One of the main reasons people want/need brighter headlights is that there is much more light inside the car from screens. These don't let your eyes adjust to the dark properly. Older cars had dim green lighting for the gauges and even had a knob to adjust the brightness up and down. You could create a very dim interior instead of the huge amount of white light you get with modern cars and the multiple screens.
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.
Lately, I see a lot of drivers who turn on their brights and just leave them on and this includes cars with the older halogen and even incandescents. This is a change in behavior.
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.
> Lately, I see a lot of drivers who turn on their brights and just leave them on and this includes cars with the older halogen and even incandescents. This is a change in behavior.
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!
I have become an aggressive counter-flasher. This has yielded in some cases new knowledge - that the low beams of a lot of cars these days look like high beams (indicated when they flash back, and it's the brightness of a thousand suns).
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).
Haha I've also angled my side mirror out of my eyes, which incidentally is back towards the car behind me. I of course angle it back if I need to change lanes, but it's such an annoying thing I have to do just to see the road ahead of me.
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.
My rear view mirror does this, I wish my side mirrors did too. Although recently I've noticed some cars headlights can even pierce my rear view mirror's polarized dimming. It never used to be a problem in the past. I've seen the difference when drivers turn their high beams on and off. It always did a great job against driver's brights including large trucks. But occasionally there's now a vehicle with the light of a thousand suns that is too bright for the auto-dimming.
I might just be getting old, but more and more I see people not using indicators and not understanding the rules of junctions. Tail gating also really annoying.
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.
The recommended 3 second gap is a much bigger distance than most people recognise, especially at high speed.
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".
I was with a friend who was driving and he literally said that the car in front of him was driving fairly close to him. I have a funny bumper magnet that says "sorry for driving so close in front of you" that mocks this inversion of cause.
As someone who continues to mask in public shared-air settings for my own health, I am entirely unsurprised by that response and get it all the time.
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."
Not in a way meaningful to assessing infectious risk, no.
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.
> One can measure CO₂ as a proxy to rebreathed air fraction.
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.
Not sure why you'd ask me that vs. use Google, feels like cornering a random driver to defend "Why do you use seatbelts?".
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.
Thanks for sharing. I tend to think people wearing masks these days are a little loony, but these are solid reasons for specific cases and environments. I wouldn't shun someone because they're wearing a mask, though. It seems like a significant discomfort so I don't partake (and I get sick extremely rarely and stay home those few times).
I genuinely didn't think to use Google for this. I had no idea about the list of reasons. It wasn't passive aggressive, I was curious. Thanks for sharing this.
Yes on your last point, I feel exactly the same way. If anyone told me I was driving too fast and they were uncomfortable I'd immediately be apologetic and slow down, and I'd genuinely feel bad about it.
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.
I'd say just in general people have become way more cavalier and oblivious as drivers. I frequently see people doing wild stuff like driving at night with no headlights, or driving for several blocks in a bike lane. Every single yellow light is pushed to the limit, with often at least one (and sometimes multiple) drivers running the red light as well. I feel like a lot of is connected to a more general post-COVID decline in awareness of how one's actions affect others. People are just fine with doing anything they can get away with. I suspect the trend won't be reversed without a major increase in enforcement.
I’ve noticed the same, and also people’s behaviour generally everywhere has bottomed out and not recovered. I was speaking to an ED nurse who said people have just forgotten how to relate and violence is through the roof every night in the hospital.
I have legitimately been wondering for quite some time if we are not in a leaded gas kind of situation where something is adversely affecting the global population as a whole and we are left in the dark. Plenty of contenders between industrially processed food, social media, mobile phones. It might just be me getting paranoid however.
Wow this gives me anxiety just reading. My 2012 BMW has a warning everytime I turn it on. "DO NOT RELY ON BEEPS" (I'm paraphrasing of course.)
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.
I leave plenty of distance and don't have that problem. Occasionally people do fill the space, perhaps because I'm providing a safer place than people tailgating. This reduced risk benefits me too. I just slow a little bit to re-establish my following distance.
About once a week I see someone cut in even though the person is literally tailgating. The driver at the back has to brake+swerve to not cause a high speed collision. There's actually nothing you can do to prevent these people from getting ahead of you. Don't worry about what they'll do, it's insane anyways. Just try not to die.
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.
My other pet peeve is the opposite - they've got LED daytime running lights, and use those instead of headlights. They're driving around at 11pm with no taillights and abysmal forward lighting, but there's enough of a glow from the DRLs that they assume their lights are on.
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.
I've long wished we had a standardized communication channel between cars. It could even be fixed status codes.
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.
I actually made an LED sign for the rear of my van, with over a dozen messages, including some peaceful ones like yours (sorry, thanks). One was for headlights. I made it IR-controlled and used an older Android smartphone with IR blaster and an app that gave me labeled buttons to show the messages.
if you ever visit Portland make one up reading YOU HAVE THE RIGHT OF WAY. drivers keep it weird here by ignoring the rules of the road for some kind of "no no i insist, after you" as if theyre giving some gift, but instead just confuse everyone
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
Defending that particular kind of driver: He might not have known to be the last car. But one thing he knows for sure: a long line of cars in front of him. Speeding up or keeping distance is pointless, so he uses that moment to be friendly instead.
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.
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.
This hit on a peeve of mine, that automatic high beam systems really suck for pedestrians. Manual control is genuinely better in this regard. Try walking around at night in a wealthy neighborhood, and about 1/8 of the cars just blind every pedestrian.
#3 sounds like you're either nitpicking or maybe having an eye issue?
#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.
#3 Plenty of drivers have difficulty spotting a gray/silver/black car under low or high-contrast lighting. Highly visible colors (yellow, orange, white) have a 7-12% lower chance of getting into an accident during the day and up to 47% lower at dusk.[0] Keeping your headlights on at all times reduces this risk.
#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.
> #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.
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.
By definition, zipper merge means late merge [0]. 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.
The rule for the leftmost lane (highway) is that you must not block for other drivers. It is in the rule book (at least in my country). That mean in very clear terms that if you can't do the overtaking in a timely fashion without blocking other drivers, then you should not enter the left lane.
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.
If everybody left it, it wouldn't be going 5+ over limit and then it could serve the people who are serious about breaking the law and go big. ... Oh, wait...
> I've been tempted to purchase digital billboard space to raise awareness.
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.
> Mostly I'm hoping that automatic high-beams, like some Ford trucks I've seen do well, proliferate more!
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.
Maybe it’s an overcorrection because the Tacoma I had, a couple years older than yours, had auto high beams and they would just stay on all the time. They only turned off from reflecting on road signs or when a car was only a few lengths away approaching. Quickly found the button to disable that feature.
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.
I dunno, maybe where you live is a lot flatter than the roads that I drive on, but the instant I see a car coming the other way (ideally before they come into direct view) is the time to turn off full beams.
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.
I live near mountains, rolling hills, and lots of farmland. There are many stretches where you can see a car coming from a mile away, long before anyone's high beams are noticeable. But in that darkness, my truck picks up those headlights and dims the high beams.
Hmm, I mostly drive in the English countryside where most often there are hills and bends, bushes and trees, houses and hedgerows. Seeing another car a mile away would probably mean both are heading into a wide valley, in which case the geometry makes it less important.
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".
Automatic high beams only dip for other cars. They don’t dip for bicycles or pedestrians. Those walking or cycling by the road do not even register. Pure hubris.
A big cause on older cars is haze on the clear plastic that develops over the years. This makes even low beams spread so they blind oncoming drivers. There are kits where you polish and re-finish them, and they do make a noticeable difference in beam directionality.
RE ".... 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. ...." I had this idea too this annoyance too - but never implemented it.
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've been tempted to purchase digital billboard space to raise awareness. Eg., "If this blue indicator is on, you're blinding everyone".
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.
Can confirm, my Model 3 had its lights angled too high from the factory. Only realized after a few people flashed their high beams at me during my first week driving.
I had the exact same issue, and Tesla sent out a service rep to my home to complete the adjustment to spec for free. You can request it through the service menu. Haven't had anyone flash me in the year since.
Thank you for being part of the 0.01% of Tesla drivers who figured this out. I think by default they set them to "maximum height" or something. As someone in a sedan, they are infuriatingly blinding at night by default. I'm sure they're illegal, but obviously Tesla doesn't care.
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.
My parents' new Chevy Bolt automatically turns off the brights when appropriate. At first I was doing it manually but then I started trusting it, it just works, it does it at exactly the moment I would do it (actually it's better at it than me.) I'm surprised Teslas don't do it.
You must never drive on a curvy roads then. Every car I driven waits until the approaching car is fully around the corner, blinding them for a full second before dimming, instead recognizing the headlights around the corner and dimming earlier.
Newer cars with matrix LED headlights account for this, such as the Volkswagen ID series. The brights not only "blot out" the shape of the cars around you, they also rotate when turning or going around a curve, so that you never accidentally point them at oncoming traffic.
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 don't even know what a Chevy Bolt looks like! Maybe the problem is every other model.
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.
All Teslas can do this too, as can a huge range of modern cars with so called "auto dipping headlights". Virtually all cars with this option allow you to turn it off though...
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.
I am not sure that the incredibly bright Tesla Model 3 (and sometimes Model X) lights are on brights but are just stupidly bright at low-beam settings.
I remember, when shopping for a car, the salesman told me about an Alpina model he had with laser headlights so intense they weren't even legal for new builds anymore. It's a selling point in some vehicles.
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.
Back when sensors, electronics, and servos were unaffordable or unavailable, it made sense to have a low beam height control as the resting pitch of your car could vary by several degrees based on passenger/cargo load, trailer tongue weight, etc.
It seems vastly less necessary now to have that control in the hands of the driver.
No, the level is fixed for the high and low beams. I guess the driver can adjust them with a screwdriver but not while driving.
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.
Older cars have the height adjustment control too. Either as a physical dial or a menu entry. It's useful when transporting something heavy or when you're driving on totally wrecked roads so you can spot potholes faster etc. But most people don't know that, dial it all the way up and just leave it there.
Headlight regulation obviously stopped making any sense at all when they allowed bigger cars to put them up higher. Like you are gonna regulate all kind of beam parameters and then miss the most important thing.
As someone who's undergone LASIK correction, I have to do this semi-regularly for night highway driving. (For those unaware, the procedure gives you a mild halo effect basically for life, if you've had your eyes dilated before, imagine that, at like 25%). LED headlights are BRUTAL for this, oftentimes I can't even see the car they're attached to because of the insane amount of glare.
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 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.
Adaptive headlights that actively shield oncoming drivers were finally made legal in the US in 2022 but complicated bureaucratic hoops make them hard to implement. BMW seems to have them working as I find their higher-end lighting (ex: ICON Adaptive w/ Laser Light) to be among the best to oncoming drivers—at least to my eyes.
CNN writes about why headlight brightness is worse in the US than in other countries:
The USA seems to suffer from a not-invented-here problem when it comes to automotive regulations. Most of the world adopted the European standard for adaptive headlights, but the USA had to spend years coming up with its own incompatible standard.
It's not a bug, it's a feature? US manufacturers are not widely known for technological innovations. Deviating standards are a way to keep them competitive in their domestic market.
There is a reason US school buses look like WW2 troop transport and the long haul trucks are museum pieces in all aspects. It's not even NIH, it's just protectionism.
I have a car with LED lights. It's easily the best car I've had for vision at night. We very occasionally get someone flashing us at night, wrongly believing our high beams are on.
However, from a safety point of view, I'm not convinced the trade off is actually in favour of reducing illumination for everyone.
I found out recently that you can adjust your Tesla headlights electronically from the computer screen inside and it was quite easy. I was regularly getting high-beam flashed by people because I think the stock Tesla settings have the lights too high.
> Lately, I see a lot of drivers who turn on their brights and just leave them on and this includes cars with the older halogen and even incandescents. This is a change in behavior.
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.)
The Tesla Model Y automatic dimmer is quite stupid. It dims whenever my lights reflect off a street sign and no other cars are nearby. I have to keep it turned off and dim my lights manually, which is a PITA because sometimes I forget and blind oncoming drivers.
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?
The automatic wipers on non Tesla cars use infrared sensors that have existed for decades, so they're a well known quantity. The Tesla wipers use the front cameras to detect rain, and those cameras are focused at a distance that's far enough to be able to see other vehicles, so they're not focused on the windshield, which is why they're unreliable.
>
Lately, I see a lot of drivers who turn on their brights and just leave them on and this includes cars with the older halogen and even incandescents. This is a change in behavior.
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.
I usually drive with only the DRLs even at night. My vision is good enough that there's no reason to blind other drivers. I only use the beams at all when there's bad weather that fucks with visibility, or when the road has no retroreflectors. Also ever since a collision repair the headlight beams have been misaligned and that's extremely distracting/infuriating so I hate using them anyway.
Not sure why people are not believing you. I have a Volvo and the headlights and taillights are illuminated at all times, even when the headlight switch is "off."
The only thing that turning the headlights "on" does differently is enable high beams.
Thanks - I'm ok with that. As also mentioned, I'm NOT when it's a dark car at night with ONLY DRL and no rear lights at all - which I've seen a LOT of lately..
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.
DRL's aren't dim enough to make your car "nearly invisible". If it's enough light for the driver to see the road via reflection, it's more than enough for the oncoming driver to see via line of sight transmission.
I don't know what's invisible about the outside edge of my headlights, and my taillights, being illuminated. The car is very visible. If it were invisible, and I do a LOT of nighttime driving, I would've gotten pulled over for it already (and I haven't been).
My vehicle does not dim the DRLs with the beams on. The brightness of the DRLs is also inoffensive enough that I don't think they're worse than the beams at all. They're also essentially evenly-lit light bars, and not point sources like the beams, which further helps.
> headlight beams have been misaligned and that's extremely distracting/infuriating so I hate using them anyway
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.
I think the "horizontal cutoff style" you're referring to is the American DOT beam pattern (two horizontal lines at different height) as opposed to the European ECE beam pattern (which goes up towards the edge of the road to illuminate signs and such). I would assume this follows the normal regional model variations, although Tesla seems to have notoriously misaligned headlights - some suggest it's a bug causing it to reset occasionally?
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.
Saab also had a feature where it would turn off all the lights in the instrument panel, but you could turn them back on by hitting the top of the dash. Might be a Swedish thing as Volvo had it too.
Saab also had a battery warning light, like most cars. However, if the battery was not charging, the light would not come on. Also if the bulb burned out, your alternator wouldn't work.
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.
Adding to this: on rainy nights, crazy amounts of glare off the wet pavement from streetlights. It would be safer if the lights were off for headlights only.
I physically desoldered and replaced the very bright 6500k interior overhead LEDs in my VW with much warmer units. It makes a huge difference when turning them on for a second and not killing my night vision. Also just much more pleasant and natural light in my opinion.
The car I'm driving now (2016 BMW) is the only car I've driven or been in that has appropriate interior lighting. E.g. You can really crank the brightness down, and the display lights are all red.
In my past few rentals, the dial still acts on the driver's gauges - but not on the "entertainment / navigation" screen which remains too bright no matter what! In one, the automatic "night mode" was still crazy bright and independant from the dashboard brightness dial. Absurd indeed.
In my Mazda, turning on the headlights enables a night mode in the both the instrument panel and stereo/etc screen, dimming everything. Which seems like a nice touch, but if I want to run with my headlights on during the day, as seems to be fairly customary these days, that means I can't read my clock. Not great.
My 2006 car had an independent brightness setting for the infotainment screen but that's likely because the infotainment system just wasn't as fully integrated into the car as it is today. It wasn't a touchscreen so since everything had a button, you could have easily designed it to use a VFD or similar.
I drive an old car with dull yellow headlights and a dull green glow from the analog instruments, just the way I like it. I was recently driving around a hire car that had this enormous screen that became blindingly bright after sunset on unlit carriageway. I couldn't believe how terrible it was. The whole thing was a pile of unintuitive garbage, but the screen brightness was egregious. I had to pull over and spend minutes navigating through a maze of menus to turn the thing down... I might have even had to google for how to do it. Then of course when I turned the car off later and started it again, the brightness setting was back to "surface of the sun".
Absolutely. People just crank up the brightness on the inside lights because "blinky lights" but I have also noticed that, modern cars typically include fog lights which used to be a luxury or premium option, many people just drive around with these lights on as well. Fog lights are illuminating the area closer to the vehicle and therefore inhibit one's visibility further down the road. So now we get super bright vehicles coming at us, inhibiting our ability to see.
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.
Trucks are the absolute worst vehicles on the road. Their giant ass lights blind anyone near their vehicles. A number of truck owners, especially the ones that lift their vehicles, will additionally add light bars to the exterior which are so incredibly dangerous.
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.
I just got done with a trip. Unfortunately there's a number of numb-nuts who don't see the problem with driving on regular roads with their lightbars on.
I have an older car with the low light gauges, and so my eyes are more adjusted the darkness. Which makes the poorly calibrated bright lights of newer cars the bane of my life at night.
Exactly. Even if my eyes adjust well to the relative darkness with my lights, the effect is erased the instant I encounter a car coming on me on the opposite side of the road.
One thing that helps is to make sure you don't look at the headlights directly. It really helps to look at the white line on the side of the road when the other car is close to preserve your night vision.
> 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.
I believe this is intentional to avoid blinding oncoming traffic and pedestrians
I have an old Landrover and there is no lights except for the dials. Visibility to the outside is excellent. Some newer cars allow you to dim the info console and the some of the instruments but they cannot be seen in the day light.
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'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.
Turn on your fog lights? At least in my 2018 M3, they illuminate the sides as well.
YES! I rented a Prius once, and this was my biggest complaint.
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.
My car's screen switches to night mode when it's dark, but if you want to make it the darkest setting, you have to manually adjust it, every single time. I don't know why there isn't a persistent setting for [when the car is in night mode]. I frequently have to adjust this because I want my eyes to adjust to the exterior darkness for safety reasons.
My 2006, 2017, and 2023 cars all will autodim the screens at night. Except for the 2006 model, the brightness knob adjusts both the instrument cluster and the screen brightness and stays where you leave it. The 2006 car had a separate up/down button for the screen.
Teslas are the worst offenders in my area. I don't own one but I looked up online out of curiosity, and saw many owners complained because they got flashed a lot. Turned out the factory settings for the headlight angle was too high. They went to the menu and adjust the angle down by "2-3 clicks" and they reported never got flashed again.
> huge amount of white light you get with modern cars
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.
> 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.
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.
My Tesla does a good job with its screen and since it is a model 3, no bright gages in front of the wheel. Most other modern cars have this problem though.
My Subaru Outback lets me adjust the dashboard and display lights down, which I do whenever I am driving at night. It's amazing how much more you can see without a ton of lights in the cab.
There was a mix of technologies. Up to about the early 80s, instruments were lit by an "unfiltered" incandescent lamp at the back of the instrument housing, that reflected off a band of white paint around the top of the housing and screened by the bezel, like old Smiths gauges. After about that point they moved over to edge-lit screen-printed perspex backings, and continued that way until the current trend for glarey and unpleasant LCDs everywhere.
You're retconning. Brighter headlights (xenon) were invented in '61 and first appeared in '91. By 2000 the tech made its way to less premium cars.
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.
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.
I was at a junction the other day, there was some new Audi EV at the other side of the junction and I couldn't see a damn thing. I've got perfect 20/20 vision, never had any form of eye problem ever in my life, and I was completely blinded. I'm convinced if they'd turned the full beams on, I'd have disintegrated.
Part of the problem I've identified are SUV's and Trucks. Back home I drive a 4runner so I never noticed this but on vacation one week and we rented a Corolla. While the lights from other cars never bothered me in the 4runner, it was so apparent in the smaller Corolla.
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.
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!
Some high-end cars use banks of lights all pointing in slightly different directions, and they autodim the lights pointing directly at headlights coming the other way.
Edit: sorry, I shouldn't post US rules on a UK topic. For penance, a fact about lighting in the UK, reverse lights weren't required until 2009!
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.
this is also my understanding. The range is large because it caters to passenger cars, lorries and construction equipment. Construction equipment is seen are more rugged (it often is) and this is now projected as a desirable trait for SUVs and pickup trucks.
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.
I will always champion the compact pickup truck. A 1980s S-10 or Toyota Truck (HiLux) can do light truck things, is relatively economical, and doesn't have a large footprint. Alas, nobody makes similar vehicles for US/Europe anymore --- kei trucks are still made for Japan, and less developed economies can get simple small trucks. Maybe some of the EV compact trucks will actually be made.
Another one of those quirks of law that appears to be there to help avoid burdening the legendary smallholding farmer whose teenagers are hardworking farmhands towing around 8 head of cattle in the work truck, but which mostly just enables a bunch of idiots driving around surburbs in gleaming-clean four-door pickups that have never carried anything in the bed but a couple bikes or a little camping gear.
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.
Farmer's kids are already exempt from 99% of road and licensing requirements if they are on farm business. I was 12 years old driving around in an old truck without a license plate or license, sometimes hauling massive loads, and it was 100% legal because it was for the farm and my parents were farmers. And honestly there were far more dangerous tasks done on the farm than that so I don't see a real problem with it.
I came from exactly that sort of community. The fact of the matter is that teen would have driven that truck regardless of the law permitting it.
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.
> you can bet that no regulation of any kind will ever be enacted to curb the disaster that CAFE rules caused to "car" size.
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.
Sure. But unfortunately the effect of stupid CAFE on the whole fleet nationwide has been so extreme that the 85% of cars that are still gas have grown to be enormous, so understandably no one feels safe driving a little Civic if they can afford at least a CR-V and ideally a 3-row SUV.
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!
Yeah I'm in a really low Civic Type-R, so when I'm opposite some kind of SUV, and also at a slight angle, was basically at direct eye height with their LEDs. I definitely don't have the same problem with older bulb based SUVs though
Honestly the worst offenders for shooting the lights right in your eyes are the Jeep Wranglers. I drive a work truck on occasion and the Jeeps are about the only vehicle that still get me looking for the fog line. High intensity lights are still really annoying though, and my eyes are probably 7-8ft off the ground.
Wranglers are often lifted via the aftermarket, and I bet a lot of people who do that don't ever stop to consider whether the headlights need to be realigned after.
My experience has been all Wranglers unless they have aftermarket "eyelids". I think their stock lights have zero angle and just blast straight ahead without pointing towards the ground. Most high intensity lights tend to point at the ground so you don't usually get it straight into your eyes.
That's the worse for you driving a work truck. For people in shorter cars, the Wranglers might actually be above our sightlines, and the Dodge Ram tailgating us is among the worst.
you weren't in a short car, you were in a normal car. Society really needs legislation around auto obesity. Cars are too big, too high, too heavy, all at despite being less practical than a station wagon from twenty years back.
Blame the obama CAFE regulations that accounted for wheelbase and car volume, giving manufacturers lower fuel economy standards for larger cars. Then the CAFE standards that hold trucks/SUVs to a lower standard.
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.
While drastically higher gas prices would have been the proper solution, the CAFE standards did not incentivize people to buy larger/taller vehicles.
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.
Minivans really did suck in comparison to most SUVs. The vast majority of them were underpowered, had electrical problem, and their insides fell apart rather quickly.
I can't say I have experienced those issues between Odysseys and Siennas, but those are quality problems, nothing inherent to the concept of a minivan. I don't believe a minivan is or was underpowered for 99% of people's needs, especially to move family in a 1 hour radius.
