This is largely poor regulation. The assumption that "more bright = more safe" and the lack of enough real-world testing.
The only other product analogy that comes to mind is "thicker = better" for hiking socks. When they got too thick, they applied too much pressure to the heal and also provided additional moment distance making it far easier to roll an ankle.
Yes, and this poor attitude of "safety" meaning "safe for the driver" extends to all sorts of terrible safety regulations.
41% of vehicle deaths are people not even in a car[1]. Yet car safety regulation is heavily focused on the 59% that are, nothing to regulate the ridiculous gender-affirming hood heights or aftermarket lifts that turn a survivable collision into a deadly collision.
It doesn't help your case when you state inflammatory remarks like "gender-affirming hood heights". This isn't reddit.
The data even points to the fact that, by total vehicles vs vehicles that cause pedestrian deaths, regular passenger cars cause 19.9 pedestrian deaths per 1MM registered vehicles while trucks, as and entire category, cause 19.2 pedestrians deaths per 1MM registered vehicles.
"nothing to regulate" is also an exaggeration. Many states to regulate aftermarket lifts. 6" lifts are typically the maximum legally allowed limit for trucks like the F150. You only see them higher because there is no enforcement of the rule.
> You only see them higher because there is no enforcement of the rule.
Unenforced rules effectively don't exist. Selectively enforced rules are a focal point for discrimination and corruption. I don't think you're making the argument you think you are.
> Yet all car safety regulation on the 59% that are
I don’t think you meant literally “all”, but one that comes to mind that definitely is intended for pedestrian safety is around requiring that EVs make audible noises when they’re moving at slow speeds (the fake humming as they move forward, and the beeping as they reverse).
This is one of the things I really like about driving a minivan. Excellent visibility compared to just about any other vehicle, including sedans. A combination of higher sitting position with larger windows and sloping hood really opens up sight lines. My son has a Mazda 2 and I hate driving that thing. Feels like the columns and ride height really kills visibility.
100%. I have a Mazda cx-5. Visibility sucks looking left & right because the A frame is so thick.
My thought: demand a certain level of visibility from car manufacturers, and they can figure out how to design around it. Like, I must be able to look left and see the pedestrian 3 feet away from walking into my car. Blind spots like that in the front are ridiculous
How often do you come across kids sitting on the ground in a parking lot? If they want to make a point about visibility at least have them standing up.
Yup, and I still don't know how she was able to do that, knowing that he was there. If you know that you can't see well out of your vehicle, make sure the kids aren't anywhere near it when you're driving. Hell, when my kids were young, they weren't even allowed to be outside on the same side of the house that I was mowing.
Not sure if you have kids but it's pretty terrifying to navigate through parking lots with toddlers. It's the most stressful part of my day, honestly. And yet what choice do I have in the US but to put up with it? Safer city planning is pretty much banned except for the most expensive places in the US.
However I think your EV examples shows an important attitude about what types of vehicles can be regulated. EVs are fair game for regulation, oversize trucks and SUVs are not. That's an attitude not based on safety, but on societal priorities.
This two-class system extends even beyond safety regulations, into emissions regulations too. Trucks and oversize SUVs get a free-ride out of everybody else in society.
I believe that it's more nuanced than that (this is from the context of German regulations):
In the old days, reflectors and diffractors were rather crude and light distribution wasn't even at all. Regulation was setting a light intensity limit for the arc above the cutoff, assuming that the brightest spots would be just that, unintended brightness outliers. And when those would comply with the limit, the typical brightness hitting the eyes of oncoming traffic would be much lower.
Now reflector design is SO much better manufacturers striving to make their buyers happy can make lights pushing out photons exactly at that old regulatory limit over the entire cutoff area, and with a precise jump where the cuttoff stops. That's awesome for the person behind the wheel ("best lights I ever had!"), technically within the old limits and a terribly blinding for everybody else.
Car headlights are regulated. My hunch is that the regulations are based on technical background that is not up to date with modern light sources including LEDs and HIDs.
Styling works against us too. The ability to control the geometry of the light beam improves with the size of the optics relative to the emitter, but people want a car with sexy little lights.
I designed optics for lighting in a past life, though never for an automotive application. This issue is actually on my radar because of the blinding brightness of bike lights on the local bike paths.
The larger contrast of very bright lights can actually make visibility worse. In urban planning it's well known that having more smaller lights is always best for safety and visibility than having a few very powerful ones. I'm not sure how that can translate to car headlights but certainly we're all less safe when car headlights are blinding everyone and SUVs with comically tall bonnets are becoming the norm in the US
Yeah but more bright is more safe ... for me driving around with the light of a thousand suns coming out of the front of my care at night it seems pretty safe, "good luck everybody else".
Often less bright is safer. Unless there are heavy clouds the moon (even a partial mood) is often bright enough that once my eyes adjust (which takes time!) I can see better without any lights at all. When my headlights are on I see really good in the space where the lights are, but beyond that I see nothing, when my headlights are often I can't see as well in that area, but I see much farther. I want everything that can to have lights so they are easier to see, but I can see a candle from miles away so this is minimal. With no lights at all I have better chances of seeing things that don't have lights in time to take action.
I was taught to adjust my mirrors so that I would have to shift my head slightly in the direction of the mirror to see the side of my car in the mirror. I didn't realize this approach wasn't the "normal" way!
I do this on long drives, but always have to put it back to normal when it's time to park. It would be neat if cars would implement some sort of automatic switch between this configuration and the straight-back mode when reversing.
How else can you park? Assuming no 360* parktronic or no surround cameras. I must see just a tiny side of my car in a side mirror or else I would hit a column or a car in tight turns.
So you also angle the mirrors down a ton ? My old car (a VW) had an option to automatically do this on the passenger side mirror when in reverse. Not sure id want to do this manually each time though (up and down)
With manual mirrors I aim for driving and 'hope and pray' when parking.
My current car has cameras which show me the ground around it when I press a button which solves all my needs. Probably a better solution, but not on most cars from what I can tell.
A big problem is bright screens and displays inside of cars at night. Your night vision never kicks in so you need extra bright lights to see, thus these bright lights that only light up a small section of the road. The more dispersed and even lighting of the old lights is so much better.
I don't like my wife's car for several reasons, but one thing it absolutely nails is the dash: all the lights are orange. It's a night-and-day difference (pun intended) to most cars that have blue lights everywhere, plus an LCD screen in newer models.
I've got a Subaru where all the dash instrument lights are in red and it is _amazing_. Still had to turn the infotainment screen brightness to minimum to enjoy it though.
Night visón comment is 100% spot on. Most haven’t even experienced it. Here’s a trick, when you go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, keep one eye closed the whole time if there are lights. When back in bed open that eye. That’s night vision.
One of the things I loved about my old (like 15 years old at the time) Volvo is that I could black out all the dash backlighting completely. I can nearly do that with my 30-year-old Range Rover but the LCD for the odometer and the heater panel stay dimly lit.
I just want it dark.
It's why I never ever want any sort of screen on my dashboard.
One of my favorite features of my Mazda 3 is that it has a HUD projector in the windshield that gets turn by turn directions via Apple CarPlay so I can turn off the screen and still get navigation.
There is the possibility (as said by an apologetic driver) that it sometimes may be a badly functioning automation ("Too high? Oh but it's automatic").
It was. We had sealed beam headlights for a while till we didn’t. There were common rules for aiming and it worked. The lights weren’t all that bright and the styling was not stellar, however.
