswagen manufacture sedans made in the US, that you can buy today. Not sure why it would make a difference where it is made anyway.
If you wanted a lower priced sedan, you would choose from the 10+ great options, cheaper than a larger vehicle, and buy a sedan.
Which means if you paid more for a larger/higher vehicle, it is because you wanted the larger/higher vehicle.
What's normal can change. Today, 37% of used registrations in the US are sedans and about 18% of new registrations.
You were in a normal car, and the SUV manufacturer has mounted the lights higher just for aesthetic reasons.
There are rules. FMVSS [1] says lower beam headlamps must be mounted between 55.9 cm and 137.2 cm above the ground, and upper beam headlamps must be mounted not less than 22 inches nor more than 54 inches. The height ranges match, but are specified in different units
But that's a big range.
These rules end up being the stick used to regulate vehicle lifts and lowering; you could lift a vehicle higher, or drop it lower but very few people will do the work to relocate the lights.
[1] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-49/subtitle-B/chapter-V/p... Table 1-A, seach in page for 'Expand Table' cause I couldn't find a good way to navigate.
The irony is that SUVs and pickup trucks do not need lights 137 cm above ground, but that height is perfectly legal in too many countries. These vehicles are a menace and should be legislated out of existence.
It's insane to me that I as a 16 year old was allowed to drive an F350 pulling a 40ft trailer on a standard license.
I'd be all for exemptions to any rules for anyone who proves ownership of a working farm or ranch but you can bet that no regulation of any kind will ever be enacted to curb the disaster that CAFE rules caused to "car" size.
IMO, this sort of thing should work more like the way fair use works. A cop could pull you over for a traffic violation, ticket you, and then when you go to court you push the defense of "I'm a farmer and I was doing farm work" to get the missing license charge dropped (but you'll still likely end up with a traffic ticket to pay).
Generally speaking, cops aren't patrolling farming roads anyways so you'd really not need almost any exemption in place.
I'm not a big EV person, but afaik EVs don't have efficiency standards and so they don't have to conform to CAFE footprints, so we can get compact vehicles again, hopefully. Up to manufacturers to put them for sale, and people to actually buy them, of course.
Plus, giant EVs have more room for batteries and most Americans think 300 miles of range is necessary even if they drive 20 miles a day and even if they can charge at home!
This is a huge hole in the regulatory regime. It doesn't make sense to be as wasteful with electrons as we are with hydrocarbons. Sure the electron can be generated cleanly or with higher efficiency, but that doesn't negate the pursuit of encouraging increased utility.
Now you're in a car that the US car industry doesn't want to sell, and thus you don't exist.
Do we need self-darkening HUDs? Like an LCD overlay that specifically mutes the intensity of these improperly engineered cars? Seems dumb, but it might happen.
I wonder if we'll just move to using IR for the really high beams? That probably doesn't do anything good to the human eye at high intensities, but if you could augment the driver's vision and not blind everyone at the same time that would be nice? Let's bring back the Cadillac Deville!
EDIT - also:
> Now you're in a car that the US car industry doesn't want to sell, and thus you don't exist.
To be fair, this is related to the cars people want to buy. Everyone's making SUVs because they sell like hot cakes.
I assume regulation prevents the dynamic lighting from including the low beam section.
Man, this feels like a vehicular instantiation of class war. Pay enough and you too can blind others on the road.
What's next - frickin laser beams?
https://www.bmw.com/en/innovation/dr-hanafi-and-the-bmw-lase...
For starters, there is higher market penetration for better headlight technology, particularly ADB (adaptive driving beam). North American road safety regulations have made it very difficult to get this technology into cars, whereas in Europe it is reasonably widespread. Even rental cars I have had in the UK have this technology- most recently a Mazda3 which had a very good implementation of it, I could drive through the countryside with high-beams on constantly, and you could see the car quickly dim the beam facing towards oncoming traffic if any came around a bend. These are not high-end cars; I have rented cars with a manual transmission and cloth seats yet better headlights than the fanciest S-class in North America.
There is also less variation in vehicle size, and better emphasis on road safety testing. In Canada I often encounter lifted pickup trucks, which changes the alignment of factory lighting, not to mention the lights on these are often aftermarket anyway and usually installed without any thought for alignment. British pickup trucks are rarer, smaller, and would fail their yearly MOT for having improper headlamp aim.
In a North American city where there is overhead lighting and the streets are a mile wide, sure, I could probably turn the lights off even and be totally fine.
In the middle of the British countryside on a single-track road that has hedges on either side, not enough space for cars in the oncoming direction to pass me, a 60mph speed limit, during a rainstorm? I want the nice lights.
Crazily, we allow people to raise up their trucks so high that at night, if they're behind you in the lane, the cab of your vehicle is flooded so badly, you can hardly see sometimes. (Just wait till you experience this in a drive-through lane!)
In my state, it's against the law to run your fog lamps when the weather doesn't warrant them, the police seem to have forgotten this.
people are missing a lot of the natural sun radiation, causing the fluid in your eye to be less translucencent generally and possibly building up floaters more easily.
this could disperse light more inside your eye. enlarging the effect of blinding lights at night.
I would like to see a headlight solution where you get the same amount of light thrown on the road, but from a strip that goes all the way across the front of the car, so that no individual spot is especially bright for oncoming drivers.
