The War Against Headlight Brightness
The crusade against bright headlights has picked up speed in recent years, in large part due to a couple of Reddit nerds. Could they know what’s best for the auto industry better than the auto industry itself?
cross-posted from: https://feddit.nl/post/26864473
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/184198
The headlights that are basically as bright as most cars high beams. Should be illegal
My Subaru has lights that seem to be getting dimmer, at least relative to too many cars. I can get LED replacements. They’re not legal since the projectors wouldn’t change but they’re widely available and would help me
My service station even offered to do it for me.
Incandescent bulbs wear out and go dim over time. I bought some new ones and it solved the issue. Philips Xtreme vision is what I got, it was $15 for the pair.
Stop building so many SUVs and Trucks, and go back to sedans/hatchbacks/wagons and there problem solved!
Vehicle size is another issue that comes up regularly, since NHTSA regulations for headlights don’t include a standardized mounting height, even as cars have ballooned in size in recent years. This means a perfectly aligned headlight in a larger car can still wreak havoc on a smaller car: “Where the [midsize] Civic might not give you glare,” Trechter, the former lighting engineer, said, “that F-350 [truck], if you’re sitting in a [sport-size] Miata, is gonna absolutely wreck your eyeballs.”
I drive a midsize sedan an I often have my rear-view and side mirrors lit by these trucks. It's stupid they're even allowed.
Taller vehicles need two kinds of headlight: a higher intensity mounted low to illuminate the path, and a lower intensity mounted high to illuminate retro-reflective surfaces like traffic signs.
If a transport truck can have lights at a reasonable height and angle that don't blind me, so can a standard pick up truck. Many transports actually have their lights mounted lower than pick up trucks and full size SUVs.
Transport trucks don't "need" super-high ground clearance the way 4x4s do. In order to get a vehicle like this to have headlights at a reasonable height, they'd need to be mounted on the axle, LOL:
(Or vehicles modified that extensively would have to stop being street legal; that would work too.)
Edit: to be clear, this was never intended to be a defense of lifted 4x4s, only an example of just how incompatible their headlight heights can be and how difficult it could be to fix that.
You don’t really need a second set of lights for signs. The light reflecting off the ground from your 9 trillion lumen headlights, and the efficiency of reflective signs are plenty.
Most LED lights have a VERY sharp cutoff. Without the light reflecting off other things anything outside of the line of fire is almost pitch black.
Reflective signs are specifically efficient at reflecting light back at their source and nowhere else (retroreflectivity). Obviously it's not perfect, but the fact that that cone is so narrow is part of why it looks so bright (not dissimilar from the cutoff of the LED lights you are describing). Meaning that light reflected off the roadway before reaching the sign will generally be reflected back at the roadway. With how large some vehicle grills are being built nowadays, it may be possible for a low mounted headlight to be far enough away from the driver that retroreflective signs are no longer as effectively illuminated for the driver. Truckers probably already deal with this, I haven't driven in one, but I suspect road signs are not as well illuminated for the driver as in other vehicles. We don't rely solely on retroreflectivity to make our signs visible, so it's not all or nothing, but it may be worth keeping some nominal illumination (could be like moderate flashlight levels of brightness) at driver level so we can continue to take advantage of retroreflective technology
95% of the time I get blinded by an oncomming car's headlights, it is either a Tesla or a Mercedes.
The vast majority, it is a Tesla.
I read somewhere that a Tesla resets their headlight possitioning to the default value after every software update.
If that is true, I have two responses:
Fucking blue lights. Also fuck Teslas that do auto brights because that shit does NOT work correctly.
My dad drove a '56 Cadillac for many years, with a factory-fitted electric eye on the dash that would dim high beams if oncoming lights were detected. It was a simple system that worked really well. So it says something about Tesla if they managed to fuck that up.
I think you’re shitting on the wrong car. I don’t trust auto-brights for exactly the reason you give but so far my Tesla’s are flawless and react before I can. Auto brights are common now and most of them suck
You’re not paying attention if they can react faster than you can. It’s not hard to notice headlights coming from around a turn.
i hate them, i hate them, i fucking hate them
I call driving at night, participating in the mass blinding. It's fucking terrible.
In a PURELY utilitarian sense would there be more overall harm by me driving around with my brights on to piss people off and therefore incrementally accelerate any solution here, or just drive with normal headlights? Serious question actually. Btw people don't flash their brights any more - nobody can tell if you have them on or not, because half the cars on the road appear to have them on at all times.