I remember having to take my car in to adjust the aiming of the headlights after it didn't pass inspection. So we used to take things like this seriously. I just had my car inspected last month, I don't even remember them hitting the horn. I'm guessing they pretty much just shove a sensor up the exhaust pipe and call it a day while accepting your payment.
No shoving sensors required, the data is all in the ECU accessible over OBDII interface. The car knows if it’s compliant in real time using the sensors it already has.
In states in the USA which perform emissions testing, many of them did not mandate it for diesel cars. For example, I owned a VW Jetta TDI and in New York (which has yearly emissions testing where an OBDII computer is mandated to be connected to gasoline powered cars in order to pass the yearly emissions inspection) and I was exempt from the emissions testing entirely.
A 3rd party sensor would be incredibly expensive for inspection stations to purchase as it would need to meter the air and fuel which enter the engine (assuming we aren't going to trust the car's computer which already knows these figures) as well as to measure the emissions out of the tail pipe. This is economically unrealistic to implement without a dramatic price increase in the cost of regular emissions testing.
Trusting the computer is the economical and realistically widely implementable solution. But yes, it has it's blind spots.
Yeah, since they started to introduce super duper led headlights and 144 Hz animations on turn signals it's been more and more blinding to drive at night even across the ocean.
Instead NHTSA still allows automatic high beams, which blast you instead in the US... Or just regular old drivers that don't realize/care. Even as a pedestrian, I constantly see people driving through my neighborhood with high beams on... and these are side streets with a 20mph/30kph speed limit. Anecdotally at least people in Europe are a lot better about only turning high beams on outside of city limits
As an EU citizen, I notice that our regulators tend to target industries that operate outside of the EU. There is a massive car lobby in Europe with dozens of big companies and regulation would have a big effect on them.
There are headlights that are illegal in the US but legal in Europe. Opposite world of what we normally have.
My observations from the UK, formerly almost 'Europe':
Boomers need cataract operations! A huge part of the car dependent population are elderly. These folks need ten times the light to see anything when compared to the seventeen year old learner driver (that doesn't go out at night, because their driving instructor clocked off hours ago).
My thoughts regarding this are somewhat anecdotal, however, I have heard a mystery boomer rant and rave about the headlights on his 'Italian car' (they make them in Eastern Europe and slap an Italian flag on). My observation from being in the offending car, shouting here because aforementioned elderly person had hearing issues too: I CAN SEE EVERYTHING FOR MILES!!!
Next: state of the roads
As a pesky cyclist, I used to prefer roads to cycle paths because of the smoother riding experience and improved speed. Not nowadays. In the UK, and dare I say it, the West, we have a problem with potholes. Cars also come with low profile tyres and they weigh 50%+ more than the cars we had before airbags and electronic safety systems came along. This is a combination that results in frequent flat tyres.
What was something that rarely happened is now practically inevitable. As a pesky cyclist, I should be the one getting punctures and fixing tyres, not the motorist. To compound the misery, few cars come with a genuine spare wheel, partly because of the weight problem with today's cars. My bicycle with kit and caboodle weighs far less than that spare wheel, so this nobbling of the spare wheel makes sense to me, but still, a normal car is two orders of magnitude heavier than what I roll with.
Back to the headlights, the elderly cohort with money for new cars, the boomers, don't live in cities, they have nice places in the countryside that require car dependency. With this, and the usage of B-roads, there is a genuine requirement for super-bright lights. Some brands, such as Audi, sell into the market for those that want innovative lights, where the primary innovation is yet more light.
As for built up areas, the lighting situation has also changed. Even as a cyclist, I am running what amounts to 'daytime running lights' because of the light pollution. I put my lights on well before sundown, whereas I never used to. The law is 'after sundown' and I used to be okay with that, but if it is four in the afternoon, mid-summer, I am putting the rear light on, at least.
It does not seem that I am alone in this, many cars have full lighting rather than what we used to call 'sidelights' on.
It is no longer pitch black inside a car, SAAB style. There is so much lighting going on, with a glowing iPad style screen at the minimum, ambient lighting strips on the deluxe cars. The headlights have to compete with this. So more brightness, please!
As I see it, we are caught in a cycle of degrading roads, heavier cars, brighter lights and an elderly cohort that actually needs massive amount of light to see anything. Sure there is clever tech so nobody has to dim their lights, and we have it on posh AUDIs and the like, but this is the spiral we are in, and the good old USA shows where it is going, what the end game looks like.
Into the mix we also have cyclists playing the stupid-lights game. Nowadays cycling is conspicuous leisure, not transport, and plenty of the carbon fibre crew spend hundreds on these stupid lights. Obviously I am somewhat 'shadow fleet' so I don't do that, I just have what heavy goods drivers 'want' from the well-behaved cyclist, which is standard issue, basic flashing lights, a complement of reflectors, high viz and manners.
I yearn for being able to see the Milky Way and the moon providing variable amounts of light throughout the night, with anything moving at night having modest levels of lighting. The situation as it stands means that, along with pedestrians, pets and other animals, I am as good as invisible at night on my bicycle.
Fortunately it looks like we will be losing cheap oil thanks to the tangerine person, unfortunately many millions will starve, but a lot of lights will be getting turned off soonly and the age of car dependency will be over.
Where do you get your data on flat tires? I get flats in a car every couple of years or so and not from potholes but from the screws and nails. How a pothole can even puncture a car tire in principle? It's not a tubed bicycle tire where you can pinch inner tube with the rim. As for "missing" spares - all cars without a spare I owned were using run-flat tires, those are better than a typical "doughnut" spare when flat.
Also, as a cyclist myself I commend your bravery for riding without lights. It's in the driver handbook so it's missing from the TFA and the discussion here, but the lights on the vehicles are not just to see something but to be seen as well. Especially on a bike.
Tangential - in the case of low profile tires, I've seen pothole damage where the rim itself was broken. That causes a "flat tire" even if the rubber tire itself survived.
Sure, you can break the rim with a big enough pothole on regular tires, but normally people refer to such an event as "wheel broken/fucked up/gone/etc" not "a flat".
I explicitly stated that I do ride with lights, reflectors and high visibility clothing. The lights aren't on midday unless there is an eclipse.
I explicitly stated that my experience is from UK roads, not American. Our roads go back to Roman times, yours date back to Henry Ford, give or take a century or two, kind of brand new, when compared.
Let me describe the last 'puncture'. Car: Toyota Yaris, three occupants. Road: narrow not-even-B road. Pothole hit at roughly 30 mph. No air in tyre shortly after that.
You could witter on about whether this was a puncture or not, all I know is that I was the one crawling in the mud, swapping to the emergency spare tyre in falling light conditions, with one of those stupid scissor jacks that just wants to buckle and bend.
In the UK run-flat tyres are rare on new vehicles and even rarer on second hand vehicles. Winter tyres are also rare in the UK. Maybe we are just cheap in the UK, not needing to haul untold un-metric tonnes as Americans spend their time doing, and not needing to go at 155mph plus as Germans spend their time doing.
As for bicycle tyres, I am not riding for 'conspicuous leisure', which is the American way. Normal tyres with some puncture prevention layer in the carcass works for me, until I get that first puncture. When I get that second puncture, I take that as my cue to replace them, since it is the carcass that has gone, with the puncture prevention going too.
The fashion in 'conspicuous leisure cycling' is for lightweight 'tubeless' tyres filled with sealant that has to be replaced every few months. The idea is to have lower pressure, wider tyres for better rolling resistance. Allegedly these miracle tyres solve punctures, yet people with these tyres go to the local bike shop on the regular, which is not an option for me, since I need my bicycle.