Some of the towns here also started scattering flashing LEDs over every road sign they can find. Some areas feel like driving through Blackpool Illuminations. The worst offender locally is a roundabout light that flashes blue, which of course you assume to be an emergency vehicle approaching.
I still drive when I have to, but I had to give up watching soccer on tv when they added animated ads to all the pitches. I'm honestly considering some kind of AR filtering at this point.
Also shoutouts to the places in South America (esp. Guayaquil) where people modify cars and buses to have constantly flashing lights, animated screens etc. It's like having a little Times Square in every traffic jam!
The main reason seems to be that it's hard for others to to gauge your speed when your lights are flashing.
Apparently, the absolute safest solution is to have two rear lights side-by-side -- one that is always on and one that is always flashing.
It doesn't seem like there's clear data on which is safer if you have to pick only one. Different countries/states have chosen differently.
I once worked on a device where we were required to blink the Important Safety Light™ on-off. I often glanced at this light out of the corner of my eye, and saw that it was off, so we were Safe™. We were not Safe™: it was just in the off phase of its blink.
I am very glad I never got hurt by trusting that light.
I wanted to blink it bright-dim but was denied by people who said that IEC 61010 required it to blink, and blinking bright-dim isn't blinking. I didn't quite understand that objection.
Ideally (for me) you could have smooth high-low alternation or colour alternation.
(I recognize that something that looks like emergency services, e.g. alternating blue/white may be illegal, and that colour-blindness may limit this approach.)
If a safety indicator needs to be visible at a glance, why did it blink at all?
Blinking only works for things that are in your vision and need to be the primary focus.
It seems like blinking to begin with is terrible design for something like this, or else having it be in the corner of your eye is the terrible design decision.
Beats me! But they've apparently flashed for ages and ages on these things, and somewhere along the line it got standardized.
> It seems like blinking to begin with is terrible design for something like this, or else having it be in the corner of your eye is the terrible design decision.
This is benchtop equipment, not cars, so "corner of your eye" has a little bit different context here. But, yes, I kind of agree.
It is also really important to get this one right since for this particular type of device, conditions are lethal (yes, genuinely lethal, no exaggeration) if you get cavalier with it.
If you are riding a bike and you're lighting up the heads of oncoming riders or pedestrians you are being dangerous and obnoxious. Never shine a flashlight above someone's shoulders at night if you can help it.
Bicycle lights aren't blinding anybody. At least none I've ever seen. They're powered by little batteries usually.
The subject at hand was whether they flash or not. Not their brightness, which I've never heard anybody complain about.
They are much worse if they flash. That blinds and disorients. Even after they pass you won't be able to see anything for some time.
If you're somewhere without any other lighting and your eyes have adjusted to the darkness, then I can understand how they might seem bright. But I'm not really sure what you think the solution is. They're already vastly dimmer than cars, but make them any dimmer and the cyclist won't be able to see the ground and it won't be safe.
E-bike rentals don't have anything adjustable, and where I am, they're quite fixed at illuminating the ground.
Maybe there are people with e-bikes who can draw a lot more power and have higher-powered headlights? Are you talking about e-bikes specifically? But it's just not something I've ever seen. I'm certainly blinded by vehicles while cycling under certain circumstances, but I've never once in my life felt blinded by cyclists or even anywhere close. That's why I'm so confused by what you're describing. When you say "blow away your vision from half a mile away easily", I honestly can't even begin to imagine what you're talking about.
Stuff like this:
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=bike+headlight
You can even see people posting pictures of the light where it's clearly illuminating 10' up the tree on the side of the path.
I'll start paying more attention -- I'm curious now -- but I can still definitely say I've never felt blinded by a bicycle, or even close.
And the lights in that photo seem fine -- the road is pitch black just 20 feet in front. The tree is getting a lot of light reflected from the road and grass. The lights don't seem to be illuminating anywhere even close to as far as car headlights illuminate. None of that looks anything like what car headlights produce.
They absolutely are. They suffer from the same phenomenon as car headlights. They're often poorly aimed (at an upwards angle instead of downwards) and have adopted an insanely bright white colour. I frequently yell at other cyclists when they blind me.
People do it for safety, but it doesn’t help. I literally can’t see where you are if you have a bright light shining in my face. The same thing is true if I’m in a car. As long as you have lights I can see you. If your lights are obnoxiously bright and especially if they are blinking you have succeeded in making people want to harm you, not increased your safety. The drivers who aren’t paying attention will not be more likely to see you if you are just a blinding glow of light.
If bikes didn't move, a blinking light would be fine. But they do move and it makes it really hard to tell where the bike is in the dark.
Also flashing is really fucking annoying, and I my own experience is that it does notale cyclista more visible or safe. I don't use flashing lights myself, even though I can't see the rear one and eould probably rather be annoying than dead.
To be clear, I'm talking about rear lights only. The front light is white and always-on so you can see the ground. Plus you can see what's in front of you, so you avoid things, people don't need to avoid you as much.
It's the rear red light that flashes. You yourself don't see the flashing, but it increases visibility so people don't run into you, when you can't see them behind you.
When I'm behind a cyclist with a flashing red rear light, it doesn't bother me. It feels safe. It probably encourages me to keep a little extra distance from them, which is a good thing.
