How Complex Modern Headlights Can Be
jalopnik.com
jalopnik.com
What I discovered though, was "Intelligent High Beam"... which was an automatic head light mode that looked (from the driver perspective) like it used an LCD matrix over the high beam. It would fade up from the normal beam, flood the road, and then if a car was in front or approaching it would block out the parts of the scene in which those vehicles were present.
It turns out it is this: https://www.osram-continental.com/en/products/smartrix.html
It's something else to have full visibility of the sides of the road (where sheep wandered freely) and still not be blinding anyone in front or oncoming, and to not have to think about it at all. More than that, road signs were singled out and side obstacles made visible... whilst not blinding anyone.
Within a couple of days I took this fully for granted, and not a single vehicle we passed flashed their lights at us (which I'd expect if we'd blinded anyone).
Now if I buy a car I'd like lights like this.
I actively control the high beams, raising and lowering in order to allow me to see what's coming and maintaining visibility on the road as appropriate. Automatics just assume you want all the light all the time bar when someone elses lights are already there.
20-25 Km average daily every day of the week, that's only about an hours worth of cycling on a slow bike or maybe 45 minutes on a faster one. That's on the order of a few hundred hours of exposure per year. Near misses several times per month at least.
The problem here is that there are cars around you when you're biking. If you didn't have to ride alongside cars, then cycling would be far safer, and your main worry would be things like gravel, snow, rain (anything that makes the road surface slippery), and probably pedestrians.
There's a reason that places that put bike lanes next to car traffic, with no barrier, don't get much increase in cycling, and why places with physically divided biking lanes have far lower cyclist deaths and injuries. Cars are just too dangerous to be allowed around bikes.
The fundamental problem here is the existence of cars, and the sheer dominance of cars as a transport method. It makes it almost impossible for anything else to be a viable alternative, for many different reasons including safety and sprawl (cycling isn't all that feasible if you have to ride 30 miles each way because the "city" is so sprawling).
Between brightness and this ridiculous fad of high Kelvin blue headlights, driving at night on the highways of major traffic areas is awful. It's the luminous equivalent of people who utterly ignore decibel limits of their vehicles to the detriment of pedestrian ears.
I wonder about the high Kelvin headlights causing retinal damage, there is some research I recall reading about related to blue light filters.
To think we'll all be blinder and deafer for this is quite agitating.
But it's meaningless unless everyone does it, and it won't work for cars already on the road.
The problem with polarized glass is that, by its very nature, it's filtering out ~half the light. This is why cameras don't normally come with polarizing lenses: it'll make them perform worse in low-light situations. So you won't be able to see quite as much, with half the light blocked.
Of course, our eyes are logarithmic, so this might not be that big a deal, and it might be worth it, but you'll never get the US government safety agencies to agree to this. They already forbid anything which reduces light transmission through the windshield below the "AS400" line (the optional tint strip near the top).
They already won't allow aspheric side mirrors because those "confuse" drivers (even though cars in Europe have them).
It is so nice to not have a blindspot larger than half a car. That leaves all attention for bikes and bicycles. I've never had a rental car in the US which did not have a blindspot the size of a small car.
Who are you forgetting about there?
Remember pedestrians and cyclists? They don’t have windshields so what about them?
This is obviously a reach but you could design specially polarized glasses or goggles that would work for everyone if the cyclists really wanted to reduce the blinding glare. And if the cyclists don't want to wear them then they don't have to and they're in the same situation they're in now.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21852885
comparatively, they wont be worse of than with original bright headlights when they dont invest in circular polarized glasses for night traffic, while if they do they would benefit. similarily apply the polarization filters to bicycle headlights.
As a cyclist I myself am fed up with bright bicycle lights of others not aimed downward enough, and even when downward there is still a lot of glare... I assume my own bicycle lights are similarily annoying for others.
As a cyclist myself I would prefer a polarization based solution, to be eventually adopted by both cars and cyclists.
2 days after you I independently posted a similar comment but with circularly polarized light:
It doesn't help that all pedestrians wear black Northface or Canada Goose jackets.
My own brights are lower than most of the low beams/automatic adjustment lights that I encounter.
I could take the bus but the schedule is so sparse where I’m going it would be quicker to walk (almost an hour). There’s no great options.
It seems that headlights got much brighter to benefit the driver behind them, without any consideration that they blind everyone else -- and also reduce the ability for peoples' eyes to adjust to dim conditions. That can't be a good trade-off.