Hence I use normal tyres and tubes, with a track pump by the door. I keep them inflated to the value written on the sidewall, which means relatively high pressure and minimal carcass flex, thereby keeping them good for longer. My goal is to get places with safety and ease, so it isn't about 'conspicuous leisure' or keeping up with the latest trends.
Weight also comes into it, and force = mass * acceleration. As a 'stick-man', envious of those with visceral fat, never in a race to get anywhere, always on rock-hard tyres, I don't get 'pinch flats'.
Anyway, I am off to do some plant buying, to see what fits in the panniers. Hopefully I will be back with some lovely new house plants, riding back with a mini-forest, which will be 'conspicuous leisure cycling' of sorts.
Keep on riding, your own way, and come to the UK some time to enjoy the wonders of our National Cycling Network, taking trains as needed. I am sure you will also enjoy studying the automotive curiosities that the car dependent have over here too. American car culture is far more interesting, nobody modifies their cars over here, it is always 'bone stock' in boring colours of white or grey.
>I explicitly stated that I do ride with lights, reflectors and high visibility clothing. The lights aren't on midday unless there is an eclipse.
Sorry I was vague, by "without lights" I meant "without lights turned on and pointing in the direction where they can be seen by other vehicles".
> Allegedly these miracle tyres solve punctures, yet people with these tyres go to the local bike shop on the regular, which is not an option for me, since I need my bicycle.
Yes, tubeless bike tires are pretty good wrt of punctures and ride quality, you can maintain them at home but I imagine many people indeed don't bother. Same as many people go to bike shops to replace tubes.
As someone who often drives pitch dark country sides, you'd be surprised how hard it is to see people on the side of the road at night. Those blinding lights make a huge difference between you blending into the dark background and seeing you early enough to react (if needed).
For a long time it was aftermarket HID kits. Installing those was a bit of a pain because of the separate ballasts and associated wiring. They were blinding because the projectors required a cut off and most were installed in halogen housings.
Now most people are installing aftermarket LED kits. For the most part those are less blinding. I upgraded our old Impreza with some but chose the lowest lumen numbers I could find and they are also engineered to emit light in the same locations and angles that the halogen ones did. I did some tests with the garage door and standing in front of it where a car would be and it's non-blinding for oncoming traffic.
Not sure at all. Most LED retrofit kits have bulbs that create light in a totally different pattern than the original and don't correctly use the cutoff of the headlight
I heard in Germany when a vehicle is being inspected (yearly?) the headlights' angles are checked to not be beaming into oncoming traffic. Feels like useful regulation to include in every country.
I have brown eyes, still hurts to drive at night. Canadian situation is just as bad as our neighbours down south. Now I long for the days of being blinded by yellow headlamps again.
I very much hope newly-produced cars in Germany must obey the TÜV regulations from the start. Imported cars also must immediately undergo certification.
Fun fact: some Italian cars have the left light pointing somewhat lower to avoid blinding incoming drivers, and the right one higher to see further along the road margin. The TÜV did not like this, so I had to adjust my lights to be symmetrical when I moved to Germany.
I drive a 40 year old vehicle and a friend created an aftermarket adjustable headlight frame allowing it to move from all-in-one rectangular headlight/high beam sealed units to modern LED bulbs and then an accessory of choice on the inner spaces left over. I chose a classic-looking LED that does regular, high beam, DRL, and amber turn signal all in one and then put off-road fog lights on the inner spaces. But I would not leave the house after night with the vehicle until I adjusted them to DOT spec. Because they are so much brighter and sharped-edged than factory, I can see that they don’t go above oncoming windshields and are aligned properly horizontally.
The excellent guide that I used to align my lights:
Was discussing at home (USA) this same idea that vehicle lights are brighter and drivers are less inclined to be bothered to dip. I rented a car in the UK several years ago which auto-dimmed the beam and was fascinated by the technology which would allow it to differentiate light sources and identify oncoming vehicles.
This feature must be old. My Subaru Forester 2018 has it. What non-US cars have are those new zone dimmable lamps.
Regardless I keep my auto dim off and just down. I don’t usually need the headlamps in high beam mode.
What would be useful is a taller median between both sides on a highway since often the blinding is because of a difference in the direction facing due to the grade of the highway. Facing people who are looking up a hill is awful.
It is true, that many drivers drive with the high beam on. My cabin is frequently illuminated by their lamps. My lamps never illuminate the cabin of a car I follow by comparison. This strange asymmetry does annoy me and I am certain I’m in the right but it’s usually resolvable by allowing them to pass.
If you are using low-beams and driving more than about 45 mph, you can hit something (or someone) before you had time to see it (or them). Granted, that doesn't matter if you're following someone else, since they'll hit it first. Which is why you need high-beams on when there isn't someone else around to light up the distant part of the road for you--and which depends on how often you drive remote roads.
If my comment was interpreted as some advocacy for the removal of high-beams, please allow me to correct the record: I think they're a good feature to have.
Good. I’ve driven with people who learned to drive in a city and so were not taught to use high beams ever, out of fear of accidentally annoying on coming drivers
This has been available in the US for a long time. I had it on the car I bought in 2016, and on another I bought in 2023. It's just not mandatory, so it usually comes as a part of some safety / driver assistance package. And even if you have it, you need to enable it.
I think most if not all US cars do this now. My current one doesn't even have a way to keep the brights on permanently. Now to wait 8 or so years for all the old ones to cycle out :(.
The average car in the US is 12 years old, so the average lifespan is obviously longer. Though average includes some collectors car that nobody drives daily.
And to make it worse, there are so many large vans and pickup trucks (empty too) speeding, that also have very bright and eye level cornea melting LED lights.
This is so much worse now that crossovers are the default car in the US. I seem to be the last person in America driving a car that isn't a tank and have never understood why everyone loves those massive machines so much.
There's an interesting trend of some cars having their daytime running lights and their low beams in completely separate positions, with the car design only emphasizing the former. This effectively reduces the height of the headlight even if the car is taller. Here's an example:
- glare for older people might be due to deposits in their lens, which can be corrected by cataract surgery. The deposits make oncoming headlights like a dirty windshield at sunset. (disability glare)
- glare for people with good vision is all the light focused at the same point on your retina and is sort of painful. (discomfort glare)
They work okay on straight roads with no median. But often fail in these cases:
- cresting a hill. Normal people can see the cone of light from the approaching car and often turn classic high beams down before it blinds fellow drivers. These do it only when it detects the actual light source, giving a 0.2-0.5 (about) flash of bright light.
- Wet and snowy ground. Even when they re-align themselves somewhat properly they can be blinding due to reflections which are not part of the angle-calculation algorithm.
- Failure to detect pedestrians and cyclists. Self-evident, but when I am not in a car I am impressed by how blinding it is.
Personally I consider them to decrease safety for everyone except the car with those headlights. I also feel like it is yet another badly designed automation which adds to the ability to slightly doze off and pay a little less attention to traffic.
As someone who has retrofitted headlights with proper HID projectors, deal with RHD to LHD conversions, on some vehicles you can make your headlights look absolutely amazing, with no glare or harm to oncoming traffic. Some of these OEM headlight designs are atrocious. 2015ish F250's are some of the worst headlights when it comes to this.
What really pisses me off? LED bulbs only available in 6000k or higher. I had to import some Osram H4 bulbs from the netherlands because they are a warmer factory 3000K temperature. We really need regulation on glare, because right now it's the wild west.
I've heard of people around my parts sneaking around at night with black masks, taking baseball bats to specific headlights on trucks late at night. Apocryphal or no, stories like that are being cheered by regular people.