I don't get adding flashing lights to brake and tail lights. It's actually worse, flashing lights make it harder for us to judge distance as now there's no steady queue needed for depth perception. It's why when cycling I've always opted for a solid taillight instead of the flashing ones.
I'm ok with factory strobing on hard braking, and I think that is permitted generally.
> Cut the positive wire to the third brake light and strip the insulation from both ends of the cut.
That's altering the factory wiring harness. That's an extra junction the factory didn't authorize and when it fails, the factory warranty won't cover it, because the wiring harness modification lead to the failure. All so the dealer can make about $250 extra on a sale.
If these were built as a module you plugged in between the wiring harness plug and the light module socket, I'd have a smidge less hate for them; but there's too many plug types for that, and there might not be enough room anyway, so the dealer has to cut into the wiring harness for this ... if there's a real benefit to flashing brake lights, it should be standardized and done by the manufacturers.
[1] https://pulseprotects.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Sales-R...
I don't understand why people are allowed to drive around with blinding LED light bars which affect other drivers ability to see the road and and _oh so conveniently_ obscure their front license plates.
There might be some issues with retro fitting the world's existing road vehicle fleet, but that's a deployment detail. :p
I personally don't use them. So I just get to observe.
When I say properly, I mean with a special purpose abrasive glass polish. This could take an hour or more to do well by hand but it should remove the near invisible (in standard lighting conditions) film which forms on the glass surface.
This will also significantly improve visibility in heavy rain.
Go for a walk of an evening along a footpath into traffic. I guarantee it'll be Teslas and Minis that are the routinely the culprits of dazzling.
I'd guess it's cheap, lazily aligned hardware in the Tesla, and the ridiculous design of the Mini that cause the problems.
Yes, sporadically you'll be blinded by another model- one that needs an alignment - but it'll consistently be Tesla's and Minis.
https://www.theringer.com/2024/12/03/tech/headlight-brightne...
> On a recent episode of the Carmudgeon Show podcast, auto journalist Jason Cammisa described a phenomenon occurring with some LED headlights in which there are observable minor spots of dimness among an otherwise bright field of light. “With complex arrays of LEDs and of optics,” he said, “car companies realized they can engineer in a dark spot where it’s being measured, but the rest of the field is vastly over-illuminated. And I’ve had now two car companies’ engineers, when I played stupid and said, ‘What’s the dark spot?’ … And the lighting engineers are all fucking proud of themselves: ‘That’s where they measure the fucking thing!’ And I’m like, ‘You assholes, you’re the reason that every fucking new car is blinding the shit out of everyone.’”
The quality of driver is also decreasing. One of our MPs computed the data and discovered "Since 2016, 1,367,942 foreign drivers have been issued a driving licence without taking a UK test". There are apparently 42.1 mn licenses [2], so ~1/30 never took a UK test. It's getting dangerous out there.
[1] https://mattersoftesting.blog.gov.uk/the-mot-headlamp-aim-te...
[2] https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/advice/know-how/population-of-th...
You're all driving on the wrong side of the road, what are you even talking about? /s
The real reason we drive on the left is so that our driver's windows meet in the middle and we can use our right hand to do sword battles and jousting with oncoming vehicles.
Whether it is ageing or non-native licenses, I think a case can be made for checking that people conform with local expectations for driving skill.
Your "personal experience" is just wrong. They are driving slower because they cannot react fast enough to be safe. It is well understood that old drivers are dangerous, including the ones going 20mph in a 45mph zone.
As a simple example I drove around Northern France and the first day almost went flying off the motorway slip road as I didn't realise how tight they tend to be in France compared to the UK and Ireland.
I almost did the same in France many years ago taking a slip road onto the motorway, almost rolled the car.
In the UK, driving is on the left, while in much of the world people drive on the right. Arguably it's not so much that the UK is better, but that people should take a test to validate that they can handle the switch. But this would also mean UK drivers should do the same in other countries where they drive on the right.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casua...
1. Traffic is slower due to the decreased speed of traffic because of increased number of vehicles, and they continue to improve their safety (i.e. with proximity sensors & cameras). It's likely we see a reduction in casualties and fatalities even if number of accidents in total increases. For example, the number of accidents on the M25 may go up, but whilst they have speed restrictions for large areas of 50mph and sometimes 40mph, casualties will be decreased.
2. Payouts for minor injuries such as whiplash were pretty much stopped by insurance providers. Historic figures are likely inflated and new figures are likely deflated due to claims not being accepted.
3. Due to the cost of living and insurance hikes, we likely see people try to avoid making a claim. If a claim is made, the insurance premiums for both parties is increased (no matter who is at fault), both parties can be without a payout for a long time, the vehicles may be categorised and lose their value. If both vehicles are still drivable and an agreement can be made, the entire incident can go without being recorded.
The problem with proving the above is the linked data you have is for casualties, and insurance claims data I believe will reflect similar issues. I'm not sure how you would encapsulate people who have an accident but refuse to make a claim. Perhaps motorcyclists and pedestrian casualties may offer a ground-truth, as either rarely have a collision involving a vehicle where there is a choice to not make a claim.
https://x.com/RupertLowe10/status/1987100209185181958
This reciprocal scheme only applies to certain countries: the EU/EAA, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan, Korea, Switzerland, etc.
I think when you are blaming things like headlight brightness on those bloody foreigners, it's time to do some self-reflection.