It's funny that you point out Japanese companies as the actually worthwhile minivans. You're not pointing out the shitwagons dumped out there by Ford, Dodge and Chevy that were the bulk of the market. I remember the Astrovans being especially bad. There was a lot of stumbling around by US makers switching over to things like fuel injections and electronic controls. A lot of this left some amount of consumer dislike to particular brand names. Then when you add that SUV/Crossovers started showing up when manufacturing of cars had improved greatly these new models were more apt to be considered quality it made a big difference.
What? I’m almost 40, and my whole life it has been common knowledge that American cars are of inferior quality compared to Japanese cars.
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).
Well either that or completely privatize the infrastructure needed to operate those cars like multi-lane roads and parking lots with no mandatory minimums for road width and parking lot size.
One thought I've had with the matrix projectors on my Lightning is that it would be nice if they were able to dim parts of the beam that were below the normal threshold for low/high. It reliably turns off the bright parts above that line, but it seems like the "low beam" area is fixed. So on small hills and such I'll occasionally beam people directly in the face with a lot of light. Mostly that happens when the distance is still far enough that it won't be nearly as bad as when you're just across an intersection, but it's still fairly bright IMO.
I assume regulation prevents the dynamic lighting from including the low beam section.
I high-beamed one of them, then they turned their high beams on - it was a shockingly ridiculous amount of light that's simply dangerous anywhere. Fuck Audi.
Man, this feels like a vehicular instantiation of class war. Pay enough and you too can blind others on the road.
Yeah quite possibly actually, I did think at the time if they were angled down slightly, it wouldn't be half as bad. So that checks out. But does show there needs to be some kind of solution for uneven situations like that
I think most vehicles are operating with their headlamps adjusted too high. I think the majority are now completely out of spec [1]. My normal lights are very respectably adjusted and are the older dimmer type, but my full beams are blinding - I rarely ever use them. A few times a driver comes towards me with full beams on, I flash mine and light up the entire night.
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.
The source of this claim, which you helpfully did not provide, is Rupert Lowe, a far-right UK politician and shite-merchant who is so toxic he got kicked out of Reform. He does not give any indication as to where his number came from.
A small correction: drivers from the EU do not need a UK license; the driving license from their own country is valid in the UK, even post-Brexit. And the exchange scheme only applies to residents of Great-Britain.
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
I would argue it's not about being better or worse than another country, but if 1 in 30 drivers have a different understanding then that's a risk. By doing a driving test in the country you live in you gain a greater understanding of what it's like driving in that country.
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.
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.
It’s not especially difficult to swap the side of the road you’re driving on, your brain adjusts very quickly. Millions of truck drivers and tourists do it each year when visiting the UK from mainland Europe and Europe from the UK.
We could get very far by mandating easier adjustment of headlights, and free adjustment at auto shops. It only takes a couple minutes to adjust the headlights , especially at a shop with a lift and a gauge.
The curse of modern super bright LEDs. Add to that list; super bright red brake lights, and a new trend for animated turning lights / indicators. Looks like something we'd have installed as teenagers after watching Knight Rider. Really distracting.
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.
Add to that rental bikes that have always-on flashing lights. My neurospice is relatively mild, but flashing lights and animations in my field of view really fuck up my ability to focus on other things. I can't be the only one with this issue, but it doesn't seem to garner much sympathy.
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!
To be fair, the flashing on bicycles is intentional, precisely to make sure you are aware of them, since they're so much smaller and vulnerable, and the light itself is so much smaller than the rear light on a vehicle. It's not just on rentals, it's a standard feature of bicycle rear lights that is there for safety.
Fascinating. I just looked up a bit of research on it, and it seems there are two contradicting phenomena at play. Flashing helps in seeing cyclists further away and helps with visibility generally -- but it also makes it harder to estimate speed and distance.
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.
Flashing on-off and always on aren't the only options. I wish more designers went with flashing bright-dim, because it solves a lot of problems.
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.
Blinding and dazzling oncoming traffic in the name of safety is outright stupid.
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.
You definitely don't ride around here if you have not been blinded by a bike headlight. They can blow away your vision from half a mile away easily. I can't even see the trail in front of me without putting my hand up to block the light. I call it the nighttime salute.
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.
The thing that really irritates me about the animated turning lights is that they still do it when hazards are on. The one and only possible use case would be differentiating between hazards and turn signals, and they don't do it.
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.
Flashing third brake light (in the US) is usually a dealer profit addon. Personally, I think these violate federal vehicle safety law. I'll add a link to a federal letter that I think agrees with me [1]... But no enforcement means dealers alter the wiring harness to add these on to all their inventory and add a line item on the bill. They'll remove it if you complain, but the wiring harness has been altered.
I'm ok with factory strobing on hard braking, and I think that is permitted generally.
From the install guide [1] under "Installation Instructions, General", step 5 is:
> 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.
I’ve seen a few cars that have strobe-then-solid brake lights from the factory, where the strobe only fires under hard deceleration. That seems like a safety win to me. (Remember it being on a high-spec Mercedes SL, and I’m pretty sure it was stock; looked it up and Mercedes calls it part of “Adaptive Braking”.)
Those radar speed limit signs that blink at what seems like 50 times a second if you go 36 in a 35 zone are very annoying. To be fair the blink threshold must be configurable, but whoever installed them around here didn't have any common sense and set them all to the speed limit exactly.
There's one near me that's set to 45 in a 55. Every time I drive past it it gets a little closer to going missing. It's a minimum effort install on a wood post and it's right near the road to enter a new bougie subdivision in an otherwise rural area so it's almost certainly a cheap attempt to make a complainer go away.
Not just flashing but also flickering, some headlights that I've seen in the wild look quite aggressive if they are in the periphery; dimming gone wrong? Anything that flickers or flashes will be brighter at peak than if it was a constant light source.
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.
I feel the same way in America, I think there should be stricter regulations on how bright a car's headlights are allowed to be for it to be street legal. Wouldn't mind having a cap on blue-light levels in addition.
There are a two things contributing to "headlights too bright" in the US...
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.
Well, and the fact they're just way brighter than ever. When I was younger you could stare at the yellowish glow of a car with headlights on and just not be blinded. We even used to park several cars around a basketball court behind the goals with headlights on at times to play at night.
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.
> When I was younger you could stare at the yellowish glow of a car with headlights on and just not be blinded.
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.
It would be fantastic if it were possible to dictate a headlight height for standard lights. just because your SUV is twelve feet off the ground doesn't mean the lights need to be positioned there.
> Second, there's a decent sized market for cheap, unapproved HID/LED kits for older cars. They're often not aimed correctly.
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.
Those are some of the most offensive lights but I wouldn't say it's the biggest problem. SUVs and trucks often have their headlights at the absolute highest point allowed and it's not uncommon for drivers to install lift kits which raise the lights even higher. If you're in a standard sedan, headlights pointing into your eyes is pretty unavoidable. Even a small vehicle that's oncoming and on a steeper incline than you may shine their bright headlights into your eyes.
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.
> I would bet that nearly all of the “headlights are too bright” complaints are coming from people seeing LED retrofit kits.
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.
How many people are really getting after market headlights installed on their SUVs? There's too many vehicles with blindingly bright lights for that to be the cause.
I used to think it was a lot of people doing it. I drive an older car with what I call "normal" brightness headlights, and the warm color too instead of the annoying blue/white.
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"
I mean, I have those types of lights on my car, but I am VIGILANT about checking that they have a slight DOWNWARDS slope (and I'm in a relatively low sedan to begin with). There's a T-intersection near my house with a retaining wall at the end - very convenient for checking the angle.
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.
> 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"
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.
When my taillight burned out, I went to the local autoparts store to get a replacement. The first light I picked up had printed on the packaging, in not-terribly-visible writing, "For Off-Road Use Only." I had to go back and hunt longer for the light that was legal for road use.
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.
That's not how it works. They can write whatever they want on the packaging. It's the final assembly that's compliant. They're covering their ass in case you put their 5W bulb in some application they've never heard of where it technically fits but a 2.5W bulb was supposed to be used or something.
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.
The correct bulb will not say that, aftermarket LEDs do. The light reflector housings are designed and tested for specific bulb standards. There are LEDs which try to output light from the same place as the filament in the bulb they are mimicking. But there is no guarantee they function properly, hence the warning and illegality.
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
Most Teslas come mis-aimed from the factory and expect their owners to "calibrate" them - they just never tell them that.. Guess how many owners actually figure it out? A vanishingly small percentage.. (or they're all assholes who want to blind others on purpose)
In EU most DMV equivalents check headlights yearly to catch illegal illumination envelopes (along with other safety-related aspects, brakes and whatnot).
Most US states don't have an inspection regime. Of those that do, it's often just for emissions (and with 2001+ cars, it's increasingly just confirm the check engine light shows up in the light test and turns off when the engine is started, plus check that the emissions computer says ready for test). The driving public does not want to pay for safety inspections.
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.
In theory, yes. But, it's state-by-state, enforcement at drive-time is next to zero (unless the cop just wants to hassle you), leaving it to either annual or time-of-sale inspections that are easily gamed (slip the mechanic a $20).
Heck, people will reinstall stock parts for inspection then swap back to the illegal parts. Common with emissions stuff as well.
The only one I've experienced (Massachusetts) wouldn't catch any of what we're discussing in this thread. They put it on the emission testing machine, walked once around the car, maybe checked the brakes, and that was it. It was in no way comparable to the UK's MOT test, which is a proper inspection.
This isn’t the whole story. I’ve been driving the same Prius compact since 2015, and only I the last few years have I suddenly started experiencing these insanely bright headlights. The giant cars have been around the whole time. The brightest lights seem like they are on specific brands of new cars, although I’m terrible at recognizing car brands and obviously only experience this issue at night when I’m being blinded by headlights, so it’s not easy to figure out exactly which brands cause the issue.
My 2024 outback has no 'high beams'. My low beams are the same brightness as high beams. The only difference is the field of view. I switch on the high beams on and height of the beam increases, but intensity stays the same.
I feel awful about essentially high-beaming everyone unless the road is flat.
High also refers to the lack of beam cut-off or masking[1], not only the intensity. In UK English, the terms are "full beam" and "dipped beam" to reflect this.
[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.
This is how almost all cars with HID bulbs work, because HID bulbs can't be toggled on and off - they need time to warm up and have a limited number of arc initiation cycles before they wear out. So there's a mechanical shutter which changes the cut-off distance. Generally, there is also a leveling sensor which adjusts the cutoff when the car starts up, to account for suspension sag differences and load.
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.
Thanks, previously the only other car I had was a 1995 volvo which used additional bulbs when the high beams were engaged. Intensity and field of view were increased. The outback's headlights were very confusing to me since I leapt through like 3 generations of cars
I wonder if it became normal around the time everyone started complaining headlights were too bright
Most vehicles with dual-filament bulbs will turn off the low beams while the high beams are on, but looking around, I see it's mixed for vehicles with dual bulbs; US standards don't require it one way or the other --- you can meet the high beam requirement with separate bulbs or with both bulbs in concert.
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.
> Second, there's a decent sized market for cheap, unapproved HID/LED kits for older cars. They're often not aimed correctly.
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.
a third thing is some people drive with brights on all the time, particularly in snow-bird seasonal communities, I've noticed. when the seasonal people, many geriatric, are in town, the vehicles driving day and night with bright lights activated is noticable.
Might be some mistaken confirmation bias there. Canadian registered vehicles are required to have "daytime running lights" while American cars are not. You might be seeing low beams vs no beams, as opposed to high beams vs low beams.
Aiming and beam restriction is not enough and cannot ever be enough to prevent bright headlights from blinding people. It only works when the road is flat. You introduce a hill or even a speed bump and suddenly the headlight angle is zero. Brightness has to be managed directly.
The rising height of headlights in North America is compounding the issue as well. At this point a good proportion of vehicles have headlights even or higher than the roof on a sedan.
At least in my state, there is a law that restricts the location of headlights to between 22 and 54 inches from the ground. 54 inches is quite tall, though, I think that a lot of cars have roofs that are shorter than 4.5 feet. I'd love to see a much lower upper limit.
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.
LEDs are around 10x more efficient than incandescent bulbs. A 100W incandescent equivalent LED bulb typically consumes 10-12W. A 70W LED would put out as much light as 700W of incandescent.
Traditional automotive headlamps are halogens and much more efficient than conventional incandescents. It was only in the last decade that LEDs beat halogens on lumens per watt.
I'd go as far as to say that the height is the issue, and it's becoming global (although, yes, US is the leader).
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.
The maximum brightness is already regulated in US and Europe. US allows a lower brightness level.
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.
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.
The regulations for manufacturers are enforced. There have even been recalls for it.
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.
I believe so, but I need more evidence in either direction to give it a definitive answer, but why companies recall cars to fix their brightness levels if they are not enforced?
> 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.
> 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.’”
You mean the same companies that measured the testing benches used for emissions regulations and cheated on them? It's not like there isn't a history of the car companies doing foul shit here.
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.
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.
Camissa is not as unhinged as Clarkson, their most common trait is their appreciation and knowledge of cars and how they treat their histories.
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.).
It's much worse in America, in my experience. Much more deviation in cars/sedans/trucks on the road, with different road heights each, and MUCH more custom stuff on top.
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."
I'm in the Netherlands and I DO find it bad. Probably also has to do with my age (early fifties) - your eyes adjust with more difficulty the older you get, it seems.
We also need to be far more strict about enforcing properly alignment, so many are pointed too high especially on larger vehicles and pretty much always on anything that's been lifted
This is false. Light trucks are definitely regulated. Emissions regs do soften a bit for 3/4 ton and up trucks (think F250 and up), but the ubiquitous F150 as well as other half-tons, as well as mid-size trucks, are all very much regulated.
As a cyclist and pedestrian, these new headlights and the cars with the "auto brights" are just terrible.
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.
Even if we're considering only other cars and not pedestrians, it's still pretty annoying. The brights will only turn off _after_ another car is already in their field of illumination, and only after a short delay. If you're manually managing your brights, you can almost always switch them off before another car even comes into view (by e.g. seeing their headlights approaching)
I understand that currently this is sort of a collective action problem, but I'm a bit baffled why people ever thought they needed brighter headlights in the first place. In the city, it's so bright that you don't even need headlights to see whatsoever. When cars started automatically dimming the dash via a light sensor, there was actually a period of time where I totally forgot to turn on my headlights because things were so well lit -- even at night -- that I didn't need them whatsoever.
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.
> 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.
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.
Same for rural parts of North America, and you also have to worry about animals on the road.
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.
You're right, and it's actually even worse when the road has very reflective white lines. Basically, everything outside of the road is invisible. However, in France, they somehow haven't figured how to not have their lines disappear when it rains ever so slightly.
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.
The rain thing is true anywhere I've driven. Even worse, when there are old white lines grinded away for some change, and new white lines added 0.5 lanes away. In certain wet conditions the old lines become equally or more "white" than the new ones.
This is also true for Germany, but your ability to see in the dark decreases at some point with increasing brightness, since you don't allow your eyes to get used to the darkness.
Adapting to the darkness is not a binary thing. You are supposed to see beside the road by light reflected from your beams. Otherwise you would only see animals when they come into your beam, which is generally too late, you want to see them when they are to your side.
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.
> You are supposed to see beside the road by light reflected from your beams.
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.
But for the truly dark areas, you can turn on your high beams - which you aren't allowed to have on when there's oncoming traffic. Smart / adaptive lighting is another option, lower / yellower light in well lit spaces.
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.
My 2020 Lexus has the same system. I’m amazed at how well it works for same-direction traffic and how terrible it is for opposite direction traffic (which seems like it should be a vastly easier problem to solve).
It varies a lot in the US. Major highway in Florida? Very visible lines. Minor highway in Colorado with all the paint and reflectors scraped off by snowplows, even if the road is in good condition? Not as visible. Rural somewhere? Good luck.
I think everything is just way brighter now. We improved LEDs and stuck them in everything and amped them way up. Just going outside at night in a residential area gets your eyes blasted out with unshielded 8000K streetlights and spotlights people put up on the outside of their houses. I have to keep my computer monitors' brightness levels almost all the way down just to be able to use them, and they're not even the ones marketed as ultra-bright.
I live in the woods in the northeast US, and also grew up in the 80s-90s in a very rural area and I've owned a number of cars when I was young, some with comically dim lights.
You really don't need the bright lights. You never have. Slow down, look for movement, and use your brights intelligently.
Growing up in rural New England it seemed that people were constantly hitting deer with their cars—slowing down is obviously a good idea, but every additional foot of headlight distance certainly helps for spotting the glint of an eyeball on the side of the road.
I also live in the woods in the northeast US, also grew up in a very rural area (in the 70s-80s), and I still own a few 70s and 80s cars with comically dim lights. Yeah, they're not good. 1) They're very noticeably worse comparing them back to back to modern cars, and 2) my eyes are no longer young. Can I drive with them? Sure. Is it less safe? You bet.
Slow down is kind of the general tip, but I find it kinda BS. I can drive slowly focusing on the bushes on the way to/from work in bumfuck nowhere, or I can get some beacon of god aux LEDs for cheap and turn night into day.
> or I can get some beacon of god aux LEDs for cheap and turn night into day.
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.
My point is about bumfuck nowhere. Places where at night you may or may not see another car for the X km it takes you to get home. That with time people tend to forget they have their high beam bound to the beacon of god, with or without an extra switch, is a separate issue. The light itself makes sense.
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...
> I can get some beacon of god aux LEDs for cheap and turn night into day.
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.
"I can get some beacon of god aux LEDs for cheap and turn night into day" they said, in a topic entitled "Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright"
Not to be pedantic but you do need to be able to see pedestrians at night too, who can legally walk on country roads on either side, without reflectors or illumination.
It’s the car drivers responsibility to not mow pedestrians down wherever or whenever they are walking.
A lot of smaller US cities also have areas with no lighting and worn-out lines, which contrast with brightly lit areas and suddenly you're basically blind if your lights are too dim. Couple that with a wet road, which reduces visibility, and it can be hard to see where to drive.
Then we have pedestrians walking with no sidewalks or crosswalks, because city planning actively hostile to people walking.
Well, the new stupid bright lights, yes. The idea of brights in general, though, not quite as bad.
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.
I think part of the problem is people drive at the speed limit regardless of conditions. If its dark and wet you really should not drive at the same speed as when its sunny and dry. If you are unfamiliar with a twisty road you need to slow down. If there are more pedestrians around than usual you need to slow down.
I agree with you 100%. The speed limit isn't seen as a limit, culturally, in the united states from what I can tell. Anymore, it's treated as the minimum socially acceptable speed on roads.
I do, and old school yellow high-beams were plenty on a 205 to do 80+mph down b-roads back in the 00's, I would happily go back to that if it meant I could avoid being blinded every ten minutes.
All cars in the U.S. used the same headlights up until the early 80s. You could literally walk into the auto parts store and buy a headlight to replace yours, regardless of make and model
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.
> All cars in the U.S. used the same headlights up until the early 80s.
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.
Well this is why headlights have dipped beam and full beam. The issue is the dipped beam is getting as bright as the full beam used to be, and is mounted higher on the car as well.
>>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Why does nobody think that if these lights are dazzling oncoming drivers, they are also dazzling these precious deer and pedestrians people keep saying they need to see so well.
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.
> You think kids aren't running across the street at night out in the country? Chasing a soccer ball?
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.
>> You think kids aren't running across the street at night out in the country? Chasing a soccer ball?
>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've lived in Montana for 25 years, a place where there are deer (and moose and bears) rampaging all over the place. People hit them all the time. But the only place I ever hit a deer with my car was North Yorkshire.
>> You think kids aren't running across the street at night out in the country? Chasing a soccer ball?
> 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.
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.
> 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 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.
Despite the "I need this in the sticks" responses here, I think the most common answer is the silent group that didn't ask for it but it just comes with the car. This group is silent anyway, they didn't have the issue/need but also won't complain about the extra light, whereas a few other people did and so you can just make 1 size fits all with no repercussions (besides perhaps selling more replacement lamps)
In the early 2020s, I was driving at night in rural America on a daily basis in a nineties car with pre-LED yellow lights. There were plenty of animals in the road, and I never felt they were hard to see or stop for, even with no street lights.
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.
If i may add, they won't complain because the headlights of their cars aren't the ones that are flashing directly at their own face. To them the problem will always be the other's cars having the lights too bright.
I wonder whether some fraction of the population has shit night vision and whether this fraction's preferences are driving this trend to too-bright headlights.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
I have close to two decades of driving experience and I dread driving on the rural roads. Roads where you can barely fit two cars side by side, or even narrower, unexpected cars rushing towards you from the closed dead corners, badly signed crossings etc. But mostly its narrow roads, it is extremely stressful for me, and double so in the twilight and in the darkness.
> downplaying the challenges of country road driving is weird.
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.
Just because this is YC, I thought I should pitch in -
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.
People were pushing for those in the 90s. I think it never got adopted because of the loss of transparency on the windshield (AFAIK, there's an international standard that most countries go beyond, and it's way above 50%).
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.
> high-trust society that solved coordination problems through legislation
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.
Polarized light reflecting off a textured surface scrambles into nonpolarized light.
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.
Not necessarily... I had H4 or H1/H7 before, which were dimmer, but the edge cutoff was much smoother...
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.
This is pretty detached from reality. Many places in the countryside don't even have road lines, never mind reflective ones. People walk out in the countryside all the time. Animals are a very big reason to have bright lights in the countryside, too.
Headlights dazzle animals, which is why they stand there staring into your lights until they get hit. The less light your car is giving off, the more chance wildlife has to get out of its way becasue it can actually see your car not just a massive bright light like the sun coming towards them.
Most people don't change the brightness of their lights. This is driven by industry using HID and LED lights that have a higher color temperature than the old lighting. It's really a failure of governmental regulation (or lack thereof, in this case).
LED upgrades were very popular in the early 2000s. IIRC that style of light was introduced by Lexus and Audi around 2003
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
Most of my driving is down small, unlit country roads and I'm constantly coming across deer, sheep, people in dark jackets (walking back from the pub) and people riding bikes (occasionally with no lights on).
This is exactly what high beams are for, and even 20 year old cars have very bright high beams that are plenty safe.
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?
I'm pretty sure a technical solution can be found that improves normal headlight visibility compared to non-xenon lamps from 10-15-20 years ago WITHOUT blinding incoming traffic.
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.
Good headlights are. The modern levels of brightness do not qualify as good headlights. Modern headlights become unsafe as soon as any other person is on the business end of them, due to the fact that they can no longer see properly. It puts other vehicles at the risk of crashing from being blinded, both cars and smaller vehicles like bicycles.
I find it easier to drive my wife's modern car with all that than my 2005 car which has barely any internal lights (dim light around the speedo, dim light on the radio)
You're not wrong, but it's a minor contribution at most.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
You must not live where there’s wildlife… I can tell you it’s basically impossible to see deer at night without your brights on until you’re basically hitting it.
We have quite a lot of wildlife around us; deer, moose, coyotes, hedgehogs, pheasants, nearly non-stop turkeys. It really hasn't been an issue.
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.
I agree with all of this. For wildlife, using long distance IR or something to augment makes more sense than higher brightness normal lights , given how falloff works.
I have "Night Vision Assist" on my car. It has an IR sensor up front and displays a live image on the instrument cluster. It uses AI to highlight pedestrians and animals. When I'm being blinded by lights I rely on Night Vision far more than I wish I had to. It would be even better if it were integrated into a head-up display, overlaying objects on the windshield. (I suppose it would need to track the driver's eyes to know where to display them.)