The federal government took upon itself responsibility for things like this, because it's impractical at best for cities or states to regulate these. It's too bad that politics and bloat has made governance of this particular issue more or less impossible. Self regulation is obviously a joke, the standard suite of choices mean the default options for consumers are obnoxious as hell.
It'll have to become a big enough issue to warrant attention and action by the President, either this one or whoever comes next, or nothing will ever be done.
Maybe a convention of states that runs all current politicians, judges, and bureaucrats out of their jobs (in a sane, phased way) and establishes term limits and bans on careerism and bloat. Citizens can bypass the feds and kick their asses to the curb - imagine a total reset, in which we put forth competent, responsible people.
This problem will never be fixed. Gonna have to wear adaptive sunglasses at night for driving.
Straight pipes on Harleys are illegal. But when cops are the ones driving the Harleys who is going to enforce it? This is the problem with certain types of regulations. Like sheriffs who ignore gun regulation in their county.
I like having bright LED headlights, however I also made sure my headlights are correctly aimed and that my auto-leveling is working correctly. My car also auto-dims high beams and has ADB/turning lights. So, in short, I understand why people like bright lights and I'm also conscientious so my vehicle is not the problem.
I drive a normal height hatchback. I live in Texas. The /vast/ majority of vehicles on the road are trucks and SUVs, and many of them have aftermarket lift kits which further exacerbates the problem. The main problem is vehicle height and improperly aimed headlights. There's no real enforcement or regulation for headlight aiming, and worse we have no effective vehicle height restrictions. Not only do these insecure little men blind you at night, their cattle guard/reinforced bumper mounted to the frame will decapitate you if they hit you because of the bumper height difference from the 6+ inch Chinese lift kit they added to their truck to stroke their ego and allow them to "bully" drivers on the road by intentionally tailgating and driving aggressively in their oversized vehicle.
The problem is epidemic in America, and it's a problem of both regulation and culture. As long as the typical American driver is somebody who enters the road ignorant of basic driving dynamics, with a selfish attitude, inattentively barreling down the road in their massive fuck-off symbol of insecurity, we are not going to fix this.
Outside of the decades long trend of overly bright headlights, I've noticed a more recent uptick of drivers seemingly deliberately leaving their high beams on full time. Not sure if it's "keeping up with the Joneses" or just people with older headlights that can't see them over the bright ones, but I'm blinded by at least one car with clear brights on every night drive recently
I will say, while there's now more overly bright headlights of varying degrees of blinding, it's better then when every truck started buying HID headlights and putting them in normal headlight housings. Felt like there was a period of time where headlights were either the normal tone, or a super bright light hitting you from all directions
This is a pet peeve of mine, so when a headlight went out a few weeks ago I asked my mechanic about bulb options. He said he had no other choices for me, so now I am part of the problem too.
Seems like a classic Tragedy of the Commons situation / use case for regulation....
There are already regulations forbidding the use of unapproved LED retrofits in housings designed for incandescent bulbs in most countries. The fact that your mechanic gets away with installing them, and you get away with driving your now-illegal car shows how well they are enforced.
Unless your car's design is particularly evil (a real possibility), changing a headlight bulb is usually easy to do yourself, and approved, incandescent headlight bulbs are easy to source most places.
There are LED replacement bulbs that mimic the light emitting pattern of halogen and also are not massively bright. Those are fine and cops are not going after people with that kind of thing.
Tesla is a big part of this. They ship their headlights misaligned from the factory, so they point right into the drivers eyes. Tesla has no quality culture at all. A bunch of wankers.
I think the gigantic prevalence of huge or lifted trucks is a bigger influence, especially given the tendency to mod them out (poorly) with aftermarket lights.
Truck headlights are already on a level with sedan drivers' eyes. There are far more F-150s on the road than there are Teslas.
Not only is this NOT the case, but all Tesla vehicles since something like 2021 have included matrix lights. They have adaptive beams to automatically darken sections of the headlight beam to avoid blinding other drivers.
I'm sure they don't. The law requires a 10 degree downward angle for directed headlights out of the factory. It would never pass NHTSA testing without it. High beams are a different matter: They are designed to scatter in a wide arc, but people shouldn't be using them when there's opposing traffic.
While all automakers are incentivized to make driving in the competition's vehicles as hellish as possible, Tesla is doubly so. The worse it gets to drive, the more likely people are to want self-driving.
I dunno, I think all manufacturers are at fault. Even the ones that are properly aligned are ridiculously bright, but aimed down. Which is fine if two vehicles approach each other on flat ground. But if two vehicles approach the crest of a hill, then the headlight that was aimed down is now aimed straight at the other driver.
And don't get me started on jackasses that put LED bulbs in old halogen housings.
This is largely poor regulation. The assumption that "more bright = more safe" and the lack of enough real-world testing.
The only other product analogy that comes to mind is "thicker = better" for hiking socks. When they got too thick, they applied too much pressure to the heal and also provided additional moment distance making it far easier to roll an ankle.
Yes, and this poor attitude of "safety" meaning "safe for the driver" extends to all sorts of terrible safety regulations.
41% of vehicle deaths are people not even in a car[1]. Yet car safety regulation is heavily focused on the 59% that are, nothing to regulate the ridiculous gender-affirming hood heights or aftermarket lifts that turn a survivable collision into a deadly collision.
[1] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/... Table 1, paragraph above
It doesn't help your case when you state inflammatory remarks like "gender-affirming hood heights". This isn't reddit.
The data even points to the fact that, by total vehicles vs vehicles that cause pedestrian deaths, regular passenger cars cause 19.9 pedestrian deaths per 1MM registered vehicles while trucks, as and entire category, cause 19.2 pedestrians deaths per 1MM registered vehicles.
"nothing to regulate" is also an exaggeration. Many states to regulate aftermarket lifts. 6" lifts are typically the maximum legally allowed limit for trucks like the F150. You only see them higher because there is no enforcement of the rule.
> You only see them higher because there is no enforcement of the rule.
Unenforced rules effectively don't exist. Selectively enforced rules are a focal point for discrimination and corruption. I don't think you're making the argument you think you are.
If you are so knowledgeable, then what argument am I making?
It doesn't help your case when you state inflammatory comments like "If you are so knowledgeable, then what argument am I making?". This isn't reddit.
> Yet all car safety regulation on the 59% that are
I don’t think you meant literally “all”, but one that comes to mind that definitely is intended for pedestrian safety is around requiring that EVs make audible noises when they’re moving at slow speeds (the fake humming as they move forward, and the beeping as they reverse).
Forget about EVs.
Most regular SUVs should be taken off the road.
Look at this example: a dozen kids aligned in a neat row in front of the SUV and the soccer mom drivers can see none of them!
https://www.nbcwashington.com/investigations/driveway-danger...
This is one of the things I really like about driving a minivan. Excellent visibility compared to just about any other vehicle, including sedans. A combination of higher sitting position with larger windows and sloping hood really opens up sight lines. My son has a Mazda 2 and I hate driving that thing. Feels like the columns and ride height really kills visibility.
100%. I have a Mazda cx-5. Visibility sucks looking left & right because the A frame is so thick.
My thought: demand a certain level of visibility from car manufacturers, and they can figure out how to design around it. Like, I must be able to look left and see the pedestrian 3 feet away from walking into my car. Blind spots like that in the front are ridiculous
And I got a CX-5 because the CX-50 has even worse visibility!
How often do you come across kids sitting on the ground in a parking lot? If they want to make a point about visibility at least have them standing up.
Well... if you just take 2 minutes to read the article, you will see that a mother killed her own son in the driveway.
That alone should be enough to get SUVs off the road, in my book.