So those bloody foreigners that live in the United Kingdom and dare drive there are from Australia, Canada, Japan, Switzerland... Countries well-known for their dangerous drivers! /s
On another day you would claim that being a member of Reform is toxic, and that being kicked out is a sign of being normal. Being kicked out of Reform is clearly itself not a sign of being toxic.
Rupert Lowe is an elected MP that has published his own policy paper [1] that remains uncontested, with the only criticism I can find is based on who helped him write it [2] and not on the content. He is democratically elected and partakes in the open exchange of ideas, I think the toxicity lives in your head.
> He does not give any indication as to where his number came from.
He literally says that they are processed from the Department of Transport. I imagine he will publish some materials soon.
> This reciprocal scheme only applies to certain countries: the EU/EAA, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan, Korea, Switzerland, etc.
New Zealand for example only allows UK full license holders to drive for 18 months [3], not indefinitely. New Zealand roads are wide and vast, and public transport is somewhat limited. But for EU/EEA license holders driving in the UK, they can drive for as long as it is valid or until they turn 70. Even if you are on a shorter list and have to exchange in 12 months, it's just a small fee - no test [4].
The point is that we have many, many people driving on the roads that have never done a UK driving test. And this doesn't even begin to extend to those who are disqualified or driving under the influence. As a driver, it is getting far worse out there.
> I think when you are blaming things like headlight brightness on those bloody foreigners, it's time to do some self-reflection.
The second paragraph started with: "The quality of driver is also decreasing.", because I was making a related but separate point. I'm clearly not blaming headlight glare on foreign drivers. Maybe it it you that should do some reflection.
[1] https://www.restorebritain.org.uk/pp_mass_deportations_legit...
[2] https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-politics/2025/10/ru...
[3] https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/new-zealand/safety-...
[4] https://www.imgconnect.co.uk/news/2024/11/can-i-drive-in-the...
Was getting a lift from a friend in a less than 1 year old Yaris cross. Noticed many cars flashing us on a short flat drive home - assumed it was headlights adjusted wrong. But no - headlight were in the lowest position. Driver had asked the garage twice to check the headlight adjustment.
Went out the front and headlight looked normal - but squatted and as soon I hit the sweet spot got blinded worse than high beams on my own car. This Yaris cross, which is going to be a very common car, has dips more powerful than my full beams - it will only take a small bump in the road to shine those adjustment or not - that's a problem all by itself.
He beamed back.
Their design flaws are many, but top among them is that their low beams are simply too collimated and too bright for safe use.
I wish I could (illegally) attenuate them in order to make them safer for other drivers. Is there a coating that I can apply to the sealed external lexan housing that will 1) diffuse and/or 2) uniformly dim their light output?
At least in late 90s, there used to be a law to black out half the headlamp. Either that was no longer the case or it's not as vigorously enforced.
This is the classic case of tragedy of commons!
We are in the process of forcing car to come with automatic braking, but yet we don't force cars to turn headlights when in motion...
They are correctly adjusted.
1) Approaching the top of the hill: cut-off is too high, blinding other drivers
2) Approaching the bottom of the hill: cut-off is too low, can't see far enough ahead, hope there's not a deer there
And of course the normal up/down motion of the car while driving makes the sharp cut-off line bounce around in the distance which literally gives me nausea. And I don't get nauseous easily.
It's like Toyota hired a team of interns who decided to redesign how headlights work from first principles and then forgot to test them out in the real world.
To make things worse, when we got the car, the headlights were adjusted far too high and the cut-off was pointed up in the trees. Every other car flashed their brights at me, even though the low beams were on. I took it to the dealership to have the headlights adjusted (not a small inconvenience at the time) and when I picked it up, they said they did nothing because the headlights were not adjustable. Got home, and the USER MANUAL showed exactly how to adjust the headlights. Because I don't have the required space or equipment to do it right, I took the car out at night and stopped every few miles to tweak the cut-off line until I got to a spot that was in between blinding other drivers and not being able to see the road MOST of the time.
To totally fix this, all they had to do was NOT make the cut-off so sharp. Like the last 100 years of cars have done.
I went to Toyota and a kind guy printed the manual for this. It is FOUR PAGES of things to do (open window, honk, switch off, dance, ...). I tried once but it did not work. A guy from Toyota tried to do it quickly between two customers, no luck.
So yes, their design is quite surprising sometimes.
I am also trying to use the automated opening of the hatch. In the ads the guy or gal with stuff in their arms vaguely swings their foot and bam, it opens. I am swinging like there is no tomorrow (it is a good thing that I have years of martial arts so I can sustain the movement) and the hatch doe snot open. Then after kicking and trying once more it opens. My children learned a few new words at the occasion.
This is still a good car (except that the electronics are straight from my childhood (the 80s))
In the 1980s my dad had a Citroën GSA (and indeed I had one in the mid-2000s, when it was about 20 years old) which was a low-to-mid-spec family saloon. It had headlights about a foot wide and 5" high with a bog standard H4 type halogen bulb in. They put out huge amounts of light - far better than anything else on the road at the time - without being glarey.
Get rid of Angry Robot Face cars.
Nothing is really repairable, of course, so replacing these parts is out of the question — it’s prohibitively expensive for many owners of older cars to replace the whole headlight units, especially since there are no penalties for driving around like this. Polishing the lenses is risky and usually only a short-term solution.