My car was in the shop the other day, and they loaned me a truck, it was amazing, I could drive at night with NO ISSUES.
My commute is pretty much a single twisty, turny back road that has no street lamps, so everyone thinks they need their brights on... So I'm constantly blinded by high-beams, then they switch to what has to be illegally bright or misaligned low-beams. In the truck though, I wasn't blinded once but people still had their high beams and way too bright low beams.
I haven't driven a truck in 8 years, but maybe its time.
This works, until you realize that because you're higher than everyone else, they all think YOU have your high beams on. And then you get flashed and honked at on a regular basis (at least I do). Then I actually turn on my high beams to show people what it could be like and they take theirs off.
But even then, you're still right. The worst case scenario in a truck is still nothing compared to the blinding light of a lifted F250 with upgraded HIDs when I'm in my fiesta.
As aimed from the factory, the headlights on my car were casting way too much bright light up way too high, so I just adjusted them to a slightly more downward angle.
Chances are taking your headlights even a few degrees down from the horizon would solve a lot of problems for everyone else trying to share the road with you without significantly impacting your visibility.
The robot uses led strips to highlight its path when it detects that the luminosity from the camera is not enough using simple PID control loop. In normal situation, it is working as intended making the robot more robust to illuminations change.
But every time the robot crashes into an object or wall, it flashes its headlights like if it is trying to call for attention. What is happening is when it crashes the objects are usually really close to both the leds and the camera so suddenly it hide exterior light and it's very dark for the camera so the robot turns the leds on, but because the objects are so close a lot of light is reflected back and suddenly it's too bright so it turns the leds off and the cycle repeat : My "auto-exposure" control loop couldn't keep up and is no longer stable.
The robot had inadvertently acquired a very crude active-light obstacle avoidance / distance sensing system. To add to the complexity of modern headlights, you can now envision that to efficiently exploit this sensor you can plug in a neural network to actively control the headlights to give itself a sense of depth perception. Add multiple robots into the mix and let them evolve a headlight communication strategy/protocol... Here was a little fun dose of complexity to tingle your light-bulb...
Boring sedan, MSRP $25,000, Boring sedan (with AI headlight option), MSRP $1,750,000
>...which effectively rules out dynamic-matrix light systems like Porsche uses.
Good! I'm constantly getting flashed by smart headlights and auto-leveling systems that simply don't work well. I wish we could go back to simple lights that work and don't constantly flash me every time another driver hits a bump or their smart algorithms screw up.
These systems are most prevalent on expensive European brands that have terrible reliability ratings.
Totally obvious when you see which cars are blinding you too usually.
"Well, it's not supposed to do that..."
You don't say!
When the car hits a bump, or crests a hill, then "downwards" becomes pointed directly at oncoming traffic. If anything, quick-reacting "smart" lights would be more helpful here.
Generally, when people like you complain about this stuff, what you're really asking for is for everyone to go back to extremely low-output headlights where you couldn't see almost anything at night. I don't see how that's an improvement.
Those "smart" headlights definitely do not react correctly/fast enough to prevent blinding someone when they drive over a bump or crest a hill- which are things that are almost guaranteed to happen multiple times whenever someone goes driving. Adding the current level of smarts to a headlight does not fix the issue with brightness.
I think we've reached (or are very near) the point where a brighter headlight won't give you as much additional safety as they degrade the safety of oncoming traffic. It's cool for me to have lights that are brighter than the sun, but if oncoming traffic is blinded and hits something- maybe not me, they could be blind for several seconds after I've passed them and they hit a deer or something- then the overall effect is that my brighter headlights made the roads less safe. I have no personal incentive to get dimmer lights, but society as a whole has an incentive to find the sweet spot where lights are bright enough to drive at night and not endanger other people.
It was pretty neat - when the road was quiet it lit the road quite broadly, but when there was oncoming traffic it would deactivate the 'pixels' that could have dazzled the oncoming driver. I also got the impression it cast extra light at road signs (although maybe the route I was driven just had very well lit signs)
My country gets dark at 4pm at this time of year, so driving in rural areas involves a lot of switching between main beam and dip beam - and getting mad at oncoming drivers who don't switch early enough. So these smart headlights seem like a good thing!