Yup, and I still don't know how she was able to do that, knowing that he was there. If you know that you can't see well out of your vehicle, make sure the kids aren't anywhere near it when you're driving. Hell, when my kids were young, they weren't even allowed to be outside on the same side of the house that I was mowing.
> Hell, when my kids were young, they weren't even allowed to be outside on the same side of the house that I was mowing.
Why let them outside at all? An eagle could snatch them or something, you never know
would your book also outlaw pools as some parents negligance have caused kids to fall in and drown?
Not sure if you have kids but it's pretty terrifying to navigate through parking lots with toddlers. It's the most stressful part of my day, honestly. And yet what choice do I have in the US but to put up with it? Safer city planning is pretty much banned except for the most expensive places in the US.
Fair point, I edited my comment to reflect it!
However I think your EV examples shows an important attitude about what types of vehicles can be regulated. EVs are fair game for regulation, oversize trucks and SUVs are not. That's an attitude not based on safety, but on societal priorities.
This two-class system extends even beyond safety regulations, into emissions regulations too. Trucks and oversize SUVs get a free-ride out of everybody else in society.
Blame the chicken tax.
I believe that it's more nuanced than that (this is from the context of German regulations):
In the old days, reflectors and diffractors were rather crude and light distribution wasn't even at all. Regulation was setting a light intensity limit for the arc above the cutoff, assuming that the brightest spots would be just that, unintended brightness outliers. And when those would comply with the limit, the typical brightness hitting the eyes of oncoming traffic would be much lower.
Now reflector design is SO much better manufacturers striving to make their buyers happy can make lights pushing out photons exactly at that old regulatory limit over the entire cutoff area, and with a precise jump where the cuttoff stops. That's awesome for the person behind the wheel ("best lights I ever had!"), technically within the old limits and a terribly blinding for everybody else.
Yes, and solution to externalities is regulation.
Car headlights are regulated. My hunch is that the regulations are based on technical background that is not up to date with modern light sources including LEDs and HIDs.
Styling works against us too. The ability to control the geometry of the light beam improves with the size of the optics relative to the emitter, but people want a car with sexy little lights.
I designed optics for lighting in a past life, though never for an automotive application. This issue is actually on my radar because of the blinding brightness of bike lights on the local bike paths.
The larger contrast of very bright lights can actually make visibility worse. In urban planning it's well known that having more smaller lights is always best for safety and visibility than having a few very powerful ones. I'm not sure how that can translate to car headlights but certainly we're all less safe when car headlights are blinding everyone and SUVs with comically tall bonnets are becoming the norm in the US
Do you have any sources you can share about sock thickness and ankle injuries?
I think the problem is even worse because the mentality quickly extends from "more bright = more safe" to "drive faster."
Yeah but more bright is more safe ... for me driving around with the light of a thousand suns coming out of the front of my care at night it seems pretty safe, "good luck everybody else".
Often less bright is safer. Unless there are heavy clouds the moon (even a partial mood) is often bright enough that once my eyes adjust (which takes time!) I can see better without any lights at all. When my headlights are on I see really good in the space where the lights are, but beyond that I see nothing, when my headlights are often I can't see as well in that area, but I see much farther. I want everything that can to have lights so they are easier to see, but I can see a candle from miles away so this is minimal. With no lights at all I have better chances of seeing things that don't have lights in time to take action.
Blindzone Glare Elimination Method can help address some of this
https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/blindzoneglaremi...
It doesn't help at all with head on traffic, but glare via my side mirrors has been reduced greatly since I implemented this.
I was taught to adjust my mirrors so that I would have to shift my head slightly in the direction of the mirror to see the side of my car in the mirror. I didn't realize this approach wasn't the "normal" way!
I do this on long drives, but always have to put it back to normal when it's time to park. It would be neat if cars would implement some sort of automatic switch between this configuration and the straight-back mode when reversing.
I have small stick-on convex mirrors that I keep angled to see my back tyres, with the main mirrors adjusted to minimise blind spot.
Why do you need to see the sides of your own vehicle to park ?
How else can you park? Assuming no 360* parktronic or no surround cameras. I must see just a tiny side of my car in a side mirror or else I would hit a column or a car in tight turns.
I don't, but I need to see things an inch away. I need to see the lines which are often close to my car as well.
Meanwhile when parking I don't need to see things more than a couple feet from my car.
So you also angle the mirrors down a ton ? My old car (a VW) had an option to automatically do this on the passenger side mirror when in reverse. Not sure id want to do this manually each time though (up and down)
With manual mirrors I aim for driving and 'hope and pray' when parking.
My current car has cameras which show me the ground around it when I press a button which solves all my needs. Probably a better solution, but not on most cars from what I can tell.
Many cars do this. Typically they point the mirrors in and down when the car is set into reverse, so you can see the curb.
Teslas allow setting separate mirror position configurations for forward and reverse direction. Very handy.
A big problem is bright screens and displays inside of cars at night. Your night vision never kicks in so you need extra bright lights to see, thus these bright lights that only light up a small section of the road. The more dispersed and even lighting of the old lights is so much better.
I don't like my wife's car for several reasons, but one thing it absolutely nails is the dash: all the lights are orange. It's a night-and-day difference (pun intended) to most cars that have blue lights everywhere, plus an LCD screen in newer models.
I've got a Subaru where all the dash instrument lights are in red and it is _amazing_. Still had to turn the infotainment screen brightness to minimum to enjoy it though.
Seriously. First thing I do when driving is turn off the screen
Night visón comment is 100% spot on. Most haven’t even experienced it. Here’s a trick, when you go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, keep one eye closed the whole time if there are lights. When back in bed open that eye. That’s night vision.
One of the things I loved about my old (like 15 years old at the time) Volvo is that I could black out all the dash backlighting completely. I can nearly do that with my 30-year-old Range Rover but the LCD for the odometer and the heater panel stay dimly lit.
I just want it dark.
It's why I never ever want any sort of screen on my dashboard.
One of my favorite features of my Mazda 3 is that it has a HUD projector in the windshield that gets turn by turn directions via Apple CarPlay so I can turn off the screen and still get navigation.
Same in europe, since a few years.
It should be illegal, but there you are.
There is the possibility (as said by an apologetic driver) that it sometimes may be a badly functioning automation ("Too high? Oh but it's automatic").
The US is worse - an F150s headlights are at eye level if you're sitting in a Corolla. Nothing on European roads is quite as bad.
Theoretically the higher headlights could be angled down more to at least sort of help this ? Unless you were right in front of the vehicle.
The worst are the trucks with the insane aftermarket light bars
I don't understand why headlight elevation isn't standardized.
It was. We had sealed beam headlights for a while till we didn’t. There were common rules for aiming and it worked. The lights weren’t all that bright and the styling was not stellar, however.
I remember having to take my car in to adjust the aiming of the headlights after it didn't pass inspection. So we used to take things like this seriously. I just had my car inspected last month, I don't even remember them hitting the horn. I'm guessing they pretty much just shove a sensor up the exhaust pipe and call it a day while accepting your payment.
No shoving sensors required, the data is all in the ECU accessible over OBDII interface. The car knows if it’s compliant in real time using the sensors it already has.
Wouldn't the VW dieselgate show that we can't trust the manufactures? A third party sensor would be more trustworthy to me.
In states in the USA which perform emissions testing, many of them did not mandate it for diesel cars. For example, I owned a VW Jetta TDI and in New York (which has yearly emissions testing where an OBDII computer is mandated to be connected to gasoline powered cars in order to pass the yearly emissions inspection) and I was exempt from the emissions testing entirely.