As regards the cloudy/micro-scratched headlamps, if one is willing to do so there are numerous polish kits that can restore that "new from the factory" clarity for either an amount of elbow grease, or some time with a drill spinning a polish wheel (depending upon which kit is purchased).
When you're in another car their car's sensors might detect your headlights and dim a little bit. But as a pedestrian? You basically just get blinded - from low light right to 10000 lumens straight in your eyes. It's overpowering.
Can't make them illegal fast enough, IMO.
[0] Most flashlights that advertise numbers like this are lying, but a few aren't
[1] This does present a risk of impairing the driver's vision
With that said, yeah, headlights are kinda bright these days
> in UK you can go to jail for disagreeing with narrative.
With the narrative on headlight brightness?
Even with static headlights, the beams need to be realigned every year or two. Vibration puts them out of order.
A weak beam pointed at your eye will be more blinding than a much stronger beam aimed properly.
- headlight covers fogging up/getting cloudy or even yellowing from sun exposure; these will scatter the light so more of what should go onto the street will be visible by oncoming vehicles
- 3rd party aftermarket LED replacement bulbs; usually illegal and completely mismatching what the mirrors in the headlights were made for, but that doesn’t keep people from buying and using them
Please don't comment like this on HN. The guidelines specifically ask us not to allege or insinuate shilling or brigading, and speculating that people are deliberately making things up on HN to train LLMs is a real leap. Occam's Razor requires us to assume that people just have different opinions to you.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45969535 and marked it off topic.
LEDs make a lot of sense from an engineering and economics perspective, and that's why we must suffer them. It takes a special kind of leader to burn massive piles of cash/opportunity in order to protect a qualitative thing like how comfortable it is to drive at night. There aren't many CEOs who would be moved much by spectrograms of the headlamps in their cars.
I would love to hugely curtail automotive design:
- of course, dim the headlights to a reasonable brightness.
- The Escalades have to go. Big trucks are for business, not taking the kids to school.
- No screens in the console.
- Absolutely no AI self-driving mode until it can be designed by the government. Allowing AI's to pilot cars based on the crappy engineering of a whiny trillionaire is nuts, yet we've allowed it. Let the government set the standards for "smart roads" to force cars to share sensor data.
- Crush every cyber truck into a cube, while you are at it.
The "whiny trillionaire" gave us Falcon 9 and Starship/Superheavy.
Not the flex you think it is.
Until we stopped at a gas station and I found a little knob to adjust the height of the light output. Not sure where this feature would be useful when you could just use the high beam when needed, but it was annoying even for me, the driver of the vehicle.
Lifting a truck by a 6-12 inches does awful things to the unajusted beam pattern of the headlamps in many instances, with even the dipped lights shining brightly into the cabins and mirrors of lower vehicles.
The yellow from sodium vapor lamps was an artifact of the physics of the emission spectrum of excited sodium atoms.
The reason sodium vapor lamps were used was because before the advent of LED's, they were the most power efficient (lowest electrical energy consumption for a given light output). The 'yellow' light was just a byproduct of "more efficient bulb".
1. Some regions have mandatory DRLs (daytime running lights).
2. In many headlights, the DRL is implemented by dimming the high beam lamp.
3. LED lamps do not dim properly; compared to incandescent bulbs they dim only slightly.
The result is high beam glare from cars in broad daylight everywhere you go.
The first time I had a car with this I was getting flashed by about 1 in 20 other drivers because they thought I had the high-beams on. I eventually took that car back to the rental agent who said that yes, it looked like the beams were adjusted too high.
With a manual control it's easy to fix. With auto-smarts (tm), not so much
Headlight standards in the USA are a perfect example of government regulation failing to adapt with the times. Until recently the NHTSA was still using 70s era regulations, until Congress forced them reluctantly to update.
I wonder why it didn't pan out. I know polarizers block some light either way, but with modern, strong headlights maybe it's time to revisit the idea?
older people.
As you age, you gradually develop cataracts. These are deposits in the lens of your eye that make them cloudy, and you get glare from bright lights.
When looking at bright lights, it is like looking through a dirty windshield. Light reaches your retina indirectly from the deposits which makes it incredibly hard to see, reducing or eliminating contrast.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataract
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glare_(vision)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/Flashlig...
You can also get cataracts earlier due to other health conditions
People with serious cataracts shouldn't be driving.
I'm also uncomfortable with the idea that we should ban more people from driving just so others can have excessively bright and sometimes illegal headlights.
Edit: I have no problems with incandescent or the old Led lights.
In addition, people became aggressive and lack empathy - I was followed by a Jeep Wrangler the other day, still dark in the morning, his headlights lit my car interior via the back window to the level where I had to slow down and almost stop. Once he overtook I blinked as fast as possible just to let him know his headlights were high beam. The guy aggressively drove behind me and turned his high beams, which yes, were even brighter, but still same angle.
LEDs are a true technical wonder, but they've made so many things so stupid, from the status lights on every single piece of tech, to cars. (And I'd say streetlights too, personally, but I know some people like those).
In my country I hesitate to even use the word "night".
I thought it was a problem with my eyes and went to an ophthalmologist who told me there's nothing wrong with them - but that she hears this from people all the time these days and believe headlights to be dangerously bright.
Normal headlights seem to be gradually closing the gap to the equivalent of high beams. I wonder if high beams have also increased their intensity? Would potentially cause sight damage if so.