Bear in mind that the UK has a “national speed limit” of 60mph for much of the countryside. This is very much a limit, a maximum, and you’re expected to drive to the conditions of the road. If it’s perfect weather conditions and twisting roads not wide enough for 2 cars, you shouldn’t be driving at the speed limit.
Absolutely. The legal speed limit is 60 in the country - on any road not marked with a lower speed limit. This means that legally, you can drive at 60mph down a twisty single track road with 1.5m earth and rock banks topped with hedges.
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.
Driving too fast for the conditions (but within the limit) would usually be considered Driving without Due Care and Attention even if you don't crash (although the likelihood of anyone being around to enforce it on a deserted country road is pretty low).
That's not the purpose of that law. That's just the pretext they use to get the useful idiots to endorse it. The purpose of that laws is if you do something stupid but below the speed limit and not violating any other specific laws they've got something to nab you for.
Having driven in the US and UK, this is a significant difference between the two. In the UK, you might sometimes drive 30 under on a road that is nominally 60 mph. In the US, that road would have a specific posted speed limit that is safe to drive. US roads are also more consistently designed for constant speed or have additional advisory speed limits for curves. You can nearly always drive as fast as the number on the sign unless there is some additional hazard.
Where I live there are speed limits but rarely minimum speeds, only on divided highways as far as I know. Everyone is different, some people just aren't comfortable driving the speed limit at a given moment. We should literally back off those folks, they're not what's making traffic horrible in my experience.
Worth pointing out that headlights (and tail lights) aren't just for your ability to see things, they're also for the ability of other drives to see you.
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.
I don't even use my high beams usually, and neither do I have LED, xenon or laser headlights. But I often do wish that I magically had brighter headlights without being an asshole, both in the city and rural. In the city any 2 lane or smaller road can be unexpectedly crossed by pedestrians, on crossings and not. And pedestrians nowadays are wearing all black, completely invisible on the side of the road. And on the rural roads, I want as far visibility as I can get, because the load is usually 1.5 lane, barely fitting two cars at below walking speed, so when I see an opposite traffic I need to immediately slow down and take to the right, almost touching the ditch or the wall, to pass safely. Additionally I need to spot opposing car in the dead corners, where there is zero visibility etc. And finally the same problem as in the city with pedestrians crossing rural roads, which is even more dangerous because it is unexpected and darker.
So I can see a powerful motivation to fit bright headlights in the cars, regardless of the other's comfort.
I remember light used to be much paler and became brighter around the 2010. just go drive in an old car (20+ years) and a new car.
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.
I confess this is why I just assumed my eyes were going bad. I am getting old, and this shift seemed to have coincided with about the time I moved to a more rural area. In the city, I don't know that I ever used "brights" on my cars. In rural, it helps to see when there are basically no road lamps.
Many places don't pay for reflective paint, unfortunately. Here in Missouri they used it for a year or two and it was a vast improvement... but then they cut the paint budget and now we're back to invisible lines with even a small rain (no matter what the brightness of the headlights).
Assuming that the lines on the road are in good condition or even exist. Uneven roads, potholes, and corners/junctions with no signage can all be a challenge is poor conditions with old style headlights ( our 2 cars have old and new style lights respectively ).
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.
Where they pass through rural areas the high-speed, multi-lane roads in the UK and continental Europe are unlit. Partly for cost, partly to avoid light pollution. Brighter lights mean being able to see hazards further ahead of you.
Maybe it all comes down to allowing people to feel comfortable driving more quickly on country roads. Also, the number of people who actually choose new cars is quite limited, and they may be influenced by stupid factors.
You assume country roads have painted lines? Not where I live. And you also need to watch for deer, racoons, and other critters crossing ahead of you. High beams are essential on dark country roads.
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.
Where I live, it doesn’t matter how far your lights throw down the roadway, you still have less than a couple seconds to notice the deer sprinting out of the woods directly in front of you
> I understand that currently this is sort of a collective action problem,
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.
In the country you need decent lights on the road to spot the potholes, animals, and people. And of course you get pedestrian traffic, especially at this time of year when people are walking dogs after getting home from work.
The problem isn't as much bright lights though, it's lights shining in your face.
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
My guess is that the average population of car drivers is aging. With age comes worse eyesight and and the ability to see in the dark. So a lot of people are probably more comfortable with having brighter headlights.
Ah, the old "I am a free-thinking rational being, but everyone else are a bunch of NPCs who can't be allowed to have what they want without enlightened supervision" argument.
Out in the country there's no lines on the road. In fact, the road could be gravel for many, many miles, or just a dirt road.
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.
> In the city, it's so bright that you don't even need headlights to see whatsoever.
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.
We needed some brighter lights before the current craze.
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.
I have poor night vision, many times there are no road marks at all. I need to see whether the road continues straight, goes left or right, so I need decent headlights.
And when your ridiculous LED lamps blind the oncoming driver on a corner during heavy rain and they crash into you, you wish weren't so selfish.
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.
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.
Desperately we need to reign in car "style" choices like this. Beyond headlights being too bright, lift kits should be banned and tint regulations should be enforced. Same with sound regulations.
Public roads are not race tracks; they are for people.
What bothers you about tints? I've never bothered to get one since it's illegal where I'm at but the new ones seem pretty cool for cave dwellers who fear the light. They tint well during the day but you can still see at night from what I've seen on friends cars.
It's like driving behind a truck or van, you can't see past the (tinted) car in front.
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.
most aftermarket tints are too dark and dont allow pedestrians to see into the car to see if they going to be hit by the driver. its illegal in most places but cops dont do anything about it.
I could talk about eye contact and how using the road only works if we cooperate but, more than anything, I just find a heavily tinted windscreen to be antisocial. It's like the ultimate form of bullying. Driving around in a killing machine without your victims even being able to see you.
I find this problem to be most severe as a pedestrian - when my eyes have adjusted to the darkness (even if I'm carrying a flashlight, it pales in comparison) and a modern car is oncoming, I cannot see _anything_. Out here in the sticks where there are no sidewalks I can either take it on blind faith that the driver has seen and will avoid me, or I can step way off into the ditch (but not everyone has that option).
Thanks to automatic high beams, its a problem in residential urban areas too. My neighborhood does not have much in the way of streetlights, and automatic high beams operate by detecting whether there is significant oncoming light. That means that in my neighborhood, cars with AHB always have their high beams up when there isn't oncoming car traffic. They also tend to function really badly around road curves in residential areas, where they'll affect other drivers.
PSA: Turn off your automatic high beams, they aren't worth it the damage they do to the rest of us.
Yeah. When I ride my bike in the sticks and pass walkers in the dark, I try to disable my headlight a few seconds before I pass them. Otherwise all they see is a bright light approaching. Disabling the lights for a moment seems better than one party not seeing anything. (Or both parties, e.g. two bikes, or runners with forehead LED light.)
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.
If your front light is correctly aiming down, there’s no need to disable the light. Modern bicycle led front lights are most often incorrectly set up, though.
I can control the angle, but permanently aiming it down so far that it can't get in anyone's eyes is completely impractical. You would only see what's directly in front of you and you would miss a lot of stuff.
Just chuck in the old non LED lights. When I'm walking around town at night, it's only the cars with new bright white LEDs that are super bright and blind me.
It's a relief when an older car come by with orange'y lights.
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.
I always wondered if it would be feasible to make the headlights produce polarized light (e.g. vertical), and have windscreens filter out that polarization... I guess it would only work if the scattering of light off of whatever is being illuminated sufficiently depolarizes the light. Anyhow, I thought it was a neat idea when I was a teenager.
There might be some issues with retro fitting the world's existing road vehicle fleet, but that's a deployment detail. :p
Ooooh so I am not the only one to swear at those blinding headlights? Interestingly (or not), I think there should be a regulated height for the headlights all private cars; I drive a B-segment type of car, and I find all those European SUVs have their headlights right at my shoulder level meaning I will always be subject to be blinded by this type of vehicle vs a similar lower car. That goes for the vans as well.
There is an arms race to be the brightest, biggest vehicle on the road. Each driver wants to be the safest and many want a shiny high status vehicle. The result is a runaway feedback loop of ever more worse design
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.
Where I live, it's customary to let other drivers know by flashing your brights when they're blinding you or if there's some other issue with their vehicle like a broken tail light or such. Maybe less now that you can't easily change the bulb yourself but as a principle
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
When I got my Honda van with stock LED headlights about a year ago, people started flashing me that my brights were on. After the first couple times I started flashing my actual brights back. They make the stock headlights too dang bright.
I'm the one who's flashing you. I'm flashing you because your headlights are bothering me. Showing me that you can bother me even more does not make it better.
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.
> Still, obviously, nothing you can do, or the driver in general.
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.
I assumed the self leveling led whatever wonder-tech-wizz cannot be aimed. If they can, that should be the first reaction of someone who is getting flashed at a lot. As opposed to flashing back. It's not a headlight-measuring-contest.
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.
"Nothing they can do"? I've never owned a car so genuinely don't know but surely you can buy whatever lights you want for it and/or correct the alignment?
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.
My parents bought a Lexus that happens to be tall-ish with very bright headlights. I don't think I have ever driven it at night without people flashing me.
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...
Apparently Toyota+Lexus are ordering the most blinding lights without any reason.
Talk to the dealer - if no one complains, they don't feel the need to fix.
Maybe get them replaced if you're blinding the other drivers?
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
They're not replaceable. That's the problem. It's not just a bulb you can replace. I have to replace the entire lighting fixture, and replacing the fixture with the OEM part is going to have the same exact issue. Replacing it with a non-OEM part is probably going to make it worse.
> Maybe get them replaced if you're blinding the other drivers?
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.
> Where I live, it's customary to let other drivers know by flashing your brights when they're blinding you
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.
We had a rental like that in 2023. The person who was driving was amazed and you could see the effect very well where it would light up the forest or town except for the one strip where this other car was coming on
(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
So, I tested this for a few weeks. I can safely drive my car around with hi-beams on and nobody even notices. My hi-beams are less bothersome than the standard SUV.
A lot of this is due to differing heights. There are more tall vehicles with headlights that are high off the ground, which dazzle drivers of regular cars.
Even if the dip angle is the same (1% gradient or so), this can still dazzle most people nearby.
Vans and other bigger vehicles, that have the lights mounted higher than usual, are indeed particularly bad, but I don't really want to get into an arms race of taller and taller vehicles just to be able to see at night. Better that the manufacturers just angle it down a bit more if they want to put the lights up that high
I think this is an area where stricter regulation would be appreciated. Just needs an additional checkbox on the regular MOT forms, and all cars would be compliant within a year.
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.
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.
There is a legal minimum standard for vision to be able to drive in the UK (basically you have to be able to read a number plate at 20 metres, not have double vision, and have a normal field of vision in one eye.) The punishment for failing to stop driving if you fail that is a £1000 fine.
People with serious cataracts shouldn't be driving.
I have implants after cataract laser surgery with now 94% vision. Like with every other laser surgery the problem of halos persists for the rest of your life. As a small person in a small car I have repeatedly been forced to stop at the curb until the halos reduce enough to be able to reliably drive. SUVs are the worst offenders in this regard. This just to say that people with their cataracts cured and a really good eyesight are still majorly impacted by this.
Edit: I have no problems with incandescent or the old Led lights.
If people with 20/20 vision are having trouble, I'm sure that people with diminished eyesight but above the legal limit have it worse.
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.
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.)
I think it's the same everywhere. I'm in North America, I drive a normal size car, between the super bright led lights, and trucks and SUVs with higher mounting points it's getting really bad. I'm now almost unable to tell when people still have their high beams or not. Add to that some people who don't give a damn and actually drive with high beams on, and you're certain to become blind.
> TRL's data suggests that LED and whiter headlamps may be linked to glare and that drivers might find their whiteness harder to cope with.
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.)
I think a huge part of the problem also ties into the problem of modern "Angry Robot Face" designs. Car manufacturers are trying to make headlights the size of a penny that emit as much light as "proper" ones.
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.
Also, the plastic headlight “lenses” on many cars tend to get cloudy and develop micro-scratches over time. This reduces the efficiency of the low beams, and instead of fixing the problem, many drivers of older cars simply drive with their high beams on, which creates even more glare for everyone else.
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.
> Nothing is really repairable, of course, so replacing these parts is out of the question
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).
This has been a really huge problem in India lately, gone are the days of cute cars with minimal edges (Volkswagen Phaeton looked amazing IMO), now everyone is buying Cybertruck Clones offered by Mahindra and TATA Example: Mahindra BE 6, New Thar, and endless other examples
The problem isn't only the eye-searing brightness, but the fact that there is a sharp cutoff, presumably also mandated by regulations, that creates a small very bright area immediately in front of your field of vision, and then a contrast of complete darkness beyond that. I suspect at least some drivers of newer cars are using the high beams constantly because it moves the cutoff farther out.
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".
This is a really big problem in Australia as well. I know many people (myself included) that find it far more dangerous driving at night due to being blinded by bright headlights than they were 10-15 years ago.
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.
I've got to admit occasionally I think they are high beams and end up flicking my lights at them, maybe if enough people do that they might think something is wrong.
We could have warmer headlights which would be more comfortable for road users, but most car manufacturers have decided it's 5000K white because it's fashionable.
Higher colour temperature LEDs are more efficient, so that's one reason why they get chosen. It's not a good reason, given they're still a massive efficiency improvement over old halogens.
I'm always curious, who are all those people who tell manufacturers it's fashionable? Other than voices in their heads? Who are those people that unironically like those searing lights?
Yeah, but who are they? Do they keep a real Homer Simpson in some basement, ask him what’s cool, and take the stupidest cheapest ideas for implementation?
I imagine it's the same people that cut holes in new pants. There appear to be some true marketing gods in this world who evidently find buyers for newly broken items at prices higher than the original nonbroken items. Selling bright white lamps frankly 'pales' next to that
Empirically on UK roads it's as much about the car industry getting away with selling vehicles that are too large for our roads i.e. oversized SUV's and trucks, as anything else. The combination of driver's side closer to crown, and higher mounting, mean the light's from these behemoths tend to cast more of their beams into the eye line of anyone coming the other way, particularly in smaller, lower to the ground vehicles.
> tend to cast more of their beams into the eye line of anyone coming the other way, particularly in smaller, lower to the ground vehicles
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.
Recently I was driving in the daytime and got temporarily blinded by a BMW SUV with its high beams on. Not sure where to draw the line, but "brighter than the sun" is too bright.
As a pedestrian I can say that the headlights are too bright everywhere I visit. If a car goes up a slope and I go down it's like somebody holds a flashlight right up my eyes. I don't understand why these mandatory lights should be so bright.
This is a problem with emergency vehicles too - many times I’ve been driving and unable to see a person on the road because the lights from a police or EMS vehicle are brighter than a thousand suns, hiding anything beyond. It feels like a Jurassic park thing - they made them brighter because they could (with minimal focus on externalities)
"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."
"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."
I have adaptive lights on my Ford Lightning (and Model 3, more recently), and I do like it, but it is not without compromises.
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.
Something I have noticed in urban areas is that it is very difficult to see pedestrians that are walking in front of vehicles with these extremely bright headlights. For example, when turning left and there are people walking across the street that I am turning on to in front of another vehicle. I feel like it has something to do with the PWM of the LED lamps + the brightness and color?
The lights are too bright and poorly aligned. I walk regularly, and its more than just the tesla's and mini's at fault (Teslas are definitely some of the worst in my experience though, along with Rivian)
> 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.’”
Teslas are the worst. I try not to speculate without evidence but I cannot shake the intuition that it is intentional to aid the driver assist and self driving stuff, and reflective of a generally sociopathic company.
I've heard it alleged that Tesla simply does not have a QA check for headlight alignment at the factory. Based on my experience on the road, that's entirely believable.
In my city the street lightning is too low at night. And with the better LED headlights and some rain it's impossible to see rare occurances, like bikes without lights, pedestrians crossing the street a.s.o. I really have to drive 30km/h now.
I feel like this problem is better in the UK than in North America.
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.
The problem with headlight brightness has mostly stemmed from cars having brighter headlights. I love technology, but if I had to choose between reducing light output, vs switching to harder-to repair, more expensive, less reliable computer-powered headlights, I'd prefer the former.
When I drive cars with old headlights, they are clearly inferior to the point of feeling nearly dangerous in some situations. I would also not call modern lights less reliable, although I am sure it is more expensive to repair modern lighting technology.
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.
Auto-dimming mirrors used to seem like a luxury, now they're pretty much a necessity. It's always been possible to flip the rear view mirror manually, but the side mirrors don't have this feature. I would be hard-pressed to buy a car without auto-dimming mirrors these days, especially a passenger car (as opposed to a truck/SUV, which is higher up).
I have a glorious feeling of "got there earlier" because I wrote to the Queensland Road Traffic Authority over a decade ago about glare, when the Quartz-Halogen headlights first came in asking why there was no definitional standard for glare from oncoming headlights.
Rather than just rage at the automobile industry and other drivers for creating this problem, I bought a pair of yellow tinted night driving glasses and now it doesn't bug me as much. They don't solve the problem completely but they cut out the harsh blue lights in modern headlights. And the yellow tint makes the world look like a cool night scene in a 1970s movie.
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.
There are two situations where I have problems with being dazzled by headlights:
- low beams on roads that aren't flat, because they shine right into my eyes
- the high beams of cars behind me (sometimes close), which reflect in my mirrors but also off my ceiling, my dashboard, etc.
But I don't necessarily have a problem with the headlights just because they're too powerful.
there should be automatic robotic testers on all the round points in the world with a warning notice going to the driver to fix it in the next five minutes by turning down his headlights on the dashboard or by going ot he nearest garage for adjustment.
1. Headlights are migrating upwards, thanks to the proliferation of SUVs and pickups.
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.
Nearly all drivers look at the incoming headlights!!
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.
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.
My old 2003 Lexus has some sort of anti-bright headlight feature for the rear view mirror that was a gamechanger when I got it. I always notice when I drive another car.
yeah, some cars have powered dimming. most have the little tab/switch at the bottom you need to flick whenever you want to use the dimmer angle. in my last car that would always mess up my optimal rear view mirror angle and position, which would get annoying and turn into a hassle.
- 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.
I am in very small minority since my car is 20 years old now, but it has halogen lights with height adjustments, and they even check for height adjustment at the yearly inspection. But automated high beam switching and people are not ware of it? What sort of drivers do we have nowadays..
A number of US states don't even require regular safety inspections. For example, in Maryland, you only get a safety inspection when selling your vehicle or transferring it in from another state.
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.
It's also because the cars are getting so much taller, especially in the US. Driving a smaller car is terrifying when a lifted Dodge fitted with anti-aircraft spotlights blinds you while going the opposite direction.
Luckily that's illegal in my country, instead we have the opposite problem where new cars have LED taillights that are just as blindingly bright as their headlights.
I'm regularly blinded by some of the ultra-bright rear LEDs. I drive a fairly small/low car so traffic at night is miserable. I tend to avoid driving at night all together for the most part now.
Honestly I'm seeing the opposite. Some new cars, I THINK Camry's, have taillights so bright it's blinding to wait behind one at a stoplight. They don't need to shine just glow so you can see them.
I have never understood why everyone seems to immediately forget everything in their driving lessons as soon as they pass their test. When you're waiting at a red light, you're meant to have the hand brake on (which does not illuminate the brake lights), not your foot on the brake, unless you know that the light is going to turn green very soon, or you're trying to catch the attention of someone coming up behind who looks like they haven't seen that you have stopped.
> When you're waiting at a red light, you're meant to have the hand brake on (which does not illuminate the brake lights), not your foot on the brake, unless you know that the light is going to turn green very soon
I was definitely not taught this as a US driving student. Is this a UK thing?
I can't see how it would be country-specific. How else would you have any control of the forward motion of the vehicle otherwise, especially when starting on an uphill slope? You're meant to raise the clutch to the biting point and apply some accelerator and release the handbrake when you are confident that the engine will prevent the car from moving backwards. Taking the foot off the brake and hoping you can move it over to the accelerator quickly enough doesn't give you that control. Drifting backwards into the car behind you when setting off is rather an embarrassing thing to do.
It does appear to be a UK thing. This is from the UK Highway Code. I'm not finding a US equivalent.
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.
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.
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.
How else would you have any control of the forward motion of the vehicle otherwise, especially when starting on an uphill slope?
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.
I would wager that most modern cars that have a clutch (which is <2% of the market in the U.S.) have hill assist.
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).
Depends on the car. Most ICE automatics will creep forward, EVs will sit there until you hit the accelerator, manual ICE cars (especially diesels) can be held on the clutch just under the 'biting point' which will stop the vehicle moving backwards.
> How else would you have any control of the forward motion of the vehicle otherwise, especially when starting on an uphill slope?
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.
Really need to limit the size of cars. Its starting to get ridiculous our here in the English countryside with cars that have to cross the median because they're so fat.
Congressional hearings on headlights seem to focus on lumens, but the bigger issue is misalignment. I worry that setting a lumen cap will undermine LEDs strengths. Adaptive matrix like Tesla Model Y etc , which shade oncoming and leading traffic, allow incredible visibility without the glare.
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.
Plus speed bumps. Even if most cars had their headlights pointed correctly, the million speed bumps littering my city means constantly blinded drivers.
I wish someone does something similar in India. Night time driving is a nightmare. Everyone runs on high-beam. The new class of motor-cycles are with super bright LEDs and riders put them on high beam. Night-time driving is a guessing game - you need to guess where the edge of the road is, if there is a bicyclist in between, etc.
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.
Driving in a divider-less road in India feels like getting abducted by Aliens!!!!,
Constant High-Beam is fine, But Constant LED/Projector High-Beam is a Crime.
There will be no course-correction in India. The usual mindset is "how can I be the bigger a-hole?" With accessories becoming more and more affordable, there has been a rise in super bright LEDs, and even flashing LEDs. In cities, the police sometimes imposes fines, but apparently, no one pays fines. We have louder horns too. And psychopaths openly displaying their psychopathy. Bangalore's police at least responds on Twitter (https://x.com/blrcitytraffic), but when I look around, it seems like their efforts are a drop in the ocean. The police of other cities are all completely ineffective. The only exception is Chandigarh, but no one wants to follow their example.
As a daily commuter in North-IND I can confirm this, It is not even the car height difference anymore, people are getting aftermarket abominations on their sedans and not getting them height adjusted, the H-beam throw is all over the place.
No wonder. We need standard both on the brightness and the height of the headlights off the ground. Try driving normal sized car or anything sporty and it's blindness central any time modern SUV shows up.
I agree that many LED headlights are too bright (or, more commonly, poorly calibrated) however one thing which can significantly reduce glare is to clean your windshield properly at least once a year. Few people do this.
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.
US is the same. I no longer know is someone is using long-distance lights or normal lights, or whether they are wrongly adjusted. But driving at knight, especially with folks right behind you is hard.
I've had to adjust my headlights down to regulation height (US DOT) on every vehicle I've purchased since 2015 (1x VW, 2x Kia, 1x Ford). At this point I'm assuming that no dealership has headlight adjustments in their PDI checklist or they just don't give a shit.
Given the US bent to this website, surprised more people aren't complaining about lifted trucks...
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.
It's ignorance from consumer side and lost engineering culture from manufacturer.
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.
I'd settle for the damn brake lights/taillights being toned down. Maybe with the exception of a car undergoing hard braking there is no point in them being so bright, but the 1,000,000 nit apparent brightness coming from the vehicle in front at every traffic light is painful.
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).