A 3rd party sensor would be incredibly expensive for inspection stations to purchase as it would need to meter the air and fuel which enter the engine (assuming we aren't going to trust the car's computer which already knows these figures) as well as to measure the emissions out of the tail pipe. This is economically unrealistic to implement without a dramatic price increase in the cost of regular emissions testing.
Trusting the computer is the economical and realistically widely implementable solution. But yes, it has it's blind spots.
First generation Audi Matrix LED lights would have a word. Those blind oncoming traffic for a full second before dimming.
They were banned in the US, ironically.
> Same in europe, since a few years.
Yeah, since they started to introduce super duper led headlights and 144 Hz animations on turn signals it's been more and more blinding to drive at night even across the ocean.
I wish they would go back to the old headlights from the 70s, they and a slight yellow tint to them and all headlights were at the same level.
Since the late 90s I think, no matter what setting is used, everyone is blinded when by people in back of you and people coming towards you.
Actually, it's worse in the US due to our regs.
Many European active headlights solutions were banned in the US upon release thanks to the NHTSA. Meanwhile us Europeans got blasted by them daily.
Instead NHTSA still allows automatic high beams, which blast you instead in the US... Or just regular old drivers that don't realize/care. Even as a pedestrian, I constantly see people driving through my neighborhood with high beams on... and these are side streets with a 20mph/30kph speed limit. Anecdotally at least people in Europe are a lot better about only turning high beams on outside of city limits
As an EU citizen, I notice that our regulators tend to target industries that operate outside of the EU. There is a massive car lobby in Europe with dozens of big companies and regulation would have a big effect on them.
There are headlights that are illegal in the US but legal in Europe. Opposite world of what we normally have.
My observations from the UK, formerly almost 'Europe':
Boomers need cataract operations! A huge part of the car dependent population are elderly. These folks need ten times the light to see anything when compared to the seventeen year old learner driver (that doesn't go out at night, because their driving instructor clocked off hours ago).
My thoughts regarding this are somewhat anecdotal, however, I have heard a mystery boomer rant and rave about the headlights on his 'Italian car' (they make them in Eastern Europe and slap an Italian flag on). My observation from being in the offending car, shouting here because aforementioned elderly person had hearing issues too: I CAN SEE EVERYTHING FOR MILES!!!
Next: state of the roads
As a pesky cyclist, I used to prefer roads to cycle paths because of the smoother riding experience and improved speed. Not nowadays. In the UK, and dare I say it, the West, we have a problem with potholes. Cars also come with low profile tyres and they weigh 50%+ more than the cars we had before airbags and electronic safety systems came along. This is a combination that results in frequent flat tyres.
What was something that rarely happened is now practically inevitable. As a pesky cyclist, I should be the one getting punctures and fixing tyres, not the motorist. To compound the misery, few cars come with a genuine spare wheel, partly because of the weight problem with today's cars. My bicycle with kit and caboodle weighs far less than that spare wheel, so this nobbling of the spare wheel makes sense to me, but still, a normal car is two orders of magnitude heavier than what I roll with.
Back to the headlights, the elderly cohort with money for new cars, the boomers, don't live in cities, they have nice places in the countryside that require car dependency. With this, and the usage of B-roads, there is a genuine requirement for super-bright lights. Some brands, such as Audi, sell into the market for those that want innovative lights, where the primary innovation is yet more light.
As for built up areas, the lighting situation has also changed. Even as a cyclist, I am running what amounts to 'daytime running lights' because of the light pollution. I put my lights on well before sundown, whereas I never used to. The law is 'after sundown' and I used to be okay with that, but if it is four in the afternoon, mid-summer, I am putting the rear light on, at least.
It does not seem that I am alone in this, many cars have full lighting rather than what we used to call 'sidelights' on.
It is no longer pitch black inside a car, SAAB style. There is so much lighting going on, with a glowing iPad style screen at the minimum, ambient lighting strips on the deluxe cars. The headlights have to compete with this. So more brightness, please!
As I see it, we are caught in a cycle of degrading roads, heavier cars, brighter lights and an elderly cohort that actually needs massive amount of light to see anything. Sure there is clever tech so nobody has to dim their lights, and we have it on posh AUDIs and the like, but this is the spiral we are in, and the good old USA shows where it is going, what the end game looks like.
Into the mix we also have cyclists playing the stupid-lights game. Nowadays cycling is conspicuous leisure, not transport, and plenty of the carbon fibre crew spend hundreds on these stupid lights. Obviously I am somewhat 'shadow fleet' so I don't do that, I just have what heavy goods drivers 'want' from the well-behaved cyclist, which is standard issue, basic flashing lights, a complement of reflectors, high viz and manners.
I yearn for being able to see the Milky Way and the moon providing variable amounts of light throughout the night, with anything moving at night having modest levels of lighting. The situation as it stands means that, along with pedestrians, pets and other animals, I am as good as invisible at night on my bicycle.
Fortunately it looks like we will be losing cheap oil thanks to the tangerine person, unfortunately many millions will starve, but a lot of lights will be getting turned off soonly and the age of car dependency will be over.
Where do you get your data on flat tires? I get flats in a car every couple of years or so and not from potholes but from the screws and nails. How a pothole can even puncture a car tire in principle? It's not a tubed bicycle tire where you can pinch inner tube with the rim. As for "missing" spares - all cars without a spare I owned were using run-flat tires, those are better than a typical "doughnut" spare when flat.
Also, as a cyclist myself I commend your bravery for riding without lights. It's in the driver handbook so it's missing from the TFA and the discussion here, but the lights on the vehicles are not just to see something but to be seen as well. Especially on a bike.
Tangential - in the case of low profile tires, I've seen pothole damage where the rim itself was broken. That causes a "flat tire" even if the rubber tire itself survived.
Sure, you can break the rim with a big enough pothole on regular tires, but normally people refer to such an event as "wheel broken/fucked up/gone/etc" not "a flat".
I explicitly stated that I do ride with lights, reflectors and high visibility clothing. The lights aren't on midday unless there is an eclipse.
I explicitly stated that my experience is from UK roads, not American. Our roads go back to Roman times, yours date back to Henry Ford, give or take a century or two, kind of brand new, when compared.
Let me describe the last 'puncture'. Car: Toyota Yaris, three occupants. Road: narrow not-even-B road. Pothole hit at roughly 30 mph. No air in tyre shortly after that.
You could witter on about whether this was a puncture or not, all I know is that I was the one crawling in the mud, swapping to the emergency spare tyre in falling light conditions, with one of those stupid scissor jacks that just wants to buckle and bend.
In the UK run-flat tyres are rare on new vehicles and even rarer on second hand vehicles. Winter tyres are also rare in the UK. Maybe we are just cheap in the UK, not needing to haul untold un-metric tonnes as Americans spend their time doing, and not needing to go at 155mph plus as Germans spend their time doing.
As for bicycle tyres, I am not riding for 'conspicuous leisure', which is the American way. Normal tyres with some puncture prevention layer in the carcass works for me, until I get that first puncture. When I get that second puncture, I take that as my cue to replace them, since it is the carcass that has gone, with the puncture prevention going too.
The fashion in 'conspicuous leisure cycling' is for lightweight 'tubeless' tyres filled with sealant that has to be replaced every few months. The idea is to have lower pressure, wider tyres for better rolling resistance. Allegedly these miracle tyres solve punctures, yet people with these tyres go to the local bike shop on the regular, which is not an option for me, since I need my bicycle.