...which has done Legitimate Research into how dramatic the change has been over time. Incidentally, I found it through this great article: https://www.theringer.com/2024/12/03/tech/headlight-brightne...
I drive a regular sedan, and since >50% of cars are ginormous trucks with fancy headlights, I'm regularly annoyed at all the high beams and misalignments.
True, driving at night sometimes can be an adventure and half but as long as you do not look at the incoming headlight, you are fine. Drivers automatically look at the headlight, that is the issue.
Also, there is the old and gold quick high beam towards the incoming traffic, it still works 99% of the time. Some drivers don't know or realised they are on high beam until you send a quick high beam towards them, it is all you need. It is an unwritten traffic rule.
My Suzuki Jimny allows me to lower the headlight beam so I don't blind incoming traffic. I keep mine very low and for being a LED one, still allows me to drive safely and see everything.
Got a "piss off" answer.
Older cars had dimmer lights, but also a much softer cutoff that lets the eyes more easily adapt to the darkened area beyond.
There's also the nearly-religious-war of SAE vs ECE standards, wherein the former is more suited to soft filament lamps, while the latter creates a much worse cutoff in the "brightness war".
https://www.trl.co.uk/Uploads/TRL/Documents/PPR2072---Glare-...
Finding participant / sample sizes for this is difficult, as it seems to be somewhere between a systematic review and a meta-analysis, but heavier on the recommendations than the analysis.
(I went looking because the 'nearly all' thing sounded like a bit of a stretch. Not that I would be surprised if this were true, but I would be surprised if they could make that claim with much confidence.)
They have always been that way. Im not accusing them of being involved in "headlightgate", but it would be great if somebody did some research.
Beam patterns are always checked when at rest, just like diesel particulate emissions..
Taek•2mo ago
jghn•2mo ago
[1] https://www.theringer.com/2024/12/03/tech/headlight-brightne...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42443406
nikanj•2mo ago
rootusrootus•2mo ago
jonasdegendt•2mo ago
I'm in Belgium and headlights don't generally bother me too much, but a month in California recently had me going "no wonder everyone has tints here."
englishrookie•2mo ago
johnwalkr•2mo ago
phito•2mo ago
JonKF•2mo ago
Lalabadie•2mo ago
JohnFen•2mo ago
I don't think there's a limit to how bright they can be. The law limits the lights to "70 watts", which I believe is intended to limit brightness but misses the mark. I bet the law was passed back when headlights were incandescent.
hnuser123456•2mo ago
kayodelycaon•2mo ago
The designed lighting for a room in my house is 2 x 60-watt incandescent bulbs.
The equivalent wattage in 3 x 40-watt led bulbs is equal to 2 or 3 fluorescent light fixtures in an office building.
kevin_thibedeau•2mo ago
kubanczyk•2mo ago
It's ridiculous that an average SUV has headlights higher than an average semi (my own experience) given the latter's breaking distance is much greater.
alistairSH•2mo ago
First, SUVs are really tall... If you're in a sedan (or worse, a Miata) and get close enough to an oncoming SUV, even well-aimed, legal lights are going to feel bright because they're pointed down at you.
Second, there's a decent sized market for cheap, unapproved HID/LED kits for older cars. They're often not aimed correctly.
pyr0hu•2mo ago
This, so much this. I'm having no issue with new cars and their LEDs. The aftermarket kits that are installed on 1994 Swifts and Passat B5s are not at all configured properly. They just throw it on the car and "yay i can see more" and sometimes I even think that they are using their high beams. But no, it's just their incorrectly set up lights.
MSFT_Edging•2mo ago
funny, its the opposite for me. brand new SUVs are by far the worst offenders,
knome•2mo ago
fusslo•2mo ago
I feel awful about essentially high-beaming everyone unless the road is flat.
yesb•2mo ago
toast0•2mo ago
That's normal. Low beams are aimed low and often have a illumination pattern reducing light over the median, high beams are aimed high and uniform illumination. Very often, they're the same intensity.
fusslo•2mo ago
I wonder if it became normal around the time everyone started complaining headlights were too bright
toast0•2mo ago
I think complaints about headlights really started when different bulb types came out. HID, projector, and LED bulbs all cast qualitatively different light than the ubiquitous tungsten halogen bulbs that preceded them. A lot of these put out a lot of blue, especially in the fringes that I find very objectionable, and the lumen output seems to have increased quite a bit, as well as the spread.
Halogen bulbs were tightly constrained by power limits and output requirements; but the other types can hit the output requirements at well under the power limits, so they can cast a wider field of view (which is nice), but may need to be brighter in more of the the wider field of view to hit the output requirements in the central portion, and that additional brightness is more likely to cause glare. Of course, all of our eyes have aged as well which makes night vision more difficult, especially with light variance. I remember my parents sometimes complaining about other vehicle's lights when I was young and thought everything was fine, but everyone was using halogen lights back then.
bri3d•2mo ago
johnwalkr•2mo ago
[1] For older US cars, it was more about intensity as the masking sucked. I don't think it's that relevant to this discussion but you can look up "DOT vs Euro headlights" if it interests you.
Aurornis•2mo ago
This is the biggest problem. Even talk SUV headlights from the factory must meet standards for masking off light and the angles at which they can illuminate.