As for extra light at road signs, I believe I've read somewhere that newish signs have ability to reflect near ultraviolet as visible light, and this makes them extra reflective for headlights with ultraviolet range, more so then what you would expect for the given visible light that you see. Although I'm no expert in this and not sure if that actually the reason for why some signs popout so much.
[1] https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/road-safety-us/resources/road-tr...
And the drivers long since forgot how to actually do it manually
The ones in the UK can be so effective that sometimes I have to switch off my full beams so I don't get blinded by the signs (and I'm not driving a new car with fancy headlights).
"Again, it’s worth mentioning that here in America, a land comprehensively crisscrossed with thousands of miles of dark back roads and a whole nation’s worth of wandering deer, this technology is bafflingly illegal."
Apparently they're working on it, here's something from last year that says "coming soon"...
https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2018/10/nhtsa-proposes-new...
"One one hand, this proposed change should help lousy drivers from burning out your retinas on a lonesome country road. But, by the same token, you may no longer have the delicious opportunity to blast them with the brights once they’re within a few feet of your car to let them know to lower those damned high beams."
Many (all?) modern cars have an auto mode for night lights but it seems to endlessly baffle people as to how they work. At some point it seems you can throw all the UX you want, some are hell bent to skip on being attentive to basic driving safety anyway.
I also see a lot of cars with brights on but no lights. I annoy the people around me by asking them the difference between brights and lights and the answers are very depressing. It seems that many people fiddle with a few buttons until they see light in front of them and then consider everything good.
My Model 3 has everything set on auto. If the car can't see, it'll turn the lights on. If it doesn't see an incoming car, it'll turn on the high beams.
After a year of driving it as my only car, I needed a second car and got a cheap ICE clunker. Having to manage lights is a PITA and basically a failure of design.
I've had instances of them not detecting my smaller, older, car properly even when straight on. It's great to get blinded on a 2 lane 55mph road at night.
We have a ’03 VW Golf that turns the lights on when the engine starts, but requires you to turn the knob from Off via Parking lights to On to use the high beams. But then it doesn’t warn you that the lights are on when you shut the engine off. So whenever you use the high beams you’ll probably end up running the battery down afterwards because you’re not used to having to turn the lights off manually.
Bad UX was a thing before computerized dashboards.
But that's still bright enough that a lot of automatic headlights don't turn on.
I know mine do turn on, even at the lowest intermittent setting. I thought I'd read somewhere that that was typical, but... maybe not?
You wouldn't want the headlights to turn on all the time when wipers are on automatic mode. Now why they don't turn on for regular modes, I'm not sure, but probably consistency: if you don't turn them on for automatic mode, but you do for regular mode, then that's going to be too confusing for the driver. Maybe they should come on when the wipers are activated in any mode and stay on for a certain number of seconds (by "stay on", I mean actively clearing the windshield, not just waiting for water to appear). But this might be too unreliable in practice?
Right now the only way to realize you don't have your lights on when you have DRLs is to realize that your gauge cluster is missing the notification that the headlights are on.
I'd wager simply adding an icon in the gauge cluster like an orange icon with a cross through it would solve a large portion of the issue as it would only rely on people noticing the active notification rather than the absence of another.
Why not beep at me or otherwise alert me if it's night and I'm driving with my lights off? You know there's already a light sensor in the car, and there's already a way to beep at people or show them messages (oil is low, parking brake engaged, etc.)
There's a thing that beeps at me when my gas tank gets low. And there's a thing that beeps at me when my seat belt isn't fastened. So obviously it's OK to beep at me while driving. There's even a thing that beeps at me if I accidentally leave my headlights on and might drain the battery. Which is a fine thing to warn about, but surely not as important as a safety issue like driving with headlights off.
One could say that beeping at people whose headlights are off at night is not necessary because many cars (maybe most?) already have an automatic headlight mode, so the driver can just use that and the problem is solved. But that ignores one simple fact: people aren't doing it. Watch cars drive down a road at night, and it won't take long until you see someone whose headlights are off. I'd wager a lot of the time their car has an automatic headlight mode but they don't have the switch in the right position.
As computer people know from fighting server downtime, if something is important, you monitor whether it's behaving as required, and if it isn't, you alert.
This seems pretty relevant.