Hence I use normal tyres and tubes, with a track pump by the door. I keep them inflated to the value written on the sidewall, which means relatively high pressure and minimal carcass flex, thereby keeping them good for longer. My goal is to get places with safety and ease, so it isn't about 'conspicuous leisure' or keeping up with the latest trends.
Weight also comes into it, and force = mass * acceleration. As a 'stick-man', envious of those with visceral fat, never in a race to get anywhere, always on rock-hard tyres, I don't get 'pinch flats'.
Anyway, I am off to do some plant buying, to see what fits in the panniers. Hopefully I will be back with some lovely new house plants, riding back with a mini-forest, which will be 'conspicuous leisure cycling' of sorts.
Keep on riding, your own way, and come to the UK some time to enjoy the wonders of our National Cycling Network, taking trains as needed. I am sure you will also enjoy studying the automotive curiosities that the car dependent have over here too. American car culture is far more interesting, nobody modifies their cars over here, it is always 'bone stock' in boring colours of white or grey.
>I explicitly stated that I do ride with lights, reflectors and high visibility clothing. The lights aren't on midday unless there is an eclipse.
Sorry I was vague, by "without lights" I meant "without lights turned on and pointing in the direction where they can be seen by other vehicles".
> Allegedly these miracle tyres solve punctures, yet people with these tyres go to the local bike shop on the regular, which is not an option for me, since I need my bicycle.
Yes, tubeless bike tires are pretty good wrt of punctures and ride quality, you can maintain them at home but I imagine many people indeed don't bother. Same as many people go to bike shops to replace tubes.
> With this, and the usage of B-roads, there is a genuine requirement for super-bright lights.
No, there is a genuine requirement for normal 60W/55W dual-filament H4 halogens.
There is a genuine requirement for driving to the conditions, which means slowing down a bit in the dark.
If you think this is bad, try walking alongside a small road after dark. Some of the oncoming lights are blinding even from a few blocks away.
That was me, sorry. My car has automatic high-beams that only turn down for other vehicles.
I'm ecstatic every time I'm blinded by laser strong strobing light from the approaching vehicle, especially in the pitch dark country side. Thank you.
As someone who often drives pitch dark country sides, you'd be surprised how hard it is to see people on the side of the road at night. Those blinding lights make a huge difference between you blending into the dark background and seeing you early enough to react (if needed).
True, but once you can see the whites in their eyes it would be nice if the beams lowered.
The worst offenders are people buying aftermarket extra bright headlights, then incorrectly installing them at an angle that blinds oncoming traffic.
For a long time it was aftermarket HID kits. Installing those was a bit of a pain because of the separate ballasts and associated wiring. They were blinding because the projectors required a cut off and most were installed in halogen housings.
Now most people are installing aftermarket LED kits. For the most part those are less blinding. I upgraded our old Impreza with some but chose the lowest lumen numbers I could find and they are also engineered to emit light in the same locations and angles that the halogen ones did. I did some tests with the garage door and standing in front of it where a car would be and it's non-blinding for oncoming traffic.
Not sure at all. Most LED retrofit kits have bulbs that create light in a totally different pattern than the original and don't correctly use the cutoff of the headlight
There are even worse offenders. Some super cheap aftermarket kits seem to have the same horrific flashing as minimum viable Christmas lights.
Barely perceptible flashing yet somehow gratingly and distractingly so.
I heard in Germany when a vehicle is being inspected (yearly?) the headlights' angles are checked to not be beaming into oncoming traffic. Feels like useful regulation to include in every country.
I have blue eyes, it hurts to drive at night.
I have brown eyes, still hurts to drive at night. Canadian situation is just as bad as our neighbours down south. Now I long for the days of being blinded by yellow headlamps again.
Unfortunately the first TUV inspection is three years after initial registration. In Spain it’s four years. Plenty of time to blind people.
I very much hope newly-produced cars in Germany must obey the TÜV regulations from the start. Imported cars also must immediately undergo certification.
Fun fact: some Italian cars have the left light pointing somewhat lower to avoid blinding incoming drivers, and the right one higher to see further along the road margin. The TÜV did not like this, so I had to adjust my lights to be symmetrical when I moved to Germany.
This scourge is so bad.
I drive a 40 year old vehicle and a friend created an aftermarket adjustable headlight frame allowing it to move from all-in-one rectangular headlight/high beam sealed units to modern LED bulbs and then an accessory of choice on the inner spaces left over. I chose a classic-looking LED that does regular, high beam, DRL, and amber turn signal all in one and then put off-road fog lights on the inner spaces. But I would not leave the house after night with the vehicle until I adjusted them to DOT spec. Because they are so much brighter and sharped-edged than factory, I can see that they don’t go above oncoming windshields and are aligned properly horizontally.
The excellent guide that I used to align my lights:
https://www.danielsternlighting.com/tech/aim/aim.html
Was discussing at home (USA) this same idea that vehicle lights are brighter and drivers are less inclined to be bothered to dip. I rented a car in the UK several years ago which auto-dimmed the beam and was fascinated by the technology which would allow it to differentiate light sources and identify oncoming vehicles.
This feature must be old. My Subaru Forester 2018 has it. What non-US cars have are those new zone dimmable lamps.
Regardless I keep my auto dim off and just down. I don’t usually need the headlamps in high beam mode.
What would be useful is a taller median between both sides on a highway since often the blinding is because of a difference in the direction facing due to the grade of the highway. Facing people who are looking up a hill is awful.
It is true, that many drivers drive with the high beam on. My cabin is frequently illuminated by their lamps. My lamps never illuminate the cabin of a car I follow by comparison. This strange asymmetry does annoy me and I am certain I’m in the right but it’s usually resolvable by allowing them to pass.
If you are using low-beams and driving more than about 45 mph, you can hit something (or someone) before you had time to see it (or them). Granted, that doesn't matter if you're following someone else, since they'll hit it first. Which is why you need high-beams on when there isn't someone else around to light up the distant part of the road for you--and which depends on how often you drive remote roads.
If my comment was interpreted as some advocacy for the removal of high-beams, please allow me to correct the record: I think they're a good feature to have.
Good. I’ve driven with people who learned to drive in a city and so were not taught to use high beams ever, out of fear of accidentally annoying on coming drivers
> resolvable by allowing them to pass
How do they ever find out that they're wrong if you don't turn your highbeams on after they pass?
This has been available in the US for a long time. I had it on the car I bought in 2016, and on another I bought in 2023. It's just not mandatory, so it usually comes as a part of some safety / driver assistance package. And even if you have it, you need to enable it.
A looooooong time! :)
https://www.underhoodservice.com/gms-autronic-eye-1952/
I think most if not all US cars do this now. My current one doesn't even have a way to keep the brights on permanently. Now to wait 8 or so years for all the old ones to cycle out :(.
Double that. I think the average lifespan of a car in the US is ~16 years.
The average car in the US is 12 years old, so the average lifespan is obviously longer. Though average includes some collectors car that nobody drives daily.
And to make it worse, there are so many large vans and pickup trucks (empty too) speeding, that also have very bright and eye level cornea melting LED lights.
This is so much worse now that crossovers are the default car in the US. I seem to be the last person in America driving a car that isn't a tank and have never understood why everyone loves those massive machines so much.
Everyone I've ever asked indicated it's because being higher up feels "safer".
I also complain about this but it’s obviously not ever going to change.
I always have blue blockers (yellow and also dark orange lenses) in my car and wearing them totally prevents pain and fatigue for my eyes.