But when people buy LED retrofit kits and jam them into reflectors not designed for those bulbs, the reflectors don’t mask properly. Light spills everywhere.
I would bet that nearly all of the “headlights are too bright” complaints are coming from people seeing LED retrofit kits.
kubanczyk•2mo ago
In EU most DMV equivalents check headlights yearly to catch illegal illumination envelopes (along with other safety-related aspects, brakes and whatnot).
yesb•2mo ago
eszed•2mo ago
sokoloff•2mo ago
Whether it’s done carefully or not, I doubt, though I did fail one year for headlight lenses too cloudy, requiring a fix and reinspection.
mrguyorama•2mo ago
It's just not done though. There's a list of like 10 items to check, and you are only allowed to charge like $12-$18 for the check, so corners are cut, and your average 18 year old who was given the job of doing the inspection does not care, and enforcement is more concerned with the shops willing to give you a sticker for stuff that is outright criminal, like not really working brakes.
alistairSH•2mo ago
Heck, people will reinstall stock parts for inspection then swap back to the illegal parts. Common with emissions stuff as well.
toast0•2mo ago
But yes, if there was a safety inspection, it should include verifying that lights function and that headlights are aimed appropriately. A brightness test might be too complex, but safety inspection would be the place to do it.
cpburns2009•2mo ago
jcranmer•2mo ago
There's probably a decent contingent of people replacing their lights with out-of-spec lights not realizing that the lights are not actually road-legal.
potato3732842•2mo ago
It's like how aftermarket brake hoses all say "off road use only" despite pretty much all of them vastly exceeding the FMVSS for brake hoses.
yesb•2mo ago
If you swap one side and walk around your car, you may see that they are significantly dimmer than the stock bulbs from some or all angles. Or it may work fine. Often times the aftermarket LED dual intensity tail/stop lights have barely any difference between the two brightnesses which is egregiously unsafe
thewebguyd•2mo ago
But then I had to rent a newer car, and it came stock with super bright blue/white headlights. They were so bright to what I was used to I had to double check the high beams weren't on. The standard lights were as bright as my old car's high beams.
Lights in newer cars are literally just that bright, and I think it's a result of car safety culture being a matter of "I only care of the car protects me" instead of "the car should also be safe for others on the road as well"
hn_acc1•2mo ago
Even when I upgraded my old car to HIDs (because I could barely see anything over the other cars), I checked over and over to make sure I was low enough. Also, I ensure I never light up the TOP crease of the trunk of any sedan behind me. If I light up anything inside another car, it's bad.
thaumasiotes•2mo ago
This theory can't work on its own terms. It'd be hard to make the car less safe for the driver than by automatically blinding oncoming traffic. Brighter headlights aren't a safety improvement for anyone.
They represent car manufacturers unilaterally making the product worse for the sake of having a worse product, just like the replacement of physical buttons with touchscreens.
duskdozer•2mo ago
hn_acc1•2mo ago
yesb•2mo ago
There are no government agents going around inspecting all the vehicles coming off the factory line. Anecdotally, my friends Tesla has completely horizontal headlights from new. I could see oncoming drivers faces illuminate and wince in pain. A quick adjustment in the settings fixed that, however the majority of drivers are ignorant of the fact that headlights are usually adjustable.
Not sure there is any real solution other than going back to halogen lights or requiring sophisticated anti-dazzle systems.
esseph•2mo ago
SoftTalker•2mo ago
Disagree. The "too bright" headlights are new cars. And sedans as well as trucks SUVs.
Another big problem is that the lights are much closer to "point source" than older headlights which were 4-6" in diameter. A modern headlight is more like a 2" or smaller diameter projector lens, which is even more blinding.
scythe•2mo ago
silisili•2mo ago
Maybe I just got old or my eyes are peculiar, but that's no longer the case. I cannot stare directly into the new white/blue/whatever lights cars use at all without an immediate reaction of being blinded.
In my opinion, we just don't need this level of lighting at night. My vehicle lights up giant swaths of the fields next to the road and I can see for a hundred+ feet in either direction. I just don't need this level of HD quality night vision, only just enough to see down the road a ways and immediate side of it to check for objects/deer/people.
So now we have these retina scorching lights that are generally fine if the road is 100% flat and the car brand new. Any other situation ends up feeling like everyone is pointing lasers into your eyes.
euroderf•2mo ago
Seconded. And I guess this is about the same thing as has happened to streetlights ?
pwg•2mo ago
The older incandescent bulbs were a different color temperature (more on the yellow side of the color spectrum) and were not a point source (filament instead). Both contributed to them not seeming quite so bright, even if the net lumens was the same.
The newer LED's are much more on the blue end of the color spectrum (automatically making the same lumen level appear much brighter) and the LED's are much closer to point sources, which further makes the result appear significantly brighter even if the lumen level was the same.
Couple the "harsh blue light" and "point source" with "significantly more lumens" as well and you get modern headlights that are painful to look towards, much less to look directly at.
jjtheblunt•2mo ago
johnwalkr•2mo ago
jjtheblunt•2mo ago
Anyway, occasionally F150 / Silverado lights are mis-aimed, so low beams seem bright, but more commonly (here) German and American cars with distinct fixtures for brights vs low beans are driving in daylight with both sets activated. Not sure why, but it's not unusual.
toast0•2mo ago
directevolve•2mo ago
bayindirh•2mo ago
Some car manufacturer (Ford?) recalled their cars to fix their cars' headlight settings to match US regulations in the last 6-8 months IIRC.