I understand many cars nowadays have some sort of auto-levelling feature that is supposed to adjust the where the beams point as the vehicle load changes or related to tire inflation. I know some cars used to have a manual control for this. I don't own a car, but often hire, and often it's seemed that the auto-levelling is just adjusted too high.
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
ITT people saying you don't need strong headlights on the country side, you just need to drive slower..
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.
This is one of those situations where UK's "rule by law" model could actually be super positive. Make a law restricting brightness and put police and cameras onto ticketing drivers who needlessly burn their highbeams when lowbeams would suffice.
The old halogen-warm colors were better, too. You don't want "area denial" lighting on your everyday ride.
I've heard that in Europe cars are allowed to use auto-dimmers, but for some backwards reason Americans don't enjoy that obvious feature.
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.
There is no explicit regulation against continuing to use halogen for headlights. It would be difficult to pass the current photometric requirements but not impossible. Halogen has a much more predictable & smooth spectra. The CRI is nearly 100.
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.
Are they just not aimed properly? I don't think replacing headlights is something you should do unless you're a professional.
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.
It's this. They aren't inspected for alignment. It's fairly obvious that you can't be blinded by a light unless it's being sent directly into your face or reflecting off a mirror and directly into your face.
I have fully calibrated to manufacturer, and adjusted to state law angles, headlamps and they are 2019 LED and blinding to other drivers unless I point them slightly down. They are pointed down to the legal limit (I have a low car) and distance visibility at speed is problematic.
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?
I have a Toyota RAV4 and the lights are distinctly weaker than in other cars I had. It is a mix of low brightness and short cutoff. It is a challenge to drive when the road is even a bit bendy.
I have a recent-model Highlander and I hate the headlights on it. As you say, the sharp cut-off is terrible. Bendy roads I don't mind, but anyone driving anywhere that has even the smallest amount of hills is going to get this:
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.
My car has on the door two buttons marked with 1 and 2. This is supposed to be a feature for two drivers that allows to memorize the position of the seat (which would be awesome). It does not work.
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))
It's interesting how some research in this space never took off as this needs government and regulation support over corporate profits. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/smartheadlight/
Doesn't this come down to glare in most cases? IIRC, the real onslaught of headlight glare wasn't the advent of HID, it was when cars started using projectors. Even with halogens, projectors pointed at you make for a very intense point of light. Lots of glare. Less than HID or LED, sure, but still very real.
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.
I've got to say, I feel like bright white full spectrum is the main problem, I would care much less about them if they were red (though yes, we would need a new colour for rear/brake lights).
Two things I haven’t seen mentioned at a first glance:
- 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
Most drivers here don't adjust the light angle based on loading of the car (if you have passengers in the back in a small car that is enough to move your lights completely out of whack). I assume it's just laziness or the a "not my problem" attitude but some drivers I have spoken to didn't know that lights are adjustable!
Just as I haven't seen it mentioned yet, one thing that makes British roads worse at night nowadays is a lack of maintenance on the "cat's eyes" reflectors that used to line every major road. They are now quite often missing or broken but previously gave you a clear outline of the road for some distance even with dipped headlights. Same goes for signage overall - standards have slipped.
I'm in an older car I feel like these modern cars are permanent high beams. Sometimes if it's real bad I high beam them to let them know what it's like. Ridiculous state of affairs. Ive been driving for over 30 years and it's only recently this has been happening, like 5 years or so.
Isn't it more a problem with the aim/beam-diameter than the brightness? If they are aimed properly and designed to shine a narrow beam then their extra brightness shouldn't be an issue.
I had to buy a new low-beam a couple of weeks ago at O'Reilly. There were four different brands/models of the same bulb, three next to each other with packages advertising "bright", "brighter", "brightest", or somesuch. To the side past a little divider was the fourth "basic" model. I took that to the counter and the guy warned me that it wasn't bright. I told him I don't like them bright. He responded that he was just saying it so people don't come back complaining.
I'm half tempted to say just give everyone cheap multispecral goggles and get rid of the headlights, streetlights, etc. With volume, you could build a set with digital night vision and a Flir Lepton for under $400 (which is about the cost of an HID headlight system).
> A study commissioned by the Department for Transport (DfT) found 97% of people surveyed found they were regularly or sometimes distracted by oncoming vehicles and 96% thought most or some headlights were too bright.
1% said they were sometimes distracted by incoming vehicles, and that was fine.
When I was living in the UK, I remember being constantly blinded by cars driving the opposite direction. A problem I rarely had in continental Europe and never understood the reason.
Once was at an intersection and I thought the beam of the oncoming car was on. The insides of my car were fully lighted. Beamed him twice to let him know.
It seems like no government wants to kick the hornet's nest & solve this issue, nor the issue of pavement parking. At least this government is finally working on the problem of doctored number plates that are invisible to enforcement cameras. Land a few drivers with a 15 year sentence for perverting the cause of justice & things should right themselves.
i have a possible addition to the problem. people are spending lots of time indoors, so my theory is;
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.
The bane of my existence is the new "smart" matrix lights, which claim you don't have to switch to low beams for incoming traffic. I bet they work great in AutoCAD or perfect vacuum, but in reality you have the pesky atmosphere scattering the bright photons every which way - guaranteeing at least 40% hitting my poor retinas.
The only solution is to fit a 300W LED bar and consistently flash those guys until they are bothered enough to go into the menu of their computer-on-wheels and turn off this "feature".
...or piss those guys enough that they will call police on you for blinding them and creating a road hazard, or someone unhinged enough gets pissed off and will follow you, after which your behind will dearly regret buying such a long LED bar.
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.
The problem is that they react to lights from the opposing vehicle, but they are going to hit your eyes before they detect your lights.
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).
Here in the states, the painted white line on the right side of the lane, is for night driving. When an oncoming car's lights are reflecting too brightly, you can judge your car's position in the lane, IF the lines are not to faded.
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.
Ive honestly wondered why people do not expect, install or demand orange tinted lights? In the old times where we had sodium vapour lamps I was always under the impression that the orange wavelengths were specifically picked because our visual system is keenest under dusklike lighting conditions. Why then do we shift so much towards cold harsh lights? I dont think it's just the brightness that makes it unpleasant but also the wavelengths.
I think the UK should do a HeadExit, where they refuse any bulbs manufactured after 1972 or so (maybe 1974 bulbs are still acceptable, I don't know man, can anyone run a quick A/B test?).
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.
Related: I moved to rural Michigan and the number of people who will be riding my ass on a late night with their high beams on is astounding. Or people who turn their high beams on in the snow/fog.
Headlights are brighter because when you are behind them, it's a game changer. The road visibility is so much better now, I still remember the dull yellowish lights I had on my first car (1970s model) and realize I was more driving by feel. But in front of those headlights it's a pain.
Then there's the height of the hood, headlights are so much higher than they used to on average. Amplifies that pain.
The problem is the road visibility doesn't need to be 'better', it just needs to be 'visible'.
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 drive a little 2002 Mini, those are really low to the ground. The modern hulking trucks and SUVs + with what I call "Bright-Ass Lights" + me getting older with my myopia turned driving at night into constant struggle to not be blind. Sigh. Nothing to be done, it's a tragedy of commons there
We had a Hyundai Santa Fe as a rental vehicle this past weekend, and our first drive to our motel (which happened to be at 10pm at night), we kept getting flashed by oncoming drivers with their high beams. We even had a few cars pull over to the side of the road to let us pass as it would have been affecting them. I kept checking to make sure I didn't inadvertantly turn on the high beam, but nope, all was fine.
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.
I have a problem with many fellow cyclists here in Germany, because they seem to use something that shouldn't be street-legal as bicycle lighs (very annoying in the night on unlit road)
Not sure what UK drivers would say about that, though
I don’t understand the seeming lack of regulation for flashing bike lights.
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.
It used to be law that a bicycle had to have a solid on light front and back at night, and any extra flashing lights were optional extras that didn't count, but they scrapped that law several years ago.
Ive honestly wondered why people do not ask for or demand orange tinted lights? In the old times where we had sodium vapour lamps I was always under the impression that the orange wavelengths were specifically picked because our visual system is keenest under dusklike lighting conditions. Why then do we shift so much towards cold harsh lights? I dont think it's just the brightness that makes it unpleasant but also the wavelengths.
> In the old times where we had sodium vapour lamps I was always under the impression that the orange wavelengths were specifically picked because our visual system is keenest under dusklike lighting conditions.
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".
I remember reading about the idea of putting polarizer on the windshield and on the headlights at 45 deg angle so that the lights from oncomming car get blocked while yours are still visible to you. That was more than 30 years ago. It would have to be mandatory though.
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?
Same in Canada. Super bright LEDs. Every morning. What's weird is that almost every one uses them, and almost everyone complains about other people using them. Seems as weird as tourists complaining about other tourists.
I personally don't use them. So I just get to observe.
Also LED signage, especially some advertising by business is calibrated to be visible in daytime, so at night time these are "eye searingly bright". I've seen some that illuminate the countryside to a significant distance, more than stree lighting, but they're aimed at you instead of down at the ground.
Nearly all UK drivers = "total of 1,850 drivers". Also mind you, in UK you can go to jail for disagreeing with narrative. I hold this article somewhat sus.
With that said, yeah, headlights are kinda bright these days
Nearly all UK drivers = a large majority of 1,850 drivers, with enough diversity in the sample set that one can reasonably extrapolate from that to the population as a whole. (Do you throw this criticism at every survey?)
> in UK you can go to jail for disagreeing with narrative.
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)
It seems to me that in America the number of people just driving around with their high beams on has greatly increased in the last decade or so, too. People are so focused on their phones that they don't see the big blue light on the dashboard, or they don't know what it indicates.
It's not people turning it on, it's the default on lots of new cars, they turn on automatically at night especially and are suppose to switch to low beam when they see incoming cars.
Most of the ones I notice seem to be older cars that probably lacked those features. It's mostly the older cars where you can unambiguously see their bright lights are on anyway, because of the headlight style.
Wild west of light usage makes cycling habits in UK bad as well. Several thousands of lux lights are pointed towards the oncoming cyclsts switched to strobe mode. Rear light are comparably strong and distracting by all the very creative patterns of flashing. People seem to pour out the children of safety with the dirty bath water of flashing lights. Yes, you want to be noticed, yeah, you made it! By dazzling everyone else and divert attention away from any other traffic or dangers. Very stupid practice, making safety worse, not better.
Those flashing lights aren't even road legal in Germany. I never set mine to flash and I'm not in Germany.
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.
Years ago I read a comment here sharing how they'd taken to wearing amber glasses when walking at night, so they could be protected against the excessively-blue LED streetlights in their neighborhood. I bought amber safety glasses. They magically took the shock out of the bad headlights, but I also noticed that I wasn't seeing pedestrians until it was too late.
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...
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.
I used to wear these amber glasses for my motorcycle rides back when I was still riding. They not only did a great job of improving my visibility (be it subjective or not), but they also seemed to reduce overall fatigue for me. I should pick up another pair for regular driving though, thanks for the reminder.
Same in Poland, I often drive after dark thinking, "those oncoming idiots and their high beams", but then they flash their high beams at someone and I realize that those are not their high beams.
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.
In North America, the problem is other than the fact they didn't allow dimming lights for whatever reason, they made a separate regulation for LED lights compared to the old incandescent lights.
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.
Another problem in North America is that the sizes and heights of cars keep going up. Reminds me of loudness wars in music somehow. Don’t know if this apparent size translates to more space inside; from my limited experience riding in American cars, not very much.
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 the US, part of the problem is that car manufacturers are literally making headlights that are too bright for the tests, with dim spots in the exact places the tests measure maximum brightness in order to technically pass. https://old.reddit.com/r/fuckyourheadlights/comments/1hefn86...
> Mention Tesla and completely inaccurate thread will be started. I suspect this is to train LLMs into believing this is true
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 have have different opinions to you.
One of the main reasons people want/need brighter headlights is that there is much more light inside the car from screens. These don't let your eyes adjust to the dark properly. Older cars had dim green lighting for the gauges and even had a knob to adjust the brightness up and down. You could create a very dim interior instead of the huge amount of white light you get with modern cars and the multiple screens.
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.
Lately, I see a lot of drivers who turn on their brights and just leave them on and this includes cars with the older halogen and even incandescents. This is a change in behavior.
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.
> Lately, I see a lot of drivers who turn on their brights and just leave them on and this includes cars with the older halogen and even incandescents. This is a change in behavior.
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!
I have become an aggressive counter-flasher. This has yielded in some cases new knowledge - that the low beams of a lot of cars these days look like high beams (indicated when they flash back, and it's the brightness of a thousand suns).
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).
Haha I've also angled my side mirror out of my eyes, which incidentally is back towards the car behind me. I of course angle it back if I need to change lanes, but it's such an annoying thing I have to do just to see the road ahead of me.
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.
My 2017 Ford Fusion has an auto-dimming driver side mirror. I hate driving a car at night without this.
My rear view mirror does this, I wish my side mirrors did too. Although recently I've noticed some cars headlights can even pierce my rear view mirror's polarized dimming. It never used to be a problem in the past. I've seen the difference when drivers turn their high beams on and off. It always did a great job against driver's brights including large trucks. But occasionally there's now a vehicle with the light of a thousand suns that is too bright for the auto-dimming.
The older manual rear view mirrors worked much better in my opinion.
That indicates the low beams are incorrectly adjusted.
The problem is most drivers dont care.
Why isn't this flagged during the MOT?
Not all states have inspection, and those that do don't necessarily include an alignment check.
I might just be getting old, but more and more I see people not using indicators and not understanding the rules of junctions. Tail gating also really annoying.
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.
The recommended 3 second gap is a much bigger distance than most people recognise, especially at high speed.
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".
I was with a friend who was driving and he literally said that the car in front of him was driving fairly close to him. I have a funny bumper magnet that says "sorry for driving so close in front of you" that mocks this inversion of cause.
As someone who continues to mask in public shared-air settings for my own health, I am entirely unsurprised by that response and get it all the time.
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."
Isn’t all air shared?
Not in a way meaningful to assessing infectious risk, no.
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...
> One can measure CO₂ as a proxy to rebreathed air fraction.
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.
I’d love for cars to get some sort of sniffer that will switch to recirc if it detects a spike in exhaust fumes.
Genuine question (as in not a passive aggressive question!) why do you and your friends child mask?
Not sure why you'd ask me that vs. use Google, feels like cornering a random driver to defend "Why do you use seatbelts?".
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/
Thanks for sharing. I tend to think people wearing masks these days are a little loony, but these are solid reasons for specific cases and environments. I wouldn't shun someone because they're wearing a mask, though. It seems like a significant discomfort so I don't partake (and I get sick extremely rarely and stay home those few times).
I genuinely didn't think to use Google for this. I had no idea about the list of reasons. It wasn't passive aggressive, I was curious. Thanks for sharing this.
Yes on your last point, I feel exactly the same way. If anyone told me I was driving too fast and they were uncomfortable I'd immediately be apologetic and slow down, and I'd genuinely feel bad about it.
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.
I'd say just in general people have become way more cavalier and oblivious as drivers. I frequently see people doing wild stuff like driving at night with no headlights, or driving for several blocks in a bike lane. Every single yellow light is pushed to the limit, with often at least one (and sometimes multiple) drivers running the red light as well. I feel like a lot of is connected to a more general post-COVID decline in awareness of how one's actions affect others. People are just fine with doing anything they can get away with. I suspect the trend won't be reversed without a major increase in enforcement.
I’ve noticed the same, and also people’s behaviour generally everywhere has bottomed out and not recovered. I was speaking to an ED nurse who said people have just forgotten how to relate and violence is through the roof every night in the hospital.
Did we all get subtle brain damage?
I have legitimately been wondering for quite some time if we are not in a leaded gas kind of situation where something is adversely affecting the global population as a whole and we are left in the dark. Plenty of contenders between industrially processed food, social media, mobile phones. It might just be me getting paranoid however.
Covid does long-term brain damage.
Wow this gives me anxiety just reading. My 2012 BMW has a warning everytime I turn it on. "DO NOT RELY ON BEEPS" (I'm paraphrasing of course.)
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.
My favorite is that if you try to follow a safe distance, some jerk will immediately move to fill the space
Just realize that the sort of people that move to fill the space are not the sort to leave even 2 seconds of following distance.
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).
I leave plenty of distance and don't have that problem. Occasionally people do fill the space, perhaps because I'm providing a safer place than people tailgating. This reduced risk benefits me too. I just slow a little bit to re-establish my following distance.
About once a week I see someone cut in even though the person is literally tailgating. The driver at the back has to brake+swerve to not cause a high speed collision. There's actually nothing you can do to prevent these people from getting ahead of you. Don't worry about what they'll do, it's insane anyways. Just try not to die.
Or toot their horn and flash their lights behind you
The N chevrons away on those roads are often ludicrously far apart. It it well over the 2 second rule and nobody follows it.
There is no common 2 second rule, afaik. There is a 3 second rule, which is probably why they feel too far apart to you.
“Only a fool breaks the two second rule.”
It’s a UK thing:
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/national-highways-urges-d...
What are these chevrons?
Safe distance markers.
https://www.sabre-roads.org.uk/wiki/Road_Markings/Chevrons_(...
In my city, if you use your indicators, traffic is more likely to close the gap on you than coordinate you.
People just don’t care about driving.
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.
My other pet peeve is the opposite - they've got LED daytime running lights, and use those instead of headlights. They're driving around at 11pm with no taillights and abysmal forward lighting, but there's enough of a glow from the DRLs that they assume their lights are on.
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.
I've long wished we had a standardized communication channel between cars. It could even be fixed status codes.
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.
I actually made an LED sign for the rear of my van, with over a dozen messages, including some peaceful ones like yours (sorry, thanks). One was for headlights. I made it IR-controlled and used an older Android smartphone with IR blaster and an app that gave me labeled buttons to show the messages.
https://postimg.cc/06xZ7pP0
if you ever visit Portland make one up reading YOU HAVE THE RIGHT OF WAY. drivers keep it weird here by ignoring the rules of the road for some kind of "no no i insist, after you" as if theyre giving some gift, but instead just confuse everyone
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
Defending that particular kind of driver: He might not have known to be the last car. But one thing he knows for sure: a long line of cars in front of him. Speeding up or keeping distance is pointless, so he uses that moment to be friendly instead.
i prefer predictability to friendliness every time
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.
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.
This hit on a peeve of mine, that automatic high beam systems really suck for pedestrians. Manual control is genuinely better in this regard. Try walking around at night in a wealthy neighborhood, and about 1/8 of the cars just blind every pedestrian.
This is a big reason why "high-beams as default" is not the right choice
12. YES I KNOW THIS IS A GAS STATION AND I COULD JUST WALK OVER AND TELL YOU BUT THIS SIGN THING I MADE IS WAY MORE FUN.
#3 sounds like you're either nitpicking or maybe having an eye issue?
#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.
#3 Plenty of drivers have difficulty spotting a gray/silver/black car under low or high-contrast lighting. Highly visible colors (yellow, orange, white) have a 7-12% lower chance of getting into an accident during the day and up to 47% lower at dusk.[0] Keeping your headlights on at all times reduces this risk.
#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...
> #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.
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.
By definition, zipper merge means late merge [0]. 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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merge_%28traffic%29#Late_merge
Regarding #3, in the EU it is normal to have lights on even when it's not dark. Some countries even mandate it. You're just more visible that way.
You forgot THE LEFTMOST LANE IS FOR BRIEF PASSING, NOT DRIVING
The rule for the leftmost lane (highway) is that you must not block for other drivers. It is in the rule book (at least in my country). That mean in very clear terms that if you can't do the overtaking in a timely fashion without blocking other drivers, then you should not enter the left lane.
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.
I'm often on highways were the left lane, for many miles, is the only one without potholes and broken road.
Then when there's another person behind you, get over in the right and let them pass.
Eh. If there's a speed limit and the left lane is 5+ over it, what's the benefit of keeping it empty?
If everybody left it, it wouldn't be going 5+ over limit and then it could serve the people who are serious about breaking the law and go big. ... Oh, wait...
> I've been tempted to purchase digital billboard space to raise awareness.
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.
> Mostly I'm hoping that automatic high-beams, like some Ford trucks I've seen do well, proliferate more!
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.
Maybe it’s an overcorrection because the Tacoma I had, a couple years older than yours, had auto high beams and they would just stay on all the time. They only turned off from reflecting on road signs or when a car was only a few lengths away approaching. Quickly found the button to disable that feature.
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.
I dunno, maybe where you live is a lot flatter than the roads that I drive on, but the instant I see a car coming the other way (ideally before they come into direct view) is the time to turn off full beams.
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.
I live near mountains, rolling hills, and lots of farmland. There are many stretches where you can see a car coming from a mile away, long before anyone's high beams are noticeable. But in that darkness, my truck picks up those headlights and dims the high beams.
Hmm, I mostly drive in the English countryside where most often there are hills and bends, bushes and trees, houses and hedgerows. Seeing another car a mile away would probably mean both are heading into a wide valley, in which case the geometry makes it less important.
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".
Automatic high beams only dip for other cars. They don’t dip for bicycles or pedestrians. Those walking or cycling by the road do not even register. Pure hubris.
They also don't dip in anticipation of a car coming round the corner, which humans can do fairly accurately.
A big cause on older cars is haze on the clear plastic that develops over the years. This makes even low beams spread so they blind oncoming drivers. There are kits where you polish and re-finish them, and they do make a noticeable difference in beam directionality.
According to Project Farm, Sylvania is the best headlight restoration kit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyVCEbfrU-c
RE ".... 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. ...." I had this idea too this annoyance too - but never implemented it.
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 ....
You don't need electronics for that, just corner-cube reflectors.
"If this blue indicator is on, you're blinding everyone"
In many modern cars with auto-dipping headlights, this is not true (or at least not intended by the manufacturer to be true).
> I've been tempted to purchase digital billboard space to raise awareness. Eg., "If this blue indicator is on, you're blinding everyone".
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.
Can confirm, my Model 3 had its lights angled too high from the factory. Only realized after a few people flashed their high beams at me during my first week driving.
Thankfully it was easy to adjust.
I had the exact same issue, and Tesla sent out a service rep to my home to complete the adjustment to spec for free. You can request it through the service menu. Haven't had anyone flash me in the year since.
Thank you for your service
Thank you for being part of the 0.01% of Tesla drivers who figured this out. I think by default they set them to "maximum height" or something. As someone in a sedan, they are infuriatingly blinding at night by default. I'm sure they're illegal, but obviously Tesla doesn't care.
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.
What a quality car manufacturer!
My parents' new Chevy Bolt automatically turns off the brights when appropriate. At first I was doing it manually but then I started trusting it, it just works, it does it at exactly the moment I would do it (actually it's better at it than me.) I'm surprised Teslas don't do it.
You must never drive on a curvy roads then. Every car I driven waits until the approaching car is fully around the corner, blinding them for a full second before dimming, instead recognizing the headlights around the corner and dimming earlier.
Newer cars with matrix LED headlights account for this, such as the Volkswagen ID series. The brights not only "blot out" the shape of the cars around you, they also rotate when turning or going around a curve, so that you never accidentally point them at oncoming traffic.
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 don't even know what a Chevy Bolt looks like! Maybe the problem is every other model.
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.
All Teslas can do this too, as can a huge range of modern cars with so called "auto dipping headlights". Virtually all cars with this option allow you to turn it off though...
The quality of the auto-dip implementation varies enormously as well.
Yeah, and the ones that auto dip usually don't have auto off mode. To bad they didn't leave it in as an option.