There's an interesting trend of some cars having their daytime running lights and their low beams in completely separate positions, with the car design only emphasizing the former. This effectively reduces the height of the headlight even if the car is taller. Here's an example:
https://youtu.be/KGhycuensJw?si=ZCycH7l5hQDktqqK&t=54
Surprisingly the Cybertruck also has this layout.
a few things
- glare for older people might be due to deposits in their lens, which can be corrected by cataract surgery. The deposits make oncoming headlights like a dirty windshield at sunset. (disability glare)
- glare for people with good vision is all the light focused at the same point on your retina and is sort of painful. (discomfort glare)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glare_(vision)
some cars have matrix/adaptive headlights now:
https://www.notateslaapp.com/news/2059/tesla-matrix-headligh...
https://archive.is/20260610124844/https://www.theatlantic.co...
https://archive.is/I4K0L
EU folks: are ADBs the panacea that all these articles always make them out to be? I’ve seen mixed reports.
They work okay on straight roads with no median. But often fail in these cases:
- cresting a hill. Normal people can see the cone of light from the approaching car and often turn classic high beams down before it blinds fellow drivers. These do it only when it detects the actual light source, giving a 0.2-0.5 (about) flash of bright light.
- Wet and snowy ground. Even when they re-align themselves somewhat properly they can be blinding due to reflections which are not part of the angle-calculation algorithm.
- Failure to detect pedestrians and cyclists. Self-evident, but when I am not in a car I am impressed by how blinding it is.
Personally I consider them to decrease safety for everyone except the car with those headlights. I also feel like it is yet another badly designed automation which adds to the ability to slightly doze off and pay a little less attention to traffic.
The fucking strobing light when the eyes are working in the scotopic vision.
They can be pretty shitty if you're a pedestrian or cyclist, because quite a lot of them don't "see" you, so you just get blinded by the full beams.
As someone who has retrofitted headlights with proper HID projectors, deal with RHD to LHD conversions, on some vehicles you can make your headlights look absolutely amazing, with no glare or harm to oncoming traffic. Some of these OEM headlight designs are atrocious. 2015ish F250's are some of the worst headlights when it comes to this.
What really pisses me off? LED bulbs only available in 6000k or higher. I had to import some Osram H4 bulbs from the netherlands because they are a warmer factory 3000K temperature. We really need regulation on glare, because right now it's the wild west.
I've heard of people around my parts sneaking around at night with black masks, taking baseball bats to specific headlights on trucks late at night. Apocryphal or no, stories like that are being cheered by regular people.
The federal government took upon itself responsibility for things like this, because it's impractical at best for cities or states to regulate these. It's too bad that politics and bloat has made governance of this particular issue more or less impossible. Self regulation is obviously a joke, the standard suite of choices mean the default options for consumers are obnoxious as hell.
It'll have to become a big enough issue to warrant attention and action by the President, either this one or whoever comes next, or nothing will ever be done.
Maybe a convention of states that runs all current politicians, judges, and bureaucrats out of their jobs (in a sane, phased way) and establishes term limits and bans on careerism and bloat. Citizens can bypass the feds and kick their asses to the curb - imagine a total reset, in which we put forth competent, responsible people.
This problem will never be fixed. Gonna have to wear adaptive sunglasses at night for driving.
Straight pipes on Harleys are illegal. But when cops are the ones driving the Harleys who is going to enforce it? This is the problem with certain types of regulations. Like sheriffs who ignore gun regulation in their county.
Key posts from the subreddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckyourheadlights/wiki/index/misin... https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckyourheadlights/comments/18lrf3d... https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckyourheadlights/comments/1akn0ku...
I like having bright LED headlights, however I also made sure my headlights are correctly aimed and that my auto-leveling is working correctly. My car also auto-dims high beams and has ADB/turning lights. So, in short, I understand why people like bright lights and I'm also conscientious so my vehicle is not the problem.
I drive a normal height hatchback. I live in Texas. The /vast/ majority of vehicles on the road are trucks and SUVs, and many of them have aftermarket lift kits which further exacerbates the problem. The main problem is vehicle height and improperly aimed headlights. There's no real enforcement or regulation for headlight aiming, and worse we have no effective vehicle height restrictions. Not only do these insecure little men blind you at night, their cattle guard/reinforced bumper mounted to the frame will decapitate you if they hit you because of the bumper height difference from the 6+ inch Chinese lift kit they added to their truck to stroke their ego and allow them to "bully" drivers on the road by intentionally tailgating and driving aggressively in their oversized vehicle.
The problem is epidemic in America, and it's a problem of both regulation and culture. As long as the typical American driver is somebody who enters the road ignorant of basic driving dynamics, with a selfish attitude, inattentively barreling down the road in their massive fuck-off symbol of insecurity, we are not going to fix this.
Outside of the decades long trend of overly bright headlights, I've noticed a more recent uptick of drivers seemingly deliberately leaving their high beams on full time. Not sure if it's "keeping up with the Joneses" or just people with older headlights that can't see them over the bright ones, but I'm blinded by at least one car with clear brights on every night drive recently
I will say, while there's now more overly bright headlights of varying degrees of blinding, it's better then when every truck started buying HID headlights and putting them in normal headlight housings. Felt like there was a period of time where headlights were either the normal tone, or a super bright light hitting you from all directions
This is a pet peeve of mine, so when a headlight went out a few weeks ago I asked my mechanic about bulb options. He said he had no other choices for me, so now I am part of the problem too.
Seems like a classic Tragedy of the Commons situation / use case for regulation....
There are already regulations forbidding the use of unapproved LED retrofits in housings designed for incandescent bulbs in most countries. The fact that your mechanic gets away with installing them, and you get away with driving your now-illegal car shows how well they are enforced.
Unless your car's design is particularly evil (a real possibility), changing a headlight bulb is usually easy to do yourself, and approved, incandescent headlight bulbs are easy to source most places.
There are LED replacement bulbs that mimic the light emitting pattern of halogen and also are not massively bright. Those are fine and cops are not going after people with that kind of thing.
There are a lot of options if you search online
Tesla is a big part of this. They ship their headlights misaligned from the factory, so they point right into the drivers eyes. Tesla has no quality culture at all. A bunch of wankers.
I think the gigantic prevalence of huge or lifted trucks is a bigger influence, especially given the tendency to mod them out (poorly) with aftermarket lights.
Truck headlights are already on a level with sedan drivers' eyes. There are far more F-150s on the road than there are Teslas.
Not only is this NOT the case, but all Tesla vehicles since something like 2021 have included matrix lights. They have adaptive beams to automatically darken sections of the headlight beam to avoid blinding other drivers.
Then why does every Tesla in front and behind me at night blind me? Some of the Hyundai IONIQs too, but there’s less of them out there.
Do they detect pedestrians, cyclists, windows of buildings adjacent to the road? Or they piss off everyone with cold bright strobing light?
You might be surprised to learn that it doesn't work properly.
I'm sure they don't. The law requires a 10 degree downward angle for directed headlights out of the factory. It would never pass NHTSA testing without it. High beams are a different matter: They are designed to scatter in a wide arc, but people shouldn't be using them when there's opposing traffic.
YES! Tesla account for the majority blinding headlights in my area. The rest is idiot drivers who just drive with their high beams on.
While all automakers are incentivized to make driving in the competition's vehicles as hellish as possible, Tesla is doubly so. The worse it gets to drive, the more likely people are to want self-driving.
No they don't.
I dunno, I think all manufacturers are at fault. Even the ones that are properly aligned are ridiculously bright, but aimed down. Which is fine if two vehicles approach each other on flat ground. But if two vehicles approach the crest of a hill, then the headlight that was aimed down is now aimed straight at the other driver.
And don't get me started on jackasses that put LED bulbs in old halogen housings.