Also, light temperature has limits. I believe >4000K lights are already road illegal in UK and EU. They are also recently outlawed in my country, but there are many cars with after market 5000K+ bulbs installed. They also don't conform to the geometry of the bulbs these headlights designed to accommodate. They are painful to look at.
What needs to be done is a) Stricter regulation in retrofitting older headlights with newer bulbs b) Regulating the amount of light hitting the oncoming driver somehow. c) Stricter CRI and light temperature regulations for the LED headlights.
I don't want to be blinded from light coming from behind and front constantly at night, too.
mapt•2mo ago
At all?
It isn't just retrofits that are a problem, it's brand new cars.
It's not just about not wanting to be uncomfortably blinded by lasers shooting into your eyes at night. (Lasers well under 3000 lumens!). It's that this kills people. Frequently. It's a form of assault with hundreds of dead victims and thousands of injured victims a year.
bayindirh•2mo ago
> It's not just about not wanting to be uncomfortably blinded by lasers shooting into your eyes at night.
I mean, being uncomfortably blinded creates the risk of being dead already. I believe I made it clear that it's dangerous.
mapt•2mo ago
From a previous post on the subject https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42449068
> They measure at a certain point. Jason Cammisa points it out pretty clearly in an episode of Carmudgeon, with the money quote either here[0] or in the link direct to YouTube here[1]:
> On a recent episode of the Carmudgeon Show podcast, auto journalist Jason Cammisa described a phenomenon occurring with some LED headlights in which there are observable minor spots of dimness among an otherwise bright field of light. “With complex arrays of LEDs and of optics,” he said, “car companies realized they can engineer in a dark spot where it’s being measured, but the rest of the field is vastly over-illuminated. And I’ve had now two car companies’ engineers, when I played stupid and said, ‘What’s the dark spot?’ … And the lighting engineers are all fucking proud of themselves: ‘That’s where they measure the fucking thing!’ And I’m like, ‘You assholes, you’re the reason that every fucking new car is blinding the shit out of everyone.’”
bayindirh•2mo ago
rootusrootus•2mo ago
No, the regulation does not measure lights at a single spot. The regulations are published and very easy to find.
bayindirh•2mo ago
e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHKCmmH-x9mIbtnKiNfg2...
He tells the stories, interviews with the people who built these cars (if possible), gets and drives a copy of the said car.
We're talking about a person who painstakingly perfects the pronunciation of the brand and model names just because he feels doing otherwise is not respectful for the brand, model and people involved with the car.
---
Let's talk about specs. The spec[0] (pg 4) states that:
Photometers are placed at fixed locations on the test track to record the visibility and glare illumination of the test vehicle on each approach. To correct for changes in illumination that are due to changes in vehicle pitch, multiple photometers are used at each measurement location to capture illuminance readings at different heights. The illuminance readings are synchronized to the vehicle position and pitch using a common GPS time signal. The synchronized data are used to produce pitch-corrected illuminance versus distance curves that are used for the headlight rating. All data are processed using the DIAdem software package distributed by National Instruments. The processing scripts are available at https://github.com/iihs-hldi.
This is a fixed receptor, fixed path, multiple approach test and is susceptible to optimization of the illumination map designed by the car manufacturers.
Moreover, test document states that:
Illuminance data are collected with Gamma Scientific photometers (Part # U68401). The photometric sensors provide a very close match to the spectral response of the human eye. They are fitted with diffusers to reduce the illuminance measurements for off-axis incidence angles in accordance with Lambert’s cosine law. The sensors match the targeted cosine response to within 3 percent at angles up to 25 degrees, which is the maximum angle between the test vehicle and sensors on the sharpest curve (at distances greater than 10 m). The sensor signals are passed through a low-pass filter with a cutoff frequency of 35 Hz to allow for accurate measurements of pulse width modulated light sources such as LEDs. Each sensor is connected to its own transimpedance amplifier board that has fixed gains to yield a fast response while still minimizing linearity errors in the range of illuminance values for which the headlight ratings are assigned.
Again more places to optimize the headlight.
If the test finds the lights are "in-spec", and people are increasingly unhappy/uncomfortable, then something is wrong.
[0]: https://www.iihs.org/media/0e823704-32d1-4500-b095-15d064d82...
potato3732842•2mo ago
An entertainer who's keenly aware of what his audience demographics are, what they want to hear, what'll piss them off, and what he ought to be doing if he wants the money to keep coming?
I'm not saying he's lying, but all these guys have an incentive to say whatever it is they're gonna say in the way that makes their audience as hysterical as possible.
bayindirh•2mo ago
Listening to Camissa makes me feel like I’m listening to someone who appreciates all cars for being cars. He has no biases and preferences like Clarkson (German cars being cold, Italian cars being awesome, etc.).
pixl97•2mo ago
Aurornis•2mo ago
LED retrofit regulations are not enforced. We should equip safety inspection stations with ways to measure this, but it’s an expensive change to demand they do safety inspections in a dark room when most safety inspection businesses are small shops that don’t have the room or buildings to do it.
mnw21cam•2mo ago
crooked-v•2mo ago
OGWhales•2mo ago
chrisBob•2mo ago