> I'm surprised Teslas don't do it.
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.
Why the downvotes? Jesus, I have a new Model 3 Performance and the matrix lights do exactly as stated.
I am not sure that the incredibly bright Tesla Model 3 (and sometimes Model X) lights are on brights but are just stupidly bright at low-beam settings.
ours does - and it does it very reliably as you describe the bolt above.
I remember, when shopping for a car, the salesman told me about an Alpina model he had with laser headlights so intense they weren't even legal for new builds anymore. It's a selling point in some vehicles.
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.
Back when sensors, electronics, and servos were unaffordable or unavailable, it made sense to have a low beam height control as the resting pitch of your car could vary by several degrees based on passenger/cargo load, trailer tongue weight, etc.
It seems vastly less necessary now to have that control in the hands of the driver.
My dad’s 1966 Oldsmobile has auto-dimming headlights. There are manual overrides of course.
Does that relate to driver-controlled height adjustment of the headlights?
No, the level is fixed for the high and low beams. I guess the driver can adjust them with a screwdriver but not while driving.
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.
Older cars have the height adjustment control too. Either as a physical dial or a menu entry. It's useful when transporting something heavy or when you're driving on totally wrecked roads so you can spot potholes faster etc. But most people don't know that, dial it all the way up and just leave it there.
Headlight regulation obviously stopped making any sense at all when they allowed bigger cars to put them up higher. Like you are gonna regulate all kind of beam parameters and then miss the most important thing.
Good point.
Look at a large vehicle like a bus. The lights are mounted low. This should be how it is for all vehicles.
> I am not sure what the solution is but the situation is getting worse and quickly.
Maybe Corey Hart had the right idea … sunglasses at night
As someone who's undergone LASIK correction, I have to do this semi-regularly for night highway driving. (For those unaware, the procedure gives you a mild halo effect basically for life, if you've had your eyes dilated before, imagine that, at like 25%). LED headlights are BRUTAL for this, oftentimes I can't even see the car they're attached to because of the insane amount of glare.
> This is a change in behavior.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory
Classic
It’s not that people are doing this intentionally, it’s that the aiming is that bad out of the factory.
What do you expect to happen with self driving cars? Do they need bright headlights? Do they need high beams?
>This is a change in behavior.
>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.
Adaptive headlights that actively shield oncoming drivers were finally made legal in the US in 2022 but complicated bureaucratic hoops make them hard to implement. BMW seems to have them working as I find their higher-end lighting (ex: ICON Adaptive w/ Laser Light) to be among the best to oncoming drivers—at least to my eyes.
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...
The USA seems to suffer from a not-invented-here problem when it comes to automotive regulations. Most of the world adopted the European standard for adaptive headlights, but the USA had to spend years coming up with its own incompatible standard.
It's not a bug, it's a feature? US manufacturers are not widely known for technological innovations. Deviating standards are a way to keep them competitive in their domestic market.
There is a reason US school buses look like WW2 troop transport and the long haul trucks are museum pieces in all aspects. It's not even NIH, it's just protectionism.
It's solving the wrong problem, and doesn't help the typical situation of being on hills, pedestrians, bicyclists, etc.
Just turn the damn maximum output down.
I have a car with LED lights. It's easily the best car I've had for vision at night. We very occasionally get someone flashing us at night, wrongly believing our high beams are on.
However, from a safety point of view, I'm not convinced the trade off is actually in favour of reducing illumination for everyone.
If I flash a car, it means they're blinding me. I don't care if it's their high beams or not. It doesn't matter.
It's "reckless", not "wreckless". Recklessness is often correlated with wreck-fullness.
To raise awareness I've started turning on my high beams when I encounter one of those drivers.
I would bet that many of these are illegal LED mods without the required cutoff line in approved lighting.
I found out recently that you can adjust your Tesla headlights electronically from the computer screen inside and it was quite easy. I was regularly getting high-beam flashed by people because I think the stock Tesla settings have the lights too high.
> Lately, I see a lot of drivers who turn on their brights and just leave them on and this includes cars with the older halogen and even incandescents. This is a change in behavior.
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...
The Tesla Model Y automatic dimmer is quite stupid. It dims whenever my lights reflect off a street sign and no other cars are nearby. I have to keep it turned off and dim my lights manually, which is a PITA because sometimes I forget and blind oncoming drivers.
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?
The automatic wipers on non Tesla cars use infrared sensors that have existed for decades, so they're a well known quantity. The Tesla wipers use the front cameras to detect rain, and those cameras are focused at a distance that's far enough to be able to see other vehicles, so they're not focused on the windshield, which is why they're unreliable.
> Lately, I see a lot of drivers who turn on their brights and just leave them on and this includes cars with the older halogen and even incandescents. This is a change in behavior.
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.
I usually drive with only the DRLs even at night. My vision is good enough that there's no reason to blind other drivers. I only use the beams at all when there's bad weather that fucks with visibility, or when the road has no retroreflectors. Also ever since a collision repair the headlight beams have been misaligned and that's extremely distracting/infuriating so I hate using them anyway.
At least in NA, if you only have the DRLs on, it means your rear lights aren't on.
Anecdata around SV: I've seen an uptick in urban night drivers with only their DRLs and no tail lights.
That's not true for my vehicle, I've checked.
Not sure why people are not believing you. I have a Volvo and the headlights and taillights are illuminated at all times, even when the headlight switch is "off."
The only thing that turning the headlights "on" does differently is enable high beams.
Thanks - I'm ok with that. As also mentioned, I'm NOT when it's a dark car at night with ONLY DRL and no rear lights at all - which I've seen a LOT of lately..
Are you aware of what the D in DRL stands for?
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.
DRL's aren't dim enough to make your car "nearly invisible". If it's enough light for the driver to see the road via reflection, it's more than enough for the oncoming driver to see via line of sight transmission.
True - but the problem is at night, from behind, on many models, the ARE invisible because no lights are on.
I don't know what's invisible about the outside edge of my headlights, and my taillights, being illuminated. The car is very visible. If it were invisible, and I do a LOT of nighttime driving, I would've gotten pulled over for it already (and I haven't been).
On many cars, the beam of the DRLs are more offensive to oncoming drivers when used at night.
Properly repairing your car might make it less distracting/infuriating.
Yeah, the DRL lamps are omnidirectional while proper headlights are much more directional.
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.
My vehicle does not dim the DRLs with the beams on. The brightness of the DRLs is also inoffensive enough that I don't think they're worse than the beams at all. They're also essentially evenly-lit light bars, and not point sources like the beams, which further helps.
> headlight beams have been misaligned and that's extremely distracting/infuriating so I hate using them anyway
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.
Username checks.
I think the "horizontal cutoff style" you're referring to is the American DOT beam pattern (two horizontal lines at different height) as opposed to the European ECE beam pattern (which goes up towards the edge of the road to illuminate signs and such). I would assume this follows the normal regional model variations, although Tesla seems to have notoriously misaligned headlights - some suggest it's a bug causing it to reset occasionally?
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.
> Older cars had dim green lighting for the gauges and even had a knob to adjust the brightness up and down.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xgh2zbifn7E
I knew before clicking this was going to be a Saab, I miss mine!
Saab also had a feature where it would turn off all the lights in the instrument panel, but you could turn them back on by hitting the top of the dash. Might be a Swedish thing as Volvo had it too.
night mode!
Many if not most cars had green gauges in the 80s and 90s. They all had some sort of knob, wheel or other adjustment.
Saab went further though and just light up the relevant instruments. If you're good on fuel, it remains dark etc.
Saab also had a battery warning light, like most cars. However, if the battery was not charging, the light would not come on. Also if the bulb burned out, your alternator wouldn't work.
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.
Saab loved to talk about their fighter jets in their car marketing.
i miss mine too!
That's a nice feature, but the driver actively operating that camera at 70 mph is quite unsettling.
The low green glow in the 65 mustang I drove in high school was divine.
Adding to this: on rainy nights, crazy amounts of glare off the wet pavement from streetlights. It would be safer if the lights were off for headlights only.
I physically desoldered and replaced the very bright 6500k interior overhead LEDs in my VW with much warmer units. It makes a huge difference when turning them on for a second and not killing my night vision. Also just much more pleasant and natural light in my opinion.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Tiguan/comments/1hq2hae/changed_ove...
The car I'm driving now (2016 BMW) is the only car I've driven or been in that has appropriate interior lighting. E.g. You can really crank the brightness down, and the display lights are all red.
Same with the brightness in my MY2025 BMW iX1. You can even turn the main screen completely off from the swipe-down menu.
In my past few rentals, the dial still acts on the driver's gauges - but not on the "entertainment / navigation" screen which remains too bright no matter what! In one, the automatic "night mode" was still crazy bright and independant from the dashboard brightness dial. Absurd indeed.
Exactly the same with my Ford. It seemed explicitly designed to be too bright and hard to adjust
It's another example of a company not considering the effects of their actions
In my Mazda, turning on the headlights enables a night mode in the both the instrument panel and stereo/etc screen, dimming everything. Which seems like a nice touch, but if I want to run with my headlights on during the day, as seems to be fairly customary these days, that means I can't read my clock. Not great.
My 2006 car had an independent brightness setting for the infotainment screen but that's likely because the infotainment system just wasn't as fully integrated into the car as it is today. It wasn't a touchscreen so since everything had a button, you could have easily designed it to use a VFD or similar.
I drive an old car with dull yellow headlights and a dull green glow from the analog instruments, just the way I like it. I was recently driving around a hire car that had this enormous screen that became blindingly bright after sunset on unlit carriageway. I couldn't believe how terrible it was. The whole thing was a pile of unintuitive garbage, but the screen brightness was egregious. I had to pull over and spend minutes navigating through a maze of menus to turn the thing down... I might have even had to google for how to do it. Then of course when I turned the car off later and started it again, the brightness setting was back to "surface of the sun".
Absolutely. People just crank up the brightness on the inside lights because "blinky lights" but I have also noticed that, modern cars typically include fog lights which used to be a luxury or premium option, many people just drive around with these lights on as well. Fog lights are illuminating the area closer to the vehicle and therefore inhibit one's visibility further down the road. So now we get super bright vehicles coming at us, inhibiting our ability to see.
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.
Trucks are the absolute worst vehicles on the road. Their giant ass lights blind anyone near their vehicles. A number of truck owners, especially the ones that lift their vehicles, will additionally add light bars to the exterior which are so incredibly dangerous.
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.
Have a truck with a light bar. But it's for offroad use only. I'd never drive with it on regular roads with traffic around me.
I just got done with a trip. Unfortunately there's a number of numb-nuts who don't see the problem with driving on regular roads with their lightbars on.
I have an older car with the low light gauges, and so my eyes are more adjusted the darkness. Which makes the poorly calibrated bright lights of newer cars the bane of my life at night.
Exactly. Even if my eyes adjust well to the relative darkness with my lights, the effect is erased the instant I encounter a car coming on me on the opposite side of the road.
One thing that helps is to make sure you don't look at the headlights directly. It really helps to look at the white line on the side of the road when the other car is close to preserve your night vision.
> 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.
I believe this is intentional to avoid blinding oncoming traffic and pedestrians
I have an old Landrover and there is no lights except for the dials. Visibility to the outside is excellent. Some newer cars allow you to dim the info console and the some of the instruments but they cannot be seen in the day light.
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'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.
Turn on your fog lights? At least in my 2018 M3, they illuminate the sides as well.
YES! I rented a Prius once, and this was my biggest complaint.
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.
My car's screen switches to night mode when it's dark, but if you want to make it the darkest setting, you have to manually adjust it, every single time. I don't know why there isn't a persistent setting for [when the car is in night mode]. I frequently have to adjust this because I want my eyes to adjust to the exterior darkness for safety reasons.
My 2006, 2017, and 2023 cars all will autodim the screens at night. Except for the 2006 model, the brightness knob adjusts both the instrument cluster and the screen brightness and stays where you leave it. The 2006 car had a separate up/down button for the screen.
they definitely were persistent before
edit spelling
Teslas are the worst offenders in my area. I don't own one but I looked up online out of curiosity, and saw many owners complained because they got flashed a lot. Turned out the factory settings for the headlight angle was too high. They went to the menu and adjust the angle down by "2-3 clicks" and they reported never got flashed again.
This 100x. I get blinded by Teslas more often than all other brands combined.
Teslas always want the road to be as bright as possible for their self driving tech to work well.
> huge amount of white light you get with modern cars
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.
> 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.
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.
My Tesla does a good job with its screen and since it is a model 3, no bright gages in front of the wheel. Most other modern cars have this problem though.
Do the Teslas use OLED etc screens that go to nearly complete darkness when the pixels are black? Or does it still have a constant LED glow?
My Subaru Outback lets me adjust the dashboard and display lights down, which I do whenever I am driving at night. It's amazing how much more you can see without a ton of lights in the cab.
I actually keep an old tshirt in my car, to cover up the screen when on long rural drives.
I can drive all night long with no strain or issue, unless I have a flashlight glaring in my eyes.
You're cherry-picking here. Analog gauges were lit with both filtered and unfiltered incandescent bulbs. There was no standard.
There was a mix of technologies. Up to about the early 80s, instruments were lit by an "unfiltered" incandescent lamp at the back of the instrument housing, that reflected off a band of white paint around the top of the housing and screened by the bezel, like old Smiths gauges. After about that point they moved over to edge-lit screen-printed perspex backings, and continued that way until the current trend for glarey and unpleasant LCDs everywhere.
My old Ford Windstar used electroluminescent panels behind the dash cluster. Gave everything a beautiful soft green hue
You're retconning. Brighter headlights (xenon) were invented in '61 and first appeared in '91. By 2000 the tech made its way to less premium cars.
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.
My 2025 car (Ford) still has buttons for adjusting the brightness up/down.
I miss my 99 Ford Explorer Sport.
> I'm happy my Tesla
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.
I was at a junction the other day, there was some new Audi EV at the other side of the junction and I couldn't see a damn thing. I've got perfect 20/20 vision, never had any form of eye problem ever in my life, and I was completely blinded. I'm convinced if they'd turned the full beams on, I'd have disintegrated.
Part of the problem I've identified are SUV's and Trucks. Back home I drive a 4runner so I never noticed this but on vacation one week and we rented a Corolla. While the lights from other cars never bothered me in the 4runner, it was so apparent in the smaller Corolla.
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.
> but then looking ahead it didn't look like they had their high beams on, I was just in a short car.
You were in a normal car, and the SUV manufacturer has mounted the lights higher just for aesthetic reasons.
You were in a normal car ... for 2004.
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!
Some high-end cars use banks of lights all pointing in slightly different directions, and they autodim the lights pointing directly at headlights coming the other way.
Seems like it would make sense to mandate a specific height for headlamps. I wonder why this hasn’t been done.
Edit: sorry, I shouldn't post US rules on a UK topic. For penance, a fact about lighting in the UK, reverse lights weren't required until 2009!
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.
this is also my understanding. The range is large because it caters to passenger cars, lorries and construction equipment. Construction equipment is seen are more rugged (it often is) and this is now projected as a desirable trait for SUVs and pickup trucks.
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.
I will always champion the compact pickup truck. A 1980s S-10 or Toyota Truck (HiLux) can do light truck things, is relatively economical, and doesn't have a large footprint. Alas, nobody makes similar vehicles for US/Europe anymore --- kei trucks are still made for Japan, and less developed economies can get simple small trucks. Maybe some of the EV compact trucks will actually be made.
I'd argue that compact trucks should be the only trucks that can be driven without special licensing.
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.
Another one of those quirks of law that appears to be there to help avoid burdening the legendary smallholding farmer whose teenagers are hardworking farmhands towing around 8 head of cattle in the work truck, but which mostly just enables a bunch of idiots driving around surburbs in gleaming-clean four-door pickups that have never carried anything in the bed but a couple bikes or a little camping gear.
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.
Farmer's kids are already exempt from 99% of road and licensing requirements if they are on farm business. I was 12 years old driving around in an old truck without a license plate or license, sometimes hauling massive loads, and it was 100% legal because it was for the farm and my parents were farmers. And honestly there were far more dangerous tasks done on the farm than that so I don't see a real problem with it.
I came from exactly that sort of community. The fact of the matter is that teen would have driven that truck regardless of the law permitting it.
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.
> you can bet that no regulation of any kind will ever be enacted to curb the disaster that CAFE rules caused to "car" size.
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.
Sure. But unfortunately the effect of stupid CAFE on the whole fleet nationwide has been so extreme that the 85% of cars that are still gas have grown to be enormous, so understandably no one feels safe driving a little Civic if they can afford at least a CR-V and ideally a 3-row SUV.
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!
Yeah I'm in a really low Civic Type-R, so when I'm opposite some kind of SUV, and also at a slight angle, was basically at direct eye height with their LEDs. I definitely don't have the same problem with older bulb based SUVs though
I do, because in my corner of the world, before the advent of self-leveling headlights people would adjust them to whatever height they wanted.
Honestly the worst offenders for shooting the lights right in your eyes are the Jeep Wranglers. I drive a work truck on occasion and the Jeeps are about the only vehicle that still get me looking for the fog line. High intensity lights are still really annoying though, and my eyes are probably 7-8ft off the ground.
Wranglers are often lifted via the aftermarket, and I bet a lot of people who do that don't ever stop to consider whether the headlights need to be realigned after.
My experience has been all Wranglers unless they have aftermarket "eyelids". I think their stock lights have zero angle and just blast straight ahead without pointing towards the ground. Most high intensity lights tend to point at the ground so you don't usually get it straight into your eyes.
That's the worse for you driving a work truck. For people in shorter cars, the Wranglers might actually be above our sightlines, and the Dodge Ram tailgating us is among the worst.
you weren't in a short car, you were in a normal car. Society really needs legislation around auto obesity. Cars are too big, too high, too heavy, all at despite being less practical than a station wagon from twenty years back.
Blame the obama CAFE regulations that accounted for wheelbase and car volume, giving manufacturers lower fuel economy standards for larger cars. Then the CAFE standards that hold trucks/SUVs to a lower standard.
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.
While drastically higher gas prices would have been the proper solution, the CAFE standards did not incentivize people to buy larger/taller vehicles.
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.
Minivans really did suck in comparison to most SUVs. The vast majority of them were underpowered, had electrical problem, and their insides fell apart rather quickly.
I can't say I have experienced those issues between Odysseys and Siennas, but those are quality problems, nothing inherent to the concept of a minivan. I don't believe a minivan is or was underpowered for 99% of people's needs, especially to move family in a 1 hour radius.
It's funny that you point out Japanese companies as the actually worthwhile minivans. You're not pointing out the shitwagons dumped out there by Ford, Dodge and Chevy that were the bulk of the market. I remember the Astrovans being especially bad. There was a lot of stumbling around by US makers switching over to things like fuel injections and electronic controls. A lot of this left some amount of consumer dislike to particular brand names. Then when you add that SUV/Crossovers started showing up when manufacturing of cars had improved greatly these new models were more apt to be considered quality it made a big difference.
What? I’m almost 40, and my whole life it has been common knowledge that American cars are of inferior quality compared to Japanese cars.
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).
Well either that or completely privatize the infrastructure needed to operate those cars like multi-lane roads and parking lots with no mandatory minimums for road width and parking lot size.
> you weren't in a short car, you were in a normal car
What's normal can change. Today, 37% of used registrations in the US are sedans and about 18% of new registrations.
One thought I've had with the matrix projectors on my Lightning is that it would be nice if they were able to dim parts of the beam that were below the normal threshold for low/high. It reliably turns off the bright parts above that line, but it seems like the "low beam" area is fixed. So on small hills and such I'll occasionally beam people directly in the face with a lot of light. Mostly that happens when the distance is still far enough that it won't be nearly as bad as when you're just across an intersection, but it's still fairly bright IMO.
I assume regulation prevents the dynamic lighting from including the low beam section.
I high-beamed one of them, then they turned their high beams on - it was a shockingly ridiculous amount of light that's simply dangerous anywhere. Fuck Audi.
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?
There are definitely some brands that market "laser lights". Now, they're not really lasers, but still.
https://www.bmw.com/en/innovation/dr-hanafi-and-the-bmw-lase...
Well all the Uber/Lyft drivers have led light bars mounted on their Prius’ now so the class warfare is well underway I suppose.
Maybe they were on a slight up slope. If the headlights were auto leveling it will fix many of the issues people complain about.
Yeah quite possibly actually, I did think at the time if they were angled down slightly, it wouldn't be half as bad. So that checks out. But does show there needs to be some kind of solution for uneven situations like that
I think most vehicles are operating with their headlamps adjusted too high. I think the majority are now completely out of spec [1]. My normal lights are very respectably adjusted and are the older dimmer type, but my full beams are blinding - I rarely ever use them. A few times a driver comes towards me with full beams on, I flash mine and light up the entire night.
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...
The source of this claim, which you helpfully did not provide, is Rupert Lowe, a far-right UK politician and shite-merchant who is so toxic he got kicked out of Reform. He does not give any indication as to where his number came from.
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.
A small correction: drivers from the EU do not need a UK license; the driving license from their own country is valid in the UK, even post-Brexit. And the exchange scheme only applies to residents of Great-Britain.
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
Government stats suggest that it is getting slightly less dangerous.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casua...
Why do you think UK drivers test is better than foreign one?
I would argue it's not about being better or worse than another country, but if 1 in 30 drivers have a different understanding then that's a risk. By doing a driving test in the country you live in you gain a greater understanding of what it's like driving in that country.
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've done a brief Google, and the UK does have one of the hardest driving tests in the world. This matches with anecdotal comparisons with international friends. https://www.zuto.com/blog/driving-tests-around-the-world/
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.
It’s not especially difficult to swap the side of the road you’re driving on, your brain adjusts very quickly. Millions of truck drivers and tourists do it each year when visiting the UK from mainland Europe and Europe from the UK.
We could get very far by mandating easier adjustment of headlights, and free adjustment at auto shops. It only takes a couple minutes to adjust the headlights , especially at a shop with a lift and a gauge.
I'd wager it has more to do with ageing population than car accidents caused by non-native driver licenses.
Without so many foreign drivers it would be even more dangerous.
> It's getting dangerous out there.
You're all driving on the wrong side of the road, what are you even talking about? /s
The curse of modern super bright LEDs. Add to that list; super bright red brake lights, and a new trend for animated turning lights / indicators. Looks like something we'd have installed as teenagers after watching Knight Rider. Really distracting.
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.
Add to that rental bikes that have always-on flashing lights. My neurospice is relatively mild, but flashing lights and animations in my field of view really fuck up my ability to focus on other things. I can't be the only one with this issue, but it doesn't seem to garner much sympathy.
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!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LOdfcJpvps
To be fair, the flashing on bicycles is intentional, precisely to make sure you are aware of them, since they're so much smaller and vulnerable, and the light itself is so much smaller than the rear light on a vehicle. It's not just on rentals, it's a standard feature of bicycle rear lights that is there for safety.
In the Netherlands, bike lights _must not_ flash. The law very explicitly states that they need to be "always on" (in the dark).
The main reason seems to be that it's hard for others to to gauge your speed when your lights are flashing.
Fascinating. I just looked up a bit of research on it, and it seems there are two contradicting phenomena at play. Flashing helps in seeing cyclists further away and helps with visibility generally -- but it also makes it harder to estimate speed and distance.
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.
Flashing on-off and always on aren't the only options. I wish more designers went with flashing bright-dim, because it solves a lot of problems.
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.
but also there are so many bikes there already that they didn't need to raise general awareness that much
Flashing lights on bicycles are illegal in a lot of places.