My wife's 10 year old car's headlight bulb went out. I had to remove the front bumper to get the headlight out to get to the bulb. When I opened the back of the headlight there were bits of colored plastic all over; the insulation on the dozens of wires inside had dried up, cracked, and were flaking off - probably do to the motion of the adaptive lamps, exposing the bare wires. If any of these bare wires shorted out it could easily have started a fire.
Both headlights were like this.
You misspelled "blown a fuse". Except for the ~1ft run from the battery to fuse box basically everything in a modern vehicle has a fuse preventing it from catching on fire.
I don't know how common this is in cars, but it is quite common in household wiring. It was especially problematic with aluminum wiring used in the 70s but can happen even in copper circuits.
My neighbour onthe other side of the street regularly blinds us in teh kitchen when parking in his driveway. It doesn't help that white or blue is the new default color for new headlights.
But to anyone with a new(ish) car: do you constantly get people flashing their brights at you in protest of your "modern" headlights being an order of magnitude more blinding than old headlights?
Surely there are simpler solutions to the "blinding headlights" problem?
You could also have some auto-tint on windshields, or drive using some advanced heads up display instead of using your vision directly.
The article is very positive about these complex headlights - the only negative mentioned is the price.
I, on the other hand, am quite doubtful about them. There is so much you have to get right to have them run consistently. Such a complex piece of equipment is more likely to break or go wrong in some way, or e.g. perhaps misjudge the wrong thing as being a car and so switch off at an inappropriate time. Is there a manual override, at least?
GPS that takes into account road curvature? That doesn't sound sufficiently fast and accurate.
I'll admit I am ignorant of the tech. It is entirely possible this has all been taken into account, and it works well, and the risk/benefit does work out. Otherwise they probably wouldn't be rolling it out.
My experience with complex computerised systems and software, including in cars, leads me to be distrustful. And there are innumerable instances of advanced technological systems being peddled where the good old fashioned manual way just works better. I say this not as an old Luddite, but as a relatively young software developer.
But hey, reliable software can be built, and has shown itself to be useful in many instances.
I'd need to do more investigation to come to a proper conclusion, but my first instinct is to be doubtful.
EDIT: They don't need to work perfectly. The main question is just, do they work better than humans on average and when it's important?
About a month ago I came upon this exact scenario and had to use my headlights to light up the wreck. Wouldn't have been great if they weren't cooperating.
Though I'm sure (I hope) there'd be a way to disable the GPS tracking.
https://www.engadget.com/2019/11/19/audi-e-tron-headlight-te...
It's amazing to me that carmakers can introduce features on headlights "so as not to blind oncoming drivers" -- as if they know they've been blinding us for years. It also suggests these headlights might not have the functionality to keep from blinding drivers ahead of them. My rear view mirror has a dimming switch, but my side mirrors don't.
I would avoid driving at night entirely if I could, but in the winter that's simply not feasible. What am I supposed to do when traffic blinds me? Is it legal to wear an auto-dimming welding hood behind the wheel?
I would advise you to go check an oftalmologist and not trying to be an asshole. I don't have this problem.
Aren't side mirrors being replaced by cameras?
Enough drivers to notice leave their brights on when approaching me from behind. I think that they think I can't see the lights because I have no rear window and a big trailer.
I have six big side mirrors, three on each side, and unless you're tailgating me (a rant for another day) your lights are shining into my eyes like a police interrogation.
Dim them down, thank you very much.
standardize the polarization filter on windshields and headlights, and unreflected direct light (from other cars) can be filtered out, while softer diffuse single reflections (from both your own headlights and those of others lighting targets like road etc) pass through the windshield...
For cyclists and pedestrians one could make "night glasses" that do the same as the windshields... and similar bicycle headlights with circularly polarized light
Also, I'm still baffled that the left-foot stomp pedal for switching between low and high beam settings on headlights went away in favor of yet another thing hanging off the steering wheel. Especially in automatics where you aren't using your clutch foot anyway.
Do they never learn?
More modern cars are becoming so complex so quickly that I am reluctant to embrace one even if full EV. Car reviews that state "packed full of technology" are like a warning sign to stay clear.
People have been saying that since that 1980s at least. Today cars are more reliable than ever, and complexity is part of how they got there.
I’d argue that non-luxury car makers have been dragged kicking and screaming into modernity by the NIHS which has started dinging automakers safety ratings for including substandard lights in their base cars and making you pay for modern lights.
If you haven’t driven a car with auto high beams it’s hard to explain what a difference they make.