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Comment by cimmanom | Hacker News Reader

Because LED headlights aren’t blinding enough?

I know people who have had their headlights "tuned" to have them raised higher. Purpose was to "blind"/"warn" traffic on the German Autobahn when they wanted to clear the lane for themselves and the car to look more aggressive.

Works as easy as removing the battery, pushing the back of the car down, therefore lifting the headlights up. Reconnect the battery and that lifted state will be memorized as 0-level by the headlights. Now remove the weight from the back, the car will come back into it's normal position but the lights think they are too low, so they will level themselves higher and therefore blind oncoming traffic...

Where I live, if you blind me with your long distance headlights, I will blind you with my long distance headlights, isn't that universal?

In the situation he's describing one driver is behind the other. Unless you have headlights that point backwards you won't be able to return the favor.

Sure I can, I can turn on the high beam just as they overtake me, not always in bad faith, but maybe they just forgot theirs accidentally and need a reminder; just as I will flash and then completely turn off my headlights when I see a car running without headlights at night in the city, sometimes people just forget. I once turned off my headlights in a hill traffic jam while completely stopped as I was blinding the guy in front of me on my lowest setting and to my surprise everyone did the same in a domino-fashion. Tit for tat is pretty good.

Oh, it totally is, but your attention is sure when they come in flying from behind and starting to blind you. I think that's what they want to achieve by being such jerks.

Wait, that's a thing? Do they reset them before the TüV inspection every time?

Having been blinded by oncoming traffic on the Autobahn a few times, reading this is extremely infuriating. Xenon headlights are especially vile.

Well, after all it's no big deal: How long do you think does it take you to disconnect the battery, get a coffee and two friends to sit in the trunk while you reconnect the battery? ;-)

And if you need to see the TÜV, you just leave out the trunk friends and are good to go as the headlights will then level themselves to the normal position again.

I've been blinded so often by Xenon headlights, I'm not sure if this is a widespread problem or if I'm just sensitive to those bright lights in the dark. On the other hand I've been blinded in daylight too, so it doesn't seem like it's about the darkness. And as my eyes have been tested to working very well I have the feeling that headlight settings are getting more aggressive even in normal mode.

If you're in the US, the situation of being blinded by low-beam headlights (I agree, it's a real problem) should hopefully be on its way to being addressed:

https://www.autonews.com/article/20181029/OEM03/181029812/nh...

I'm in a rural area with literally zero street illumination. I cannot begin to describe my frustration with the blue tint, ultra bright lights, and off-road LED light bars. Install those on every other lifted truck (redneck's a plenty) and night time driving is hazardous.

I don't care who installed the lights, whether it was the factory, the current or previous driver/owner. If I can't see because of your lights, they're too damn bright.

Add driving a compact, low-to-the-ground car in a world of giant SUVs and pickups to that.

Lights should block out your night time vision no matter what, that is unavoidable. It is only a matter of how much goes.

When driving in rural areas, I sometimes flip off the lights to see much more in my periphery than I could with the lights on. This is dangerous of course, as the lights are meant more to be seen than to see.

> the lights are meant more to be seen than to see.

That's definitely false for headlights, fog lights, and for the extra light bars (well, maybe those are often installed as stylistic choices rather than utility).

Tail lights, running lights, turn signals are all more to be seen than to help the driver see.

Try it, it actually works, especially when there is a full moon.

I don't dispute that you can see more outside the beam of the light if the light is off.

You can see a surprising amount even just by starlight - but I wouldn't want to drive that way, knowing how I've stumbled over things a flashlight would have shown me.

Headlights are definitely to help the driver see (cloudy moonless nights, reflective road signs, etc.). Only at twilight or in fog would they be mostly to help you be seen. When it's really dark, running lights would be sufficient for that.

When you are traveling in the high desert, going without headlights is a great way to see and avoid deer. The deer aren’t going to be dazed by your headlights, and you can see them before they dash out in front of you on the road.

But this isn’t recommended because if another car came along they wouldn’t immediately be able to see you! Light makes you much more visible, and it also allows you to better see a narrow part of the road (more if wide beams are used), but it hides a lot. Of course, being in the high desert in the middle of the night off a freeway, there aren’t many other cars around anyways, if any.

I don't know what rural areas you're driving in, but on the roads to my house, flipping off the headlights would result in total darkness unless the moon's out. You won't see more in your periphery, you just won't see squat.