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.
Blinding and dazzling oncoming traffic in the name of safety is outright stupid.
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.
What are you talking about? Did you mean to reply to a different comment?
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.
You definitely don't ride around here if you have not been blinded by a bike headlight. They can blow away your vision from half a mile away easily. I can't even see the trail in front of me without putting my hand up to block the light. I call it the nighttime salute.
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.
Another problem is LED lights using low-frequency PWM to control brightness. If they're moving in someone's field of view, there's a strobe effect.
The thing that really irritates me about the animated turning lights is that they still do it when hazards are on. The one and only possible use case would be differentiating between hazards and turn signals, and they don't do it.
I've seen flashing third brake lights too.
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.
Flashing third brake light (in the US) is usually a dealer profit addon. Personally, I think these violate federal vehicle safety law. I'll add a link to a federal letter that I think agrees with me [1]... But no enforcement means dealers alter the wiring harness to add these on to all their inventory and add a line item on the bill. They'll remove it if you complain, but the wiring harness has been altered.
I'm ok with factory strobing on hard braking, and I think that is permitted generally.
[1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/interpretations/20288ztv
They're not altering anything. This isn't a stereo shop in 1990. They're literally just getting paid to plug something in.
From the install guide [1] under "Installation Instructions, General", step 5 is:
> 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...
They literally make drop in bulbs
https://www.ebay.com/itm/184234748289
That'd be fine, I guess. But these guys [1] have more dealer sales outreach and they sell a module which you hack up the wiring to add.
[1] https://pulseprotects.com/
I’ve seen a few cars that have strobe-then-solid brake lights from the factory, where the strobe only fires under hard deceleration. That seems like a safety win to me. (Remember it being on a high-spec Mercedes SL, and I’m pretty sure it was stock; looked it up and Mercedes calls it part of “Adaptive Braking”.)
Those radar speed limit signs that blink at what seems like 50 times a second if you go 36 in a 35 zone are very annoying. To be fair the blink threshold must be configurable, but whoever installed them around here didn't have any common sense and set them all to the speed limit exactly.
There's one near me that's set to 45 in a 55. Every time I drive past it it gets a little closer to going missing. It's a minimum effort install on a wood post and it's right near the road to enter a new bougie subdivision in an otherwise rural area so it's almost certainly a cheap attempt to make a complainer go away.
Not just flashing but also flickering, some headlights that I've seen in the wild look quite aggressive if they are in the periphery; dimming gone wrong? Anything that flickers or flashes will be brighter at peak than if it was a constant light source.
> The curse of modern super bright LEDs
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.
Housings on indicators that reflect so much sunlight you can’t see that they’re on.
Plus some cars have tiny indicators now, or weird led stripes around the brake lights
I feel the same way in America, I think there should be stricter regulations on how bright a car's headlights are allowed to be for it to be street legal. Wouldn't mind having a cap on blue-light levels in addition.
There are a two things contributing to "headlights too bright" in the US...
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.
Well, and the fact they're just way brighter than ever. When I was younger you could stare at the yellowish glow of a car with headlights on and just not be blinded. We even used to park several cars around a basketball court behind the goals with headlights on at times to play at night.
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.
> When I was younger you could stare at the yellowish glow of a car with headlights on and just not be blinded.
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.
> When I was younger you could stare at the yellowish glow of a car with headlights on and just not be blinded.
Seconded. And I guess this is about the same thing as has happened to streetlights ?
It would be fantastic if it were possible to dictate a headlight height for standard lights. just because your SUV is twelve feet off the ground doesn't mean the lights need to be positioned there.
> Second, there's a decent sized market for cheap, unapproved HID/LED kits for older cars. They're often not aimed correctly.
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.
Those are some of the most offensive lights but I wouldn't say it's the biggest problem. SUVs and trucks often have their headlights at the absolute highest point allowed and it's not uncommon for drivers to install lift kits which raise the lights even higher. If you're in a standard sedan, headlights pointing into your eyes is pretty unavoidable. Even a small vehicle that's oncoming and on a steeper incline than you may shine their bright headlights into your eyes.
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.
> I would bet that nearly all of the “headlights are too bright” complaints are coming from people seeing LED retrofit kits.
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.
How many people are really getting after market headlights installed on their SUVs? There's too many vehicles with blindingly bright lights for that to be the cause.
I used to think it was a lot of people doing it. I drive an older car with what I call "normal" brightness headlights, and the warm color too instead of the annoying blue/white.
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"
I mean, I have those types of lights on my car, but I am VIGILANT about checking that they have a slight DOWNWARDS slope (and I'm in a relatively low sedan to begin with). There's a T-intersection near my house with a retaining wall at the end - very convenient for checking the angle.
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.
> 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"
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.
Unless the testing scheme involves only testing the single car and nothing else.
When my taillight burned out, I went to the local autoparts store to get a replacement. The first light I picked up had printed on the packaging, in not-terribly-visible writing, "For Off-Road Use Only." I had to go back and hunt longer for the light that was legal for road use.
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.
That's not how it works. They can write whatever they want on the packaging. It's the final assembly that's compliant. They're covering their ass in case you put their 5W bulb in some application they've never heard of where it technically fits but a 2.5W bulb was supposed to be used or something.
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.
The correct bulb will not say that, aftermarket LEDs do. The light reflector housings are designed and tested for specific bulb standards. There are LEDs which try to output light from the same place as the filament in the bulb they are mimicking. But there is no guarantee they function properly, hence the warning and illegality.
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
Most Teslas come mis-aimed from the factory and expect their owners to "calibrate" them - they just never tell them that.. Guess how many owners actually figure it out? A vanishingly small percentage.. (or they're all assholes who want to blind others on purpose)
No, new cars are actually just ass.
Aren't there any checks for that?
In EU most DMV equivalents check headlights yearly to catch illegal illumination envelopes (along with other safety-related aspects, brakes and whatnot).
Most US states don't have an inspection regime. Of those that do, it's often just for emissions (and with 2001+ cars, it's increasingly just confirm the check engine light shows up in the light test and turns off when the engine is started, plus check that the emissions computer says ready for test). The driving public does not want to pay for safety inspections.
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.
In theory, yes. But, it's state-by-state, enforcement at drive-time is next to zero (unless the cop just wants to hassle you), leaving it to either annual or time-of-sale inspections that are easily gamed (slip the mechanic a $20).
Heck, people will reinstall stock parts for inspection then swap back to the illegal parts. Common with emissions stuff as well.
Only a handful of US states have any type of safety inspection
The only one I've experienced (Massachusetts) wouldn't catch any of what we're discussing in this thread. They put it on the emission testing machine, walked once around the car, maybe checked the brakes, and that was it. It was in no way comparable to the UK's MOT test, which is a proper inspection.
Headlight function (including aim) is on the MA vehicle inspection: https://www.mavehiclecheck.com/motorists-basicinfo
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.
This isn’t the whole story. I’ve been driving the same Prius compact since 2015, and only I the last few years have I suddenly started experiencing these insanely bright headlights. The giant cars have been around the whole time. The brightest lights seem like they are on specific brands of new cars, although I’m terrible at recognizing car brands and obviously only experience this issue at night when I’m being blinded by headlights, so it’s not easy to figure out exactly which brands cause the issue.
My 2024 outback has no 'high beams'. My low beams are the same brightness as high beams. The only difference is the field of view. I switch on the high beams on and height of the beam increases, but intensity stays the same.
I feel awful about essentially high-beaming everyone unless the road is flat.
High also refers to the lack of beam cut-off or masking[1], not only the intensity. In UK English, the terms are "full beam" and "dipped beam" to reflect this.
[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.
This is how almost all cars with HID bulbs work, because HID bulbs can't be toggled on and off - they need time to warm up and have a limited number of arc initiation cycles before they wear out. So there's a mechanical shutter which changes the cut-off distance. Generally, there is also a leveling sensor which adjusts the cutoff when the car starts up, to account for suspension sag differences and load.
> The only difference is the field of view.
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.
Thanks, previously the only other car I had was a 1995 volvo which used additional bulbs when the high beams were engaged. Intensity and field of view were increased. The outback's headlights were very confusing to me since I leapt through like 3 generations of cars
I wonder if it became normal around the time everyone started complaining headlights were too bright
Most vehicles with dual-filament bulbs will turn off the low beams while the high beams are on, but looking around, I see it's mixed for vehicles with dual bulbs; US standards don't require it one way or the other --- you can meet the high beam requirement with separate bulbs or with both bulbs in concert.
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.
They are often aimed too high from the factory
> Second, there's a decent sized market for cheap, unapproved HID/LED kits for older cars. They're often not aimed correctly.
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.
> I'm having no issue with new cars and their LEDs
funny, its the opposite for me. brand new SUVs are by far the worst offenders,
a third thing is some people drive with brights on all the time, particularly in snow-bird seasonal communities, I've noticed. when the seasonal people, many geriatric, are in town, the vehicles driving day and night with bright lights activated is noticable.
Might be some mistaken confirmation bias there. Canadian registered vehicles are required to have "daytime running lights" while American cars are not. You might be seeing low beams vs no beams, as opposed to high beams vs low beams.
Aiming and beam restriction is not enough and cannot ever be enough to prevent bright headlights from blinding people. It only works when the road is flat. You introduce a hill or even a speed bump and suddenly the headlight angle is zero. Brightness has to be managed directly.
I've seen lifted Miatas...
The rising height of headlights in North America is compounding the issue as well. At this point a good proportion of vehicles have headlights even or higher than the roof on a sedan.
At least in my state, there is a law that restricts the location of headlights to between 22 and 54 inches from the ground. 54 inches is quite tall, though, I think that a lot of cars have roofs that are shorter than 4.5 feet. I'd love to see a much lower upper limit.
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.
LEDs are around 10x more efficient than incandescent bulbs. A 100W incandescent equivalent LED bulb typically consumes 10-12W. A 70W LED would put out as much light as 700W of incandescent.
Given idea just how much more light this is:
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.
Traditional automotive headlamps are halogens and much more efficient than conventional incandescents. It was only in the last decade that LEDs beat halogens on lumens per watt.
I'd go as far as to say that the height is the issue, and it's becoming global (although, yes, US is the leader).
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.
The maximum brightness is already regulated in US and Europe. US allows a lower brightness level.
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.
Do we enforce it?
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.
Given how many cars I see on the road with only one headlamp working, we have a long way to go before enforcing anything like this.
The regulations for manufacturers are enforced. There have even been recalls for it.
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.
I believe so, but I need more evidence in either direction to give it a definitive answer, but why companies recall cars to fix their brightness levels if they are not enforced?
> 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.
Looking further -
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.’”
This highlights a problem in getting your information from a podcast or YouTube video, even when the presenter seems like someone you'd find credible.
No, the regulation does not measure lights at a single spot. The regulations are published and very easy to find.
You mean the same companies that measured the testing benches used for emissions regulations and cheated on them? It's not like there isn't a history of the car companies doing foul shit here.
I mean, Jason Cammisa is not some "YouTube person". He's arguably his generation's Jeremy Clarkson.
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...
>He's arguably his generation's Jeremy Clarkson.
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.
Camissa is not as unhinged as Clarkson, their most common trait is their appreciation and knowledge of cars and how they treat their histories.
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.).
Thanks for the info. I'm not surprised. Of course they are manipulating this test, too.
Yes, but only with preset measurements that car manufacturers work around by literally putting dim spots in headlights at specific angles (https://old.reddit.com/r/fuckyourheadlights/comments/1hefn86...).
It's much worse in America, in my experience. Much more deviation in cars/sedans/trucks on the road, with different road heights each, and MUCH more custom stuff on top.
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."
I'm in the Netherlands and I DO find it bad. Probably also has to do with my age (early fifties) - your eyes adjust with more difficulty the older you get, it seems.
I live close to you and I agree it's bad. But trust me, it's way worse in North America (where I also drive annually or so).
I do find it bad in Belgium, mostly on big cars like SUVs. Another reason for me to dislike them. Unfortunately they are getting more and more common.
The US has clear regulations on headlights that limit the number of Watts. That worked when everyone had halogen bulbs, but doesn't fit with LEDs.
There are regulations. The problem is they're easy to game. [1][2]
[1] https://www.theringer.com/2024/12/03/tech/headlight-brightne...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42443406
In the UK it's exacerbated by our narrow roads, constant drizzle, disrepair of our streets and highways and by the fact that it gets dark by 4PM.
We also need to be far more strict about enforcing properly alignment, so many are pointed too high especially on larger vehicles and pretty much always on anything that's been lifted
Usually in USA regulations apply to cars, but everyone drives a light truck that's exempt from regulations ranging from emission to pedestrian safety
This is false. Light trucks are definitely regulated. Emissions regs do soften a bit for 3/4 ton and up trucks (think F250 and up), but the ubiquitous F150 as well as other half-tons, as well as mid-size trucks, are all very much regulated.
As a cyclist and pedestrian, these new headlights and the cars with the "auto brights" are just terrible.
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.
During dusk, which is pretty long around winter here, I have to wear sunglasses when I out training on bike. It's worst on hilly terrain.
Even if we're considering only other cars and not pedestrians, it's still pretty annoying. The brights will only turn off _after_ another car is already in their field of illumination, and only after a short delay. If you're manually managing your brights, you can almost always switch them off before another car even comes into view (by e.g. seeing their headlights approaching)
The obvious solution is to carry a 10000 lumen[0] flashlight and use it to trigger the auto-dim[1].
[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
I understand that currently this is sort of a collective action problem, but I'm a bit baffled why people ever thought they needed brighter headlights in the first place. In the city, it's so bright that you don't even need headlights to see whatsoever. When cars started automatically dimming the dash via a light sensor, there was actually a period of time where I totally forgot to turn on my headlights because things were so well lit -- even at night -- that I didn't need them whatsoever.
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.
> 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.
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.
Same for rural parts of North America, and you also have to worry about animals on the road.
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.
You're right, and it's actually even worse when the road has very reflective white lines. Basically, everything outside of the road is invisible. However, in France, they somehow haven't figured how to not have their lines disappear when it rains ever so slightly.
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.
The rain thing is true anywhere I've driven. Even worse, when there are old white lines grinded away for some change, and new white lines added 0.5 lanes away. In certain wet conditions the old lines become equally or more "white" than the new ones.
> Same for rural parts of North America, and you also have to worry about animals on the road.
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).
This is also true for Germany, but your ability to see in the dark decreases at some point with increasing brightness, since you don't allow your eyes to get used to the darkness.
But you are not supposed to see in the dark while driving! If you were, we would all be driving by moonlight...
Adapting to the darkness is not a binary thing. You are supposed to see beside the road by light reflected from your beams. Otherwise you would only see animals when they come into your beam, which is generally too late, you want to see them when they are to your side.
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.
> You are supposed to see beside the road by light reflected from your beams.
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.
But for the truly dark areas, you can turn on your high beams - which you aren't allowed to have on when there's oncoming traffic. Smart / adaptive lighting is another option, lower / yellower light in well lit spaces.
> Smart / adaptive lighting is another option
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.
My 2020 Lexus has the same system. I’m amazed at how well it works for same-direction traffic and how terrible it is for opposite direction traffic (which seems like it should be a vastly easier problem to solve).
I wish it was usable, but I think it’s not.
All roads in France except very small ones have white reflective lines.
It varies a lot in the US. Major highway in Florida? Very visible lines. Minor highway in Colorado with all the paint and reflectors scraped off by snowplows, even if the road is in good condition? Not as visible. Rural somewhere? Good luck.
I think everything is just way brighter now. We improved LEDs and stuck them in everything and amped them way up. Just going outside at night in a residential area gets your eyes blasted out with unshielded 8000K streetlights and spotlights people put up on the outside of their houses. I have to keep my computer monitors' brightness levels almost all the way down just to be able to use them, and they're not even the ones marketed as ultra-bright.
> Out in the country, you still don't really need brighter headlights.
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
I live in the woods in the northeast US, and also grew up in the 80s-90s in a very rural area and I've owned a number of cars when I was young, some with comically dim lights.
You really don't need the bright lights. You never have. Slow down, look for movement, and use your brights intelligently.
Growing up in rural New England it seemed that people were constantly hitting deer with their cars—slowing down is obviously a good idea, but every additional foot of headlight distance certainly helps for spotting the glint of an eyeball on the side of the road.
In a densely wooded area, no. Your sight line is naturally blocked by trees, so a farther throw of light would be wasted
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
I also live in the woods in the northeast US, also grew up in a very rural area (in the 70s-80s), and I still own a few 70s and 80s cars with comically dim lights. Yeah, they're not good. 1) They're very noticeably worse comparing them back to back to modern cars, and 2) my eyes are no longer young. Can I drive with them? Sure. Is it less safe? You bet.
Slow down is kind of the general tip, but I find it kinda BS. I can drive slowly focusing on the bushes on the way to/from work in bumfuck nowhere, or I can get some beacon of god aux LEDs for cheap and turn night into day.
> or I can get some beacon of god aux LEDs for cheap and turn night into day.
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.
My point is about bumfuck nowhere. Places where at night you may or may not see another car for the X km it takes you to get home. That with time people tend to forget they have their high beam bound to the beacon of god, with or without an extra switch, is a separate issue. The light itself makes sense.
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...
> I can get some beacon of god aux LEDs for cheap and turn night into day.
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.
"I can get some beacon of god aux LEDs for cheap and turn night into day" they said, in a topic entitled "Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright"
don't forget "bumfuck"
we're not talking about the northeast US
and sure, you don't need to drive over 20mph on a 60mph limit road ...
Not to be pedantic but you do need to be able to see pedestrians at night too, who can legally walk on country roads on either side, without reflectors or illumination.
It’s the car drivers responsibility to not mow pedestrians down wherever or whenever they are walking.
Not least because hitting a person at 50mph on a country lane will cause serious amounts of damage to your car and ruin your day!
My point was that it is not pedestrians I worry about walking on the carriageway on a 60mph limit road, it's the trees
A lot of smaller US cities also have areas with no lighting and worn-out lines, which contrast with brightly lit areas and suddenly you're basically blind if your lights are too dim. Couple that with a wet road, which reduces visibility, and it can be hard to see where to drive.
Then we have pedestrians walking with no sidewalks or crosswalks, because city planning actively hostile to people walking.
I just realized I bet it’s sometimes a speed issue. I don’t need bright lights, maybe because I’m a slow driver.
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.
And, notably, those couple of seconds can be key to seeing far off wildlife that may decide to cross the road.
Also notably, so bright they burn the retinas of said wildlife and any drivers or pedesttrians approaching you.
Well, the new stupid bright lights, yes. The idea of brights in general, though, not quite as bad.
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.
I think part of the problem is people drive at the speed limit regardless of conditions. If its dark and wet you really should not drive at the same speed as when its sunny and dry. If you are unfamiliar with a twisty road you need to slow down. If there are more pedestrians around than usual you need to slow down.
I agree with you 100%. The speed limit isn't seen as a limit, culturally, in the united states from what I can tell. Anymore, it's treated as the minimum socially acceptable speed on roads.
I do, and old school yellow high-beams were plenty on a 205 to do 80+mph down b-roads back in the 00's, I would happily go back to that if it meant I could avoid being blinded every ten minutes.
I’d be happy with other drivers just turning their main beam off slightly faster than 5 seconds after they have seen me.
Id be happy if most drivers just realised they have a dial which adjusts the angle of their headlights and used it accordingly.
or at all, but when they're higher than you, or climbing a hill a casual blinding is unavoidable with the current laser-based headlights.
All cars in the U.S. used the same headlights up until the early 80s. You could literally walk into the auto parts store and buy a headlight to replace yours, regardless of make and model
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.
"Somehow we all did ok..."
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.
These same exact 1980s headlights were used just fine on 2000s Fords
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.
> All cars in the U.S. used the same headlights up until the early 80s.
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.
The red queen effect. We'll end up all driving flood-lit bulldozers.
Well this is why headlights have dipped beam and full beam. The issue is the dipped beam is getting as bright as the full beam used to be, and is mounted higher on the car as well.
It’s not what’s meant by pedestrians but usually you’re also looking for wildlife, like deer, that you could hit.
The parent is talking about needing _brighter_ headlights, not headlights in general.
I need to drive through the countryside to get to other towns.
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.
>>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> its worth a few seconds of extra 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.
Once we figure our deer wasting disease, we need to start the breeding program for reflectorized deer. It'll solve a lot of problems.
Why does nobody think that if these lights are dazzling oncoming drivers, they are also dazzling these precious deer and pedestrians people keep saying they need to see so well.
> there won't be pedestrian foot traffic
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.
> You think kids aren't running across the street at night out in the country? Chasing a soccer ball?
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.
>> You think kids aren't running across the street at night out in the country? Chasing a soccer ball?
>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've lived in Montana for 25 years, a place where there are deer (and moose and bears) rampaging all over the place. People hit them all the time. But the only place I ever hit a deer with my car was North Yorkshire.
>> You think kids aren't running across the street at night out in the country? Chasing a soccer ball?
> 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.
> Kids play in front yards with zero street lighting all the time
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.
> Street lighting is consistent enough to be used to define built up areas for speed limits in the UK.
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.
> 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 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.
Despite the "I need this in the sticks" responses here, I think the most common answer is the silent group that didn't ask for it but it just comes with the car. This group is silent anyway, they didn't have the issue/need but also won't complain about the extra light, whereas a few other people did and so you can just make 1 size fits all with no repercussions (besides perhaps selling more replacement lamps)
In the early 2020s, I was driving at night in rural America on a daily basis in a nineties car with pre-LED yellow lights. There were plenty of animals in the road, and I never felt they were hard to see or stop for, even with no street lights.
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.
If i may add, they won't complain because the headlights of their cars aren't the ones that are flashing directly at their own face. To them the problem will always be the other's cars having the lights too bright.
I have always lived in the sticks and I hate these new headlights, you could always see fine with the old ones on a dark country lane.
I wonder whether some fraction of the population has shit night vision and whether this fraction's preferences are driving this trend to too-bright headlights.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
I have close to two decades of driving experience and I dread driving on the rural roads. Roads where you can barely fit two cars side by side, or even narrower, unexpected cars rushing towards you from the closed dead corners, badly signed crossings etc. But mostly its narrow roads, it is extremely stressful for me, and double so in the twilight and in the darkness.
> downplaying the challenges of country road driving is weird.
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.
Just because this is YC, I thought I should pitch in -
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.
People were pushing for those in the 90s. I think it never got adopted because of the loss of transparency on the windshield (AFAIK, there's an international standard that most countries go beyond, and it's way above 50%).
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.
> high-trust society that solved coordination problems through legislation
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.
Wouldn't that, uh, make your own headlights invisible to you?
Polarized light reflecting off a textured surface scrambles into nonpolarized light.
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.
Well.. deer, for one. It's much easier to spot animals crossing the road with bright headlights than without.
I still also agree headlights are too bright, by the way, but I'm just providing an example for your question
Not necessarily... I had H4 or H1/H7 before, which were dimmer, but the edge cutoff was much smoother...
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.
This is pretty detached from reality. Many places in the countryside don't even have road lines, never mind reflective ones. People walk out in the countryside all the time. Animals are a very big reason to have bright lights in the countryside, too.
Headlights dazzle animals, which is why they stand there staring into your lights until they get hit. The less light your car is giving off, the more chance wildlife has to get out of its way becasue it can actually see your car not just a massive bright light like the sun coming towards them.
Most people don't change the brightness of their lights. This is driven by industry using HID and LED lights that have a higher color temperature than the old lighting. It's really a failure of governmental regulation (or lack thereof, in this case).
LED upgrades were very popular in the early 2000s. IIRC that style of light was introduced by Lexus and Audi around 2003
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
Most of my driving is down small, unlit country roads and I'm constantly coming across deer, sheep, people in dark jackets (walking back from the pub) and people riding bikes (occasionally with no lights on).
I'm quite thankful for bright headlights.
Driving in the countryside, good headlights are *so* much safer.
This is exactly what high beams are for, and even 20 year old cars have very bright high beams that are plenty safe.
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.
> This is exactly what high beams are for,
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?
I'm pretty sure a technical solution can be found that improves normal headlight visibility compared to non-xenon lamps from 10-15-20 years ago WITHOUT blinding incoming traffic.
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.
Good headlights are. The modern levels of brightness do not qualify as good headlights. Modern headlights become unsafe as soon as any other person is on the business end of them, due to the fact that they can no longer see properly. It puts other vehicles at the risk of crashing from being blinded, both cars and smaller vehicles like bicycles.
Smartphones, infotainment systems, and large LCDs in the cabin are killing drivers' night vision.
I find it easier to drive my wife's modern car with all that than my 2005 car which has barely any internal lights (dim light around the speedo, dim light on the radio)
You're not wrong, but it's a minor contribution at most.
Thats probably because it has ridiculously bright headlights to compensate.
> 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.
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.
Lights in other settings that were upgraded to LEDs became much brighter: night clubs usef to be mostly dark for instance.
I don't think it happened through any plan, if anyone was looking at the specs, they probably just thought "bigger number better".
Nightclubs are still too dark. Streets are too bright.
> 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.
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.
You must not live where there’s wildlife… I can tell you it’s basically impossible to see deer at night without your brights on until you’re basically hitting it.
We have quite a lot of wildlife around us; deer, moose, coyotes, hedgehogs, pheasants, nearly non-stop turkeys. It really hasn't been an issue.
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.
I agree with all of this. For wildlife, using long distance IR or something to augment makes more sense than higher brightness normal lights , given how falloff works.
I have "Night Vision Assist" on my car. It has an IR sensor up front and displays a live image on the instrument cluster. It uses AI to highlight pedestrians and animals. When I'm being blinded by lights I rely on Night Vision far more than I wish I had to. It would be even better if it were integrated into a head-up display, overlaying objects on the windshield. (I suppose it would need to track the driver's eyes to know where to display them.)
This can also be adjusted to by reducing speed.
You have to go so slow that you double the length of the trip, which is a big deal when a 2 hour trip turns into a 4 hour ordeal.
Sure but you should be able to safely drive the speed limit under normal (Ie not pouring rain, snow, etc) conditions. Night is a normal condition.
Bear in mind that the UK has a “national speed limit” of 60mph for much of the countryside. This is very much a limit, a maximum, and you’re expected to drive to the conditions of the road. If it’s perfect weather conditions and twisting roads not wide enough for 2 cars, you shouldn’t be driving at the speed limit.
Absolutely. The legal speed limit is 60 in the country - on any road not marked with a lower speed limit. This means that legally, you can drive at 60mph down a twisty single track road with 1.5m earth and rock banks topped with hedges.
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.
Driving too fast for the conditions (but within the limit) would usually be considered Driving without Due Care and Attention even if you don't crash (although the likelihood of anyone being around to enforce it on a deserted country road is pretty low).
That's not the purpose of that law. That's just the pretext they use to get the useful idiots to endorse it. The purpose of that laws is if you do something stupid but below the speed limit and not violating any other specific laws they've got something to nab you for.
Having driven in the US and UK, this is a significant difference between the two. In the UK, you might sometimes drive 30 under on a road that is nominally 60 mph. In the US, that road would have a specific posted speed limit that is safe to drive. US roads are also more consistently designed for constant speed or have additional advisory speed limits for curves. You can nearly always drive as fast as the number on the sign unless there is some additional hazard.
I have not yet found a road in the UK where i couldnt safely drive the maxiumum speed limit.
Where I live there are speed limits but rarely minimum speeds, only on divided highways as far as I know. Everyone is different, some people just aren't comfortable driving the speed limit at a given moment. We should literally back off those folks, they're not what's making traffic horrible in my experience.
No. The speed limit is the maximum for a dry road, in the summer during the day.
They should just use cameras with the ir cut filters removed and let you superimpose the result onto the windshield.
Worth pointing out that headlights (and tail lights) aren't just for your ability to see things, they're also for the ability of other drives to see you.
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.
I don't even use my high beams usually, and neither do I have LED, xenon or laser headlights. But I often do wish that I magically had brighter headlights without being an asshole, both in the city and rural. In the city any 2 lane or smaller road can be unexpectedly crossed by pedestrians, on crossings and not. And pedestrians nowadays are wearing all black, completely invisible on the side of the road. And on the rural roads, I want as far visibility as I can get, because the load is usually 1.5 lane, barely fitting two cars at below walking speed, so when I see an opposite traffic I need to immediately slow down and take to the right, almost touching the ditch or the wall, to pass safely. Additionally I need to spot opposing car in the dead corners, where there is zero visibility etc. And finally the same problem as in the city with pedestrians crossing rural roads, which is even more dangerous because it is unexpected and darker.
So I can see a powerful motivation to fit bright headlights in the cars, regardless of the other's comfort.
I don't need bright lights, most people don't and we havent done anything to get them, they just come with the car for most people.
You bought a car which had them, that was a choice.
I have never bought a car with extreme bright headlights, and I never will.
I remember light used to be much paler and became brighter around the 2010. just go drive in an old car (20+ years) and a new car.
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.
I confess this is why I just assumed my eyes were going bad. I am getting old, and this shift seemed to have coincided with about the time I moved to a more rural area. In the city, I don't know that I ever used "brights" on my cars. In rural, it helps to see when there are basically no road lamps.
Many places don't pay for reflective paint, unfortunately. Here in Missouri they used it for a year or two and it was a vast improvement... but then they cut the paint budget and now we're back to invisible lines with even a small rain (no matter what the brightness of the headlights).
Assuming that the lines on the road are in good condition or even exist. Uneven roads, potholes, and corners/junctions with no signage can all be a challenge is poor conditions with old style headlights ( our 2 cars have old and new style lights respectively ).
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.
What road lines?
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.
Where they pass through rural areas the high-speed, multi-lane roads in the UK and continental Europe are unlit. Partly for cost, partly to avoid light pollution. Brighter lights mean being able to see hazards further ahead of you.
Maybe it all comes down to allowing people to feel comfortable driving more quickly on country roads. Also, the number of people who actually choose new cars is quite limited, and they may be influenced by stupid factors.
You assume country roads have painted lines? Not where I live. And you also need to watch for deer, racoons, and other critters crossing ahead of you. High beams are essential on dark country roads.
Bright headlights dazzle wildlife. You do not need retina burning suns for headlamps to see animals on country roads.
You need to be able to see as far down the road as you can, and off to the sides, to have a better chance at seeing and avoiding a deer.
So who are they for?
Marketing.
People who drive in rural New England.
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.
Where I live, it doesn’t matter how far your lights throw down the roadway, you still have less than a couple seconds to notice the deer sprinting out of the woods directly in front of you
In the countryside, outside highways, the pain is usually non-reflective or just in such a bad state that you can't even see it.
Usually bright headlights / highbeams are useful in there.
> I understand that currently this is sort of a collective action problem,
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.
>Out in the country, you still don't really need brighter headlights.
Animals and pedestrians (along with pot holes) are the prime reason.
I never wanted bright lights, I just paid extra for LEDs in the hope that I won't need to change these anymore
I live in rural Scotland - a lot of minor roads round here have no markings?
In the country you need decent lights on the road to spot the potholes, animals, and people. And of course you get pedestrian traffic, especially at this time of year when people are walking dogs after getting home from work.
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
Low beam lights were previously much dimmer and angled much lower. Rural driving absolutely required high beams.
My guess is that the average population of car drivers is aging. With age comes worse eyesight and and the ability to see in the dark. So a lot of people are probably more comfortable with having brighter headlights.
Ah, the old "I am a free-thinking rational being, but everyone else are a bunch of NPCs who can't be allowed to have what they want without enlightened supervision" argument.
animals and other objects on the road, and potholes
Out in the country there's no lines on the road. In fact, the road could be gravel for many, many miles, or just a dirt road.
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.
Have you seen what a moose can do to a car?
> In the city, it's so bright that you don't even need headlights to see whatsoever.
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.
We needed some brighter lights before the current craze.
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.
Out in the country: moose and other animals
Moose are less of a problem in the UK than you might expect. ;)
(I'll give you other animals though.)
No thanks, I have no where to keep them.
There are other countries than the UK.
The story is about the UK. it would b ridiculous to set UK brightness levels on the grounds of what would be needed in Finland.
I have poor night vision, many times there are no road marks at all. I need to see whether the road continues straight, goes left or right, so I need decent headlights.
When you are driving in the night during heavy rainfall, good head light is difference between life and death. Get out of your bubble please!
And when your ridiculous LED lamps blind the oncoming driver on a corner during heavy rain and they crash into you, you wish weren't so selfish.
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.
> So who are they for?
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.
Desperately we need to reign in car "style" choices like this. Beyond headlights being too bright, lift kits should be banned and tint regulations should be enforced. Same with sound regulations.
Public roads are not race tracks; they are for people.
What bothers you about tints? I've never bothered to get one since it's illegal where I'm at but the new ones seem pretty cool for cave dwellers who fear the light. They tint well during the day but you can still see at night from what I've seen on friends cars.
It's like driving behind a truck or van, you can't see past the (tinted) car in front.
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.
> Unfortunately, the type of people with tinted windows are exactly the type you shouldn't overtake.
So every soccer mom SUV?
Factory tints are generally mild and never on the windshield.
Aftermarket tints are dark and people get both the rear window and windshield tinted.
most aftermarket tints are too dark and dont allow pedestrians to see into the car to see if they going to be hit by the driver. its illegal in most places but cops dont do anything about it.
Yeah, they do.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c51y927e5g2o
what driver?
I could talk about eye contact and how using the road only works if we cooperate but, more than anything, I just find a heavily tinted windscreen to be antisocial. It's like the ultimate form of bullying. Driving around in a killing machine without your victims even being able to see you.
I like to stare right into the windshield where I think the driver's face must be, make them think I can see through the tint. I doubt it works.
I find this problem to be most severe as a pedestrian - when my eyes have adjusted to the darkness (even if I'm carrying a flashlight, it pales in comparison) and a modern car is oncoming, I cannot see _anything_. Out here in the sticks where there are no sidewalks I can either take it on blind faith that the driver has seen and will avoid me, or I can step way off into the ditch (but not everyone has that option).
Thanks to automatic high beams, its a problem in residential urban areas too. My neighborhood does not have much in the way of streetlights, and automatic high beams operate by detecting whether there is significant oncoming light. That means that in my neighborhood, cars with AHB always have their high beams up when there isn't oncoming car traffic. They also tend to function really badly around road curves in residential areas, where they'll affect other drivers.
PSA: Turn off your automatic high beams, they aren't worth it the damage they do to the rest of us.
Yeah. When I ride my bike in the sticks and pass walkers in the dark, I try to disable my headlight a few seconds before I pass them. Otherwise all they see is a bright light approaching. Disabling the lights for a moment seems better than one party not seeing anything. (Or both parties, e.g. two bikes, or runners with forehead LED light.)
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.
If your front light is correctly aiming down, there’s no need to disable the light. Modern bicycle led front lights are most often incorrectly set up, though.
I can control the angle, but permanently aiming it down so far that it can't get in anyone's eyes is completely impractical. You would only see what's directly in front of you and you would miss a lot of stuff.
Not sure about your particular model but most front lights are designed to make the path visible in front of you, and not above.
Just chuck in the old non LED lights. When I'm walking around town at night, it's only the cars with new bright white LEDs that are super bright and blind me. It's a relief when an older car come by with orange'y lights.
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.
I always wondered if it would be feasible to make the headlights produce polarized light (e.g. vertical), and have windscreens filter out that polarization... I guess it would only work if the scattering of light off of whatever is being illuminated sufficiently depolarizes the light. Anyhow, I thought it was a neat idea when I was a teenager.
There might be some issues with retro fitting the world's existing road vehicle fleet, but that's a deployment detail. :p
If you polarized the light and windshield to 45° off vertical, opposite direction traffic would have their windshield at 90° to your light…
Ooooh so I am not the only one to swear at those blinding headlights? Interestingly (or not), I think there should be a regulated height for the headlights all private cars; I drive a B-segment type of car, and I find all those European SUVs have their headlights right at my shoulder level meaning I will always be subject to be blinded by this type of vehicle vs a similar lower car. That goes for the vans as well.
There is an arms race to be the brightest, biggest vehicle on the road. Each driver wants to be the safest and many want a shiny high status vehicle. The result is a runaway feedback loop of ever more worse design
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.
"designed by the government" got us the SLS.
The "whiny trillionaire" gave us Falcon 9 and Starship/Superheavy.
Not the flex you think it is.
Where I live, it's customary to let other drivers know by flashing your brights when they're blinding you or if there's some other issue with their vehicle like a broken tail light or such. Maybe less now that you can't easily change the bulb yourself but as a principle
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
When I got my Honda van with stock LED headlights about a year ago, people started flashing me that my brights were on. After the first couple times I started flashing my actual brights back. They make the stock headlights too dang bright.
I'm the one who's flashing you. I'm flashing you because your headlights are bothering me. Showing me that you can bother me even more does not make it better.
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.
> Still, obviously, nothing you can do, or the driver in general.
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.
I assumed the self leveling led whatever wonder-tech-wizz cannot be aimed. If they can, that should be the first reaction of someone who is getting flashed at a lot. As opposed to flashing back. It's not a headlight-measuring-contest.
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.
"Nothing they can do"? I've never owned a car so genuinely don't know but surely you can buy whatever lights you want for it and/or correct the alignment?
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?
> whatever lights you want
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.
> 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.
What part of my comments tells you my lights are not proper?
The lights of that Honda:
> When I got my Honda van with stock LED headlights about a year ago, people started flashing me that my brights were on.
I didn't write that. Pay attention to usernames.
I was aware, I thought you are defending, that they can do nothing about it.
That... is a sorry state of affairs and explains a lot. Thanks for making me aware.
> but then surely the mechanics can be asked to do this when they change it anyway, or upon the next inspection or so?
They then proceed to adjust them to spec, which is what they were already at, thus not fixing the problem.
My parents bought a Lexus that happens to be tall-ish with very bright headlights. I don't think I have ever driven it at night without people flashing me.
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...
Apparently Toyota+Lexus are ordering the most blinding lights without any reason. Talk to the dealer - if no one complains, they don't feel the need to fix.
Maybe get them replaced if you're blinding the other drivers?
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
They're not replaceable. That's the problem. It's not just a bulb you can replace. I have to replace the entire lighting fixture, and replacing the fixture with the OEM part is going to have the same exact issue. Replacing it with a non-OEM part is probably going to make it worse.
Perhaps there's some adjustment possible? Worth asking at least.
> Maybe get them replaced if you're blinding the other drivers?
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.
That's insane. I wasn't aware you can't replace one light bulb for another until a sibling comment that I saw in the meantime
> Where I live, it's customary to let other drivers know by flashing your brights when they're blinding you
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.
A lot of new cars have it automatic, where they run on high beam and are supposed to turn it off when they see incoming cars ahead.
We had a rental like that in 2023. The person who was driving was amazed and you could see the effect very well where it would light up the forest or town except for the one strip where this other car was coming on
(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
So, I tested this for a few weeks. I can safely drive my car around with hi-beams on and nobody even notices. My hi-beams are less bothersome than the standard SUV.
A lot of this is due to differing heights. There are more tall vehicles with headlights that are high off the ground, which dazzle drivers of regular cars.
Even if the dip angle is the same (1% gradient or so), this can still dazzle most people nearby.
Vans and other bigger vehicles, that have the lights mounted higher than usual, are indeed particularly bad, but I don't really want to get into an arms race of taller and taller vehicles just to be able to see at night. Better that the manufacturers just angle it down a bit more if they want to put the lights up that high
In my personal experience, if you are being dazzled by headlights from behind, its a tesla.
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..
I think this is an area where stricter regulation would be appreciated. Just needs an additional checkbox on the regular MOT forms, and all cars would be compliant within a year.
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.
It was a monobrow car.
Ok, here's where this becomes a problem:
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
There is a legal minimum standard for vision to be able to drive in the UK (basically you have to be able to read a number plate at 20 metres, not have double vision, and have a normal field of vision in one eye.) The punishment for failing to stop driving if you fail that is a £1000 fine.
People with serious cataracts shouldn't be driving.
I have implants after cataract laser surgery with now 94% vision. Like with every other laser surgery the problem of halos persists for the rest of your life. As a small person in a small car I have repeatedly been forced to stop at the curb until the halos reduce enough to be able to reliably drive. SUVs are the worst offenders in this regard. This just to say that people with their cataracts cured and a really good eyesight are still majorly impacted by this.
Edit: I have no problems with incandescent or the old Led lights.
If people with 20/20 vision are having trouble, I'm sure that people with diminished eyesight but above the legal limit have it worse.
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.
751 comments - Quite the bikeshed this time!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
Actual report appears to be this one, from January / February 2025:
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.)
I think it's the same everywhere. I'm in North America, I drive a normal size car, between the super bright led lights, and trucks and SUVs with higher mounting points it's getting really bad. I'm now almost unable to tell when people still have their high beams or not. Add to that some people who don't give a damn and actually drive with high beams on, and you're certain to become blind.
> TRL's data suggests that LED and whiter headlamps may be linked to glare and that drivers might find their whiteness harder to cope with.
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.)
I think a huge part of the problem also ties into the problem of modern "Angry Robot Face" designs. Car manufacturers are trying to make headlights the size of a penny that emit as much light as "proper" ones.
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.
Also, the plastic headlight “lenses” on many cars tend to get cloudy and develop micro-scratches over time. This reduces the efficiency of the low beams, and instead of fixing the problem, many drivers of older cars simply drive with their high beams on, which creates even more glare for everyone else.
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.
> Nothing is really repairable, of course, so replacing these parts is out of the question
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).
Longevity can be problematic.
In the UK, a car with cloudy headlight lenses will fail its annual roadworthiness check, and the owner will have to pay for the lenses to be polished.
Much alike in Hungary... theoretically. Here, unfortunately, practice is different.
This has been a really huge problem in India lately, gone are the days of cute cars with minimal edges (Volkswagen Phaeton looked amazing IMO), now everyone is buying Cybertruck Clones offered by Mahindra and TATA Example: Mahindra BE 6, New Thar, and endless other examples
The problem isn't only the eye-searing brightness, but the fact that there is a sharp cutoff, presumably also mandated by regulations, that creates a small very bright area immediately in front of your field of vision, and then a contrast of complete darkness beyond that. I suspect at least some drivers of newer cars are using the high beams constantly because it moves the cutoff farther out.
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".
This is a really big problem in Australia as well. I know many people (myself included) that find it far more dangerous driving at night due to being blinded by bright headlights than they were 10-15 years ago.
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.
+1 from fellow Aussie.
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.
I've got to admit occasionally I think they are high beams and end up flicking my lights at them, maybe if enough people do that they might think something is wrong.
All new car head lights are too bright. I miss the old warm yellow lights.
We could have warmer headlights which would be more comfortable for road users, but most car manufacturers have decided it's 5000K white because it's fashionable.
Higher colour temperature LEDs are more efficient, so that's one reason why they get chosen. It's not a good reason, given they're still a massive efficiency improvement over old halogens.
I'm always curious, who are all those people who tell manufacturers it's fashionable? Other than voices in their heads? Who are those people that unironically like those searing lights?
Same people who told them drivers want touchscreens.
Yeah, but who are they? Do they keep a real Homer Simpson in some basement, ask him what’s cool, and take the stupidest cheapest ideas for implementation?
I imagine it's the same people that cut holes in new pants. There appear to be some true marketing gods in this world who evidently find buyers for newly broken items at prices higher than the original nonbroken items. Selling bright white lamps frankly 'pales' next to that
Empirically on UK roads it's as much about the car industry getting away with selling vehicles that are too large for our roads i.e. oversized SUV's and trucks, as anything else. The combination of driver's side closer to crown, and higher mounting, mean the light's from these behemoths tend to cast more of their beams into the eye line of anyone coming the other way, particularly in smaller, lower to the ground vehicles.
> tend to cast more of their beams into the eye line of anyone coming the other way, particularly in smaller, lower to the ground vehicles
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.
> I drive a compact SUV, it has perfectly reasonable headlights
How would you know?
For the longest time, i thought random drivers were flashing their brights at me all over chicago
only recently did i realize, it was the regular headlight LEDs being shined directly at me as they went over a speedbump
Have to remind myself every time that the bright headlights would actually make me blind instead of flashing for a second.
Recently I was driving in the daytime and got temporarily blinded by a BMW SUV with its high beams on. Not sure where to draw the line, but "brighter than the sun" is too bright.
As a pedestrian I can say that the headlights are too bright everywhere I visit. If a car goes up a slope and I go down it's like somebody holds a flashlight right up my eyes. I don't understand why these mandatory lights should be so bright.
This is a problem with emergency vehicles too - many times I’ve been driving and unable to see a person on the road because the lights from a police or EMS vehicle are brighter than a thousand suns, hiding anything beyond. It feels like a Jurassic park thing - they made them brighter because they could (with minimal focus on externalities)
Some US context:
"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_...
I have adaptive lights on my Ford Lightning (and Model 3, more recently), and I do like it, but it is not without compromises.
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.
Something I have noticed in urban areas is that it is very difficult to see pedestrians that are walking in front of vehicles with these extremely bright headlights. For example, when turning left and there are people walking across the street that I am turning on to in front of another vehicle. I feel like it has something to do with the PWM of the LED lamps + the brightness and color?
The lights aren't too bright, they're just poorly aligned.
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.
The lights are too bright and poorly aligned. I walk regularly, and its more than just the tesla's and mini's at fault (Teslas are definitely some of the worst in my experience though, along with Rivian)
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.’”
Teslas are the worst. I try not to speculate without evidence but I cannot shake the intuition that it is intentional to aid the driver assist and self driving stuff, and reflective of a generally sociopathic company.
I've heard it alleged that Tesla simply does not have a QA check for headlight alignment at the factory. Based on my experience on the road, that's entirely believable.
In my city the street lightning is too low at night. And with the better LED headlights and some rain it's impossible to see rare occurances, like bikes without lights, pedestrians crossing the street a.s.o. I really have to drive 30km/h now.
I feel like this problem is better in the UK than in North America.
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.
The problem with headlight brightness has mostly stemmed from cars having brighter headlights. I love technology, but if I had to choose between reducing light output, vs switching to harder-to repair, more expensive, less reliable computer-powered headlights, I'd prefer the former.
When I drive cars with old headlights, they are clearly inferior to the point of feeling nearly dangerous in some situations. I would also not call modern lights less reliable, although I am sure it is more expensive to repair modern lighting technology.
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.
Auto-dimming mirrors used to seem like a luxury, now they're pretty much a necessity. It's always been possible to flip the rear view mirror manually, but the side mirrors don't have this feature. I would be hard-pressed to buy a car without auto-dimming mirrors these days, especially a passenger car (as opposed to a truck/SUV, which is higher up).
I have to do a lot of night driving and often find myself putting my hand out in front of the side mirror to prevent pain in my eyes.