The moon is usually out. I’m referring to eastern Washington scrub land. I’ve also done it when driving through the four corners in the middle of the night, and then it was because of deer.

> The moon is usually out.

Is it? Do you think that the sun is usually out as well? And note that often the moon is out during the day...

For some definition of usually I guess. Whenever I tried this there was enough moon to make it work.

Probably you noticed that sometimes it was too dark to try :-)

Then you can be like Europe which already has legislation very like that proposal! Factory fitted lights will be fine when new, and dazzle as they get older, despite it supposedly on the MOT test list. But, half the daylight running LEDs now fitted are bright enough to dazzle from the second you roll it out of the showroom.

The worst case won't be touched at all - that's the thousands who've bought illegally bright aftermarket kits, installed illegally without adaptation or self-levelling, probably in illegal cool colours too. Not a police priority so few will get pulled.

Night driving is becoming ever more unpleasant as a result.

>Not a police priority so few will get pulled.

The American reticence to road cameras is a sign that we all think we're doing something that's illegal (we are). The laws need to be fixed.

>The laws need to be fixed.

If by fixed you mean changed to reflect the behavior of average people so that the average person is not breaking them daily then I fully agree.

Yeah, that's what I meant. Increase the speed limits and increase the punishments.

Great, will just wait 35 years for this feature to become reliable and work its way down to the majority of the US auto fleet.

I think it'll take more like 15-20 years, but yeah, it'll take a long time, and who knows how reliable the tech will be.

These laser headlights, for example, are much brighter by default than standard headlights, but their safety for other drivers depends presumably on moving parts. When these parts wear out, what's the likelihood that drivers get them fixed versus just continuing to drive as-is, melting other drivers' eyeballs?

It’s ridiculous. I find driving at night really treacherous now. I essentially slow down to a crawl if another car is coming, I just can’t see. Why do we need this?

The subheadline literally includes "but won’t blind oncoming traffic"...

> All of this luminosity leads to an obvious question: How are these devices, which have the approximate wattage of the klieg spotlights commonly found outside world premieres, supposed to be safely installed in the front of a car without inadvertently blinding oncoming traffic?

> “Because of the point source nature of the beam, you can pinpoint the light,” said Nakamura. “You can even shape it dynamically on the fly, so the beam will go down, or to the right, away from the eyes of motorists.”

>>You can even shape it dynamically on the fly, so the beam will go down, or to the right, away from the eyes of motorists.”

So, cyclists and pedestrians just have to deal with it, as always. Just like current "automatic" high-beam, which does an "ok" job at detecting other cars but fails completely at detecting other non-vehicular road users.

Or when you're parked facing a restaurant with glass windows.

Or when it's snowing and all that directed laser light is being reflected right back at you (not mentioning reflectors which are already absurdly bright with LED and halogen bulbs).

Or when you hit a bump in the road and the redirection of light doesn't occur fast enough.

Or when the vibration of fifty-thousand miles impairs the aiming mirrors. Can you imagine the pathological case of a partially broken DLP chip?

There's too many corner cases and (literally) moving pieces for this to really be practical.

As someone who doesn't trust his car's automatic high-beam, 100% this.

Are the lasers bright enough to be a health risk? You wouldn't attach a high power laser pointer to a moving vehicle either.

AFAICT these things don't actually emit laser light, they use a high power laser to stimulate some sort of phosphorus-like material that then emits incoherent white light. The point is then that this secondary light source is very small (compared e.g. to LED with similar lumens), so the light can be much more easily focused by optics.

You can already have this in a BMW. The new 3 series and I think the i8 has the option for laser headlights.

On the other hand, a directed beam highlighting "hey, there's a deer/bike/walker over there getting ready to walk into the street" has potentially positive safety benefits.

Perhaps it can be coded to light up the torso and legs and leave the face in darkness.

That is already done with IR cameras and flashing the object on the dash. We can have a discussion whether that is better or worse than trying to shine light directly on the object in the real world.

Look at 1:50 for demonstration:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5fl7r-E9WY

(it looks like this system can actually "flash" at the object in real life, it can be seen a bit further in that video)

The thing is, when this tech hits, the aftermarket will eventually offer it too, and as anyone who's been around a vehicle with an aftermarket HID setup with no cutoff/a poor pattern/a poor install, the results can be blinding.

That’s still no help to pedestrians.

I don't really understand what he means. Just point it down at an angle? Or will it be motorized? How is it supposed to know where to point, some sort of fancy machine learning?

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