I have a glorious feeling of "got there earlier" because I wrote to the Queensland Road Traffic Authority over a decade ago about glare, when the Quartz-Halogen headlights first came in asking why there was no definitional standard for glare from oncoming headlights.
Got a "piss off" answer.
Rather than just rage at the automobile industry and other drivers for creating this problem, I bought a pair of yellow tinted night driving glasses and now it doesn't bug me as much. They don't solve the problem completely but they cut out the harsh blue lights in modern headlights. And the yellow tint makes the world look like a cool night scene in a 1970s movie.
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.
There are two situations where I have problems with being dazzled by headlights: - low beams on roads that aren't flat, because they shine right into my eyes - the high beams of cars behind me (sometimes close), which reflect in my mirrors but also off my ceiling, my dashboard, etc.
But I don't necessarily have a problem with the headlights just because they're too powerful.
there should be automatic robotic testers on all the round points in the world with a warning notice going to the driver to fix it in the next five minutes by turning down his headlights on the dashboard or by going ot he nearest garage for adjustment.
1. Headlights are migrating upwards, thanks to the proliferation of SUVs and pickups.
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.
Nearly all drivers look at the incoming headlights!!
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.
It's also like this in America.
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.
My old 2003 Lexus has some sort of anti-bright headlight feature for the rear view mirror that was a gamechanger when I got it. I always notice when I drive another car.
yeah, some cars have powered dimming. most have the little tab/switch at the bottom you need to flick whenever you want to use the dimmer angle. in my last car that would always mess up my optimal rear view mirror angle and position, which would get annoying and turn into a hassle.
A few things I've experienced:
- 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
I am in very small minority since my car is 20 years old now, but it has halogen lights with height adjustments, and they even check for height adjustment at the yearly inspection. But automated high beam switching and people are not ware of it? What sort of drivers do we have nowadays..
A number of US states don't even require regular safety inspections. For example, in Maryland, you only get a safety inspection when selling your vehicle or transferring it in from another state.
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.
New Hampshire just ended inspections.
It's also because the cars are getting so much taller, especially in the US. Driving a smaller car is terrifying when a lifted Dodge fitted with anti-aircraft spotlights blinds you while going the opposite direction.
Meanwhile, brake lights and running lights are frequently too dim because of an aesthetic obsession with "blacking out" tail lights.
Luckily that's illegal in my country, instead we have the opposite problem where new cars have LED taillights that are just as blindingly bright as their headlights.
I'm regularly blinded by some of the ultra-bright rear LEDs. I drive a fairly small/low car so traffic at night is miserable. I tend to avoid driving at night all together for the most part now.
Honestly I'm seeing the opposite. Some new cars, I THINK Camry's, have taillights so bright it's blinding to wait behind one at a stoplight. They don't need to shine just glow so you can see them.
I have never understood why everyone seems to immediately forget everything in their driving lessons as soon as they pass their test. When you're waiting at a red light, you're meant to have the hand brake on (which does not illuminate the brake lights), not your foot on the brake, unless you know that the light is going to turn green very soon, or you're trying to catch the attention of someone coming up behind who looks like they haven't seen that you have stopped.
> When you're waiting at a red light, you're meant to have the hand brake on (which does not illuminate the brake lights), not your foot on the brake, unless you know that the light is going to turn green very soon
I was definitely not taught this as a US driving student. Is this a UK thing?
I can't see how it would be country-specific. How else would you have any control of the forward motion of the vehicle otherwise, especially when starting on an uphill slope? You're meant to raise the clutch to the biting point and apply some accelerator and release the handbrake when you are confident that the engine will prevent the car from moving backwards. Taking the foot off the brake and hoping you can move it over to the accelerator quickly enough doesn't give you that control. Drifting backwards into the car behind you when setting off is rather an embarrassing thing to do.
It does appear to be a UK thing. This is from the UK Highway Code. I'm not finding a US equivalent.
https://www.gov.uk/general-rules-all-drivers-riders-103-to-1...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.
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.
They know where it is as they have to press it when first getting in their vehicles. They're just lazy and selfish
Well found, though I'll also point out that the highway code uses "MUST" and "should" in the same way as the RFCs do.
How else would you have any control of the forward motion of the vehicle otherwise, especially when starting on an uphill slope?
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.
I would wager that most modern cars that have a clutch (which is <2% of the market in the U.S.) have hill assist.
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).
Depends on the car. Most ICE automatics will creep forward, EVs will sit there until you hit the accelerator, manual ICE cars (especially diesels) can be held on the clutch just under the 'biting point' which will stop the vehicle moving backwards.
EVs will sit there until you hit the accelerator,
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.
> How else would you have any control of the forward motion of the vehicle otherwise, especially when starting on an uphill slope?
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.
Bright lights trigger migraines which affects mer personally. There has been a petition in the USA for quite some time https://www.change.org/p/u-s-dot-ban-blinding-headlights-and... but nothing meaningful has happened
Totally, especially the big chelsea tractors that seem to be even more direct to retina.
Really need to limit the size of cars. Its starting to get ridiculous our here in the English countryside with cars that have to cross the median because they're so fat.
Congressional hearings on headlights seem to focus on lumens, but the bigger issue is misalignment. I worry that setting a lumen cap will undermine LEDs strengths. Adaptive matrix like Tesla Model Y etc , which shade oncoming and leading traffic, allow incredible visibility without the glare.
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.
Plus speed bumps. Even if most cars had their headlights pointed correctly, the million speed bumps littering my city means constantly blinded drivers.
Another reason why speed bumps are the laziest and most annoying solution to the problem
I wish someone does something similar in India. Night time driving is a nightmare. Everyone runs on high-beam. The new class of motor-cycles are with super bright LEDs and riders put them on high beam. Night-time driving is a guessing game - you need to guess where the edge of the road is, if there is a bicyclist in between, etc.
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!
Driving in a divider-less road in India feels like getting abducted by Aliens!!!!, Constant High-Beam is fine, But Constant LED/Projector High-Beam is a Crime.
There will be no course-correction in India. The usual mindset is "how can I be the bigger a-hole?" With accessories becoming more and more affordable, there has been a rise in super bright LEDs, and even flashing LEDs. In cities, the police sometimes imposes fines, but apparently, no one pays fines. We have louder horns too. And psychopaths openly displaying their psychopathy. Bangalore's police at least responds on Twitter (https://x.com/blrcitytraffic), but when I look around, it seems like their efforts are a drop in the ocean. The police of other cities are all completely ineffective. The only exception is Chandigarh, but no one wants to follow their example.
As a daily commuter in North-IND I can confirm this, It is not even the car height difference anymore, people are getting aftermarket abominations on their sedans and not getting them height adjusted, the H-beam throw is all over the place.
No wonder. We need standard both on the brightness and the height of the headlights off the ground. Try driving normal sized car or anything sporty and it's blindness central any time modern SUV shows up.
I agree that many LED headlights are too bright (or, more commonly, poorly calibrated) however one thing which can significantly reduce glare is to clean your windshield properly at least once a year. Few people do this.
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.
US is the same. I no longer know is someone is using long-distance lights or normal lights, or whether they are wrongly adjusted. But driving at knight, especially with folks right behind you is hard.
I've had to adjust my headlights down to regulation height (US DOT) on every vehicle I've purchased since 2015 (1x VW, 2x Kia, 1x Ford). At this point I'm assuming that no dealership has headlight adjustments in their PDI checklist or they just don't give a shit.
Given the US bent to this website, surprised more people aren't complaining about lifted trucks...
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.
I don't think it's the brightness but the type of light.
LED white lights are the actually the problem
It's ignorance from consumer side and lost engineering culture from manufacturer.
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.
I'd settle for the damn brake lights/taillights being toned down. Maybe with the exception of a car undergoing hard braking there is no point in them being so bright, but the 1,000,000 nit apparent brightness coming from the vehicle in front at every traffic light is painful.
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).
I've seen some cars have variable brake lights depending on how much pressure is being applied. It's very rare though. Wish my vehicle had it.
I understand many cars nowadays have some sort of auto-levelling feature that is supposed to adjust the where the beams point as the vehicle load changes or related to tire inflation. I know some cars used to have a manual control for this. I don't own a car, but often hire, and often it's seemed that the auto-levelling is just adjusted too high.
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
ITT people saying you don't need strong headlights on the country side, you just need to drive slower..
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.
Or don't go above 50mph down country roads at night? If your eyes aren't as good as they used to be, all the more reason to drive slower
I am pretty sure that is what I wrote
Yes, I misread. Apologies!
This is one of those situations where UK's "rule by law" model could actually be super positive. Make a law restricting brightness and put police and cameras onto ticketing drivers who needlessly burn their highbeams when lowbeams would suffice.
The old halogen-warm colors were better, too. You don't want "area denial" lighting on your everyday ride.
I've heard that in Europe cars are allowed to use auto-dimmers, but for some backwards reason Americans don't enjoy that obvious feature.
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.
So ... how does a problem such as this get remedied?
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.)
There is no explicit regulation against continuing to use halogen for headlights. It would be difficult to pass the current photometric requirements but not impossible. Halogen has a much more predictable & smooth spectra. The CRI is nearly 100.
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.
Are they just not aimed properly? I don't think replacing headlights is something you should do unless you're a professional.
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.
It's this. They aren't inspected for alignment. It's fairly obvious that you can't be blinded by a light unless it's being sent directly into your face or reflecting off a mirror and directly into your face.
I thought they changed the MOT to better assess alignment[0]?
[0] https://mattersoftesting.blog.gov.uk/the-mot-headlamp-aim-te...
I have fully calibrated to manufacturer, and adjusted to state law angles, headlamps and they are 2019 LED and blinding to other drivers unless I point them slightly down. They are pointed down to the legal limit (I have a low car) and distance visibility at speed is problematic.
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?
I have a Toyota RAV4 and the lights are distinctly weaker than in other cars I had. It is a mix of low brightness and short cutoff. It is a challenge to drive when the road is even a bit bendy.
They are correctly adjusted.
I have a recent-model Highlander and I hate the headlights on it. As you say, the sharp cut-off is terrible. Bendy roads I don't mind, but anyone driving anywhere that has even the smallest amount of hills is going to get this:
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.
My car has on the door two buttons marked with 1 and 2. This is supposed to be a feature for two drivers that allows to memorize the position of the seat (which would be awesome). It does not work.
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))
The headlights are most definetly not too bright.
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
No, they are too bright. So bright that they dazzle at any height.
It's interesting how some research in this space never took off as this needs government and regulation support over corporate profits. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/smartheadlight/
Doesn't this come down to glare in most cases? IIRC, the real onslaught of headlight glare wasn't the advent of HID, it was when cars started using projectors. Even with halogens, projectors pointed at you make for a very intense point of light. Lots of glare. Less than HID or LED, sure, but still very real.
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.
I've got to say, I feel like bright white full spectrum is the main problem, I would care much less about them if they were red (though yes, we would need a new colour for rear/brake lights).
Two things I haven’t seen mentioned at a first glance:
- 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
I've found glasses like these work well (https://www.amazon.nl/Antireflectie-Gepolariseerde-autorijde...) - if I drive in Germany I can't do without them - they really help block the glare without making it unsafe to drive.
Yep, I've just taken to driving with prescription sunglasses at night
Most drivers here don't adjust the light angle based on loading of the car (if you have passengers in the back in a small car that is enough to move your lights completely out of whack). I assume it's just laziness or the a "not my problem" attitude but some drivers I have spoken to didn't know that lights are adjustable!
Just as I haven't seen it mentioned yet, one thing that makes British roads worse at night nowadays is a lack of maintenance on the "cat's eyes" reflectors that used to line every major road. They are now quite often missing or broken but previously gave you a clear outline of the road for some distance even with dipped headlights. Same goes for signage overall - standards have slipped.
One problem is this:
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.
More that they're misaligned than too bright...
The excellent Mike Harrison has a couple of good videos on YT tearing down modern headlamps:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fRjMHtnShs
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZJoPbk53ug
(all his videos are good)
I swear all these car headlights are set up for the Taklamakan desert and not Western European highways.
In my country I hesitate to even use the word "night".
I'm in an older car I feel like these modern cars are permanent high beams. Sometimes if it's real bad I high beam them to let them know what it's like. Ridiculous state of affairs. Ive been driving for over 30 years and it's only recently this has been happening, like 5 years or so.
The main issue isn't even the headlights, it's why the hell did this not get regulated to sane levels.
Isn't it more a problem with the aim/beam-diameter than the brightness? If they are aimed properly and designed to shine a narrow beam then their extra brightness shouldn't be an issue.
I had to buy a new low-beam a couple of weeks ago at O'Reilly. There were four different brands/models of the same bulb, three next to each other with packages advertising "bright", "brighter", "brightest", or somesuch. To the side past a little divider was the fourth "basic" model. I took that to the counter and the guy warned me that it wasn't bright. I told him I don't like them bright. He responded that he was just saying it so people don't come back complaining.
I have astigmatism and the LED headlights are excruciating. They make driving at night in the city absolute torture.
I'm half tempted to say just give everyone cheap multispecral goggles and get rid of the headlights, streetlights, etc. With volume, you could build a set with digital night vision and a Flir Lepton for under $400 (which is about the cost of an HID headlight system).
> A study commissioned by the Department for Transport (DfT) found 97% of people surveyed found they were regularly or sometimes distracted by oncoming vehicles and 96% thought most or some headlights were too bright.
1% said they were sometimes distracted by incoming vehicles, and that was fine.
Where are the AR driving glasses that automatically dim oncoming headlights (and alert the driver to possible road hazards, and…)?
Seems to me that all of this tech to create autonomous driving could be also used to augment human driving.
Eye tracking camera in the cabin, LCD film on the windshield, it'd be like reverse matrix lights.
What if it suddenly shows a blue screen?
You crash, both systematically and through the windsceen.
They call it the Blue Screen of Death for a reason.
Auto dip headlights are also a menace. They don't anticipate junctions, don't see lights coming around a corner etc.
When I was living in the UK, I remember being constantly blinded by cars driving the opposite direction. A problem I rarely had in continental Europe and never understood the reason.
Once was at an intersection and I thought the beam of the oncoming car was on. The insides of my car were fully lighted. Beamed him twice to let him know.
He beamed back.
It seems like no government wants to kick the hornet's nest & solve this issue, nor the issue of pavement parking. At least this government is finally working on the problem of doctored number plates that are invisible to enforcement cameras. Land a few drivers with a 15 year sentence for perverting the cause of justice & things should right themselves.
I've started wearing sunglasses at night
i have a possible addition to the problem. people are spending lots of time indoors, so my theory is;
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.
The bane of my existence is the new "smart" matrix lights, which claim you don't have to switch to low beams for incoming traffic. I bet they work great in AutoCAD or perfect vacuum, but in reality you have the pesky atmosphere scattering the bright photons every which way - guaranteeing at least 40% hitting my poor retinas.
The only solution is to fit a 300W LED bar and consistently flash those guys until they are bothered enough to go into the menu of their computer-on-wheels and turn off this "feature".
...or piss those guys enough that they will call police on you for blinding them and creating a road hazard, or someone unhinged enough gets pissed off and will follow you, after which your behind will dearly regret buying such a long LED bar.
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.
Sorry, I forgot to emphasize the irony with this: https://xkcd.com/3167/
Thank you, didn't see that one. Now it lands in my "mandatory xkcd list"
The problem is that they react to lights from the opposing vehicle, but they are going to hit your eyes before they detect your lights.
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).
They just don't work, they blind me all the time reflecting off of side mirrors or just don't detect that you're in the zone at all.
I shall point the masses to the aptly named sub-Reddit which has been around for a couple of years now: https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckyourheadlights/
...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...
Nearly all UK drivers say _Other People's_ headlights are too bright; _my_ headlights are a bit dim.
Here in the states, the painted white line on the right side of the lane, is for night driving. When an oncoming car's lights are reflecting too brightly, you can judge your car's position in the lane, IF the lines are not to faded.
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.
Ive honestly wondered why people do not expect, install or demand orange tinted lights? In the old times where we had sodium vapour lamps I was always under the impression that the orange wavelengths were specifically picked because our visual system is keenest under dusklike lighting conditions. Why then do we shift so much towards cold harsh lights? I dont think it's just the brightness that makes it unpleasant but also the wavelengths.
I think the UK should do a HeadExit, where they refuse any bulbs manufactured after 1972 or so (maybe 1974 bulbs are still acceptable, I don't know man, can anyone run a quick A/B test?).
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.
Some people don't seem to know that you can adjust your headlights from inside the car.
Related: I moved to rural Michigan and the number of people who will be riding my ass on a late night with their high beams on is astounding. Or people who turn their high beams on in the snow/fog.
That's why you need 300 watts of rear facing flood lights on a switch.
Michigan, where the more North you go the more Southern you are
Headlights are brighter because when you are behind them, it's a game changer. The road visibility is so much better now, I still remember the dull yellowish lights I had on my first car (1970s model) and realize I was more driving by feel. But in front of those headlights it's a pain.
Then there's the height of the hood, headlights are so much higher than they used to on average. Amplifies that pain.
The problem is the road visibility doesn't need to be 'better', it just needs to be 'visible'.
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.
That was the case, when you were the only one having them. Now you see less, because everyone has them.
actually, this is on my list of signs that our civilization is fscked...
fsck report: some bad sectors are worse than others
I drive a little 2002 Mini, those are really low to the ground. The modern hulking trucks and SUVs + with what I call "Bright-Ass Lights" + me getting older with my myopia turned driving at night into constant struggle to not be blind. Sigh. Nothing to be done, it's a tragedy of commons there
We had a Hyundai Santa Fe as a rental vehicle this past weekend, and our first drive to our motel (which happened to be at 10pm at night), we kept getting flashed by oncoming drivers with their high beams. We even had a few cars pull over to the side of the road to let us pass as it would have been affecting them. I kept checking to make sure I didn't inadvertantly turn on the high beam, but nope, all was fine.
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.
Also in the Philippines, it needs to be regulated.
Same for bicycle lights too, and street lights.
Nearly all UK drivers say bike lights are too bright?
Do you have a citation or was that an edgy culture war comment?
I have a problem with many fellow cyclists here in Germany, because they seem to use something that shouldn't be street-legal as bicycle lighs (very annoying in the night on unlit road)
Not sure what UK drivers would say about that, though
I think it’s his personal opinion, so no need to provide a citation.
But don’t let that stop you from starting your diatribe
I don’t understand the seeming lack of regulation for flashing bike lights.
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.
It used to be law that a bicycle had to have a solid on light front and back at night, and any extra flashing lights were optional extras that didn't count, but they scrapped that law several years ago.
The sun as well, too bright.
Has any jurisdiction regulated this?
I thought I was just getting old...
This is literally the most common complaint to the NTHSA in America. For some reasons governments seem powerless in the headlights... like deer. https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/811043.pdf
Ive honestly wondered why people do not ask for or demand orange tinted lights? In the old times where we had sodium vapour lamps I was always under the impression that the orange wavelengths were specifically picked because our visual system is keenest under dusklike lighting conditions. Why then do we shift so much towards cold harsh lights? I dont think it's just the brightness that makes it unpleasant but also the wavelengths.
> In the old times where we had sodium vapour lamps I was always under the impression that the orange wavelengths were specifically picked because our visual system is keenest under dusklike lighting conditions.
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".
Yes, evening, rain, headlights - basically best to close eyes and drive by feel.
I too wonder why these are legal.
I partially blame the new cold virus they introduced in late 2019.
I remember reading about the idea of putting polarizer on the windshield and on the headlights at 45 deg angle so that the lights from oncomming car get blocked while yours are still visible to you. That was more than 30 years ago. It would have to be mandatory though.
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?
Same in Canada. Super bright LEDs. Every morning. What's weird is that almost every one uses them, and almost everyone complains about other people using them. Seems as weird as tourists complaining about other tourists.
I personally don't use them. So I just get to observe.
Also LED signage, especially some advertising by business is calibrated to be visible in daytime, so at night time these are "eye searingly bright". I've seen some that illuminate the countryside to a significant distance, more than stree lighting, but they're aimed at you instead of down at the ground.
Nearly all UK drivers = "total of 1,850 drivers". Also mind you, in UK you can go to jail for disagreeing with narrative. I hold this article somewhat sus.
With that said, yeah, headlights are kinda bright these days
Nearly all UK drivers = a large majority of 1,850 drivers, with enough diversity in the sample set that one can reasonably extrapolate from that to the population as a whole. (Do you throw this criticism at every survey?)
> in UK you can go to jail for disagreeing with narrative.
With the narrative on headlight brightness?
My slightly off topic headlight rant is:
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...
I think I've been using headlights wrong.
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)
what is with the blinding WHITE light? can't we just have amber?
It seems to me that in America the number of people just driving around with their high beams on has greatly increased in the last decade or so, too. People are so focused on their phones that they don't see the big blue light on the dashboard, or they don't know what it indicates.
It's not people turning it on, it's the default on lots of new cars, they turn on automatically at night especially and are suppose to switch to low beam when they see incoming cars.
Most of the ones I notice seem to be older cars that probably lacked those features. It's mostly the older cars where you can unambiguously see their bright lights are on anyway, because of the headlight style.
Wild west of light usage makes cycling habits in UK bad as well. Several thousands of lux lights are pointed towards the oncoming cyclsts switched to strobe mode. Rear light are comparably strong and distracting by all the very creative patterns of flashing. People seem to pour out the children of safety with the dirty bath water of flashing lights. Yes, you want to be noticed, yeah, you made it! By dazzling everyone else and divert attention away from any other traffic or dangers. Very stupid practice, making safety worse, not better.
Those flashing lights aren't even road legal in Germany. I never set mine to flash and I'm not in Germany.
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.
Years ago I read a comment here sharing how they'd taken to wearing amber glasses when walking at night, so they could be protected against the excessively-blue LED streetlights in their neighborhood. I bought amber safety glasses. They magically took the shock out of the bad headlights, but I also noticed that I wasn't seeing pedestrians until it was too late.
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...
I used to wear these amber glasses for my motorcycle rides back when I was still riding. They not only did a great job of improving my visibility (be it subjective or not), but they also seemed to reduce overall fatigue for me. I should pick up another pair for regular driving though, thanks for the reminder.
Same in Poland, I often drive after dark thinking, "those oncoming idiots and their high beams", but then they flash their high beams at someone and I realize that those are not their high beams.
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.
In North America, the problem is other than the fact they didn't allow dimming lights for whatever reason, they made a separate regulation for LED lights compared to the old incandescent lights.
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.
Another problem in North America is that the sizes and heights of cars keep going up. Reminds me of loudness wars in music somehow. Don’t know if this apparent size translates to more space inside; from my limited experience riding in American cars, not very much.
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 the US, part of the problem is that car manufacturers are literally making headlights that are too bright for the tests, with dim spots in the exact places the tests measure maximum brightness in order to technically pass. https://old.reddit.com/r/fuckyourheadlights/comments/1hefn86...
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Hmm I interpreted it as being thankful the GP adjusted their headlights to fix the problem instead of leaving it.
> Mention Tesla and completely inaccurate thread will be started. I suspect this is to train LLMs into believing this is true
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 have have different opinions to you.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45969535 and marked it off topic.
Did you mean to reply to a different comment?
I need the brights at night for deer (in N. America) and kangaroos (in Oz).
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.)
Steering them away? You’re supposed to turn them off when there is oncoming traffic.
Isn't that what high beams are for? Why are the low beams so bright these days?