Why is America stuck with bad headlights?
caranddriver.com
caranddriver.com
I mean, hey -- i'm usually happy about automotive modifications that the police leave me alone about, but this aftermarket headlight trend is many times worse than a nuisance loud exhaust -- it can literally blind you for seconds during night driving.
Is this still a big problem? While I would have agreed with you, say, back in the 2000s when the whole "import tuner" craze was in full swing, I don't think this is popular anymore. The car mod scene seems to be close to extinct now, with whats left being a lot less crazy than those in the past.
In other EU countries they were however allowed up to a certain date (in Italy they are accepted only for vehicles built before 1993, and in the same date France made them not mandatory).
The yellow is not "a" yellow it is a very specific one, called "Selective Yellow":
Apparently it was to reduce dazzle and glare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_yellow
Especially true for midwest drives across long stretches at night where the brightness is much more annoying than in the middle of a city.
If the truck is lifted, the brightest points of the light can hit you from further away, worsening the problem.
It is also bad when someone is behind you with this setup, especially lifted trucks. Some cars have a rear mirror that can dim them to tolerable levels, but not the side mirrors. So you'll get flashes from them as you drive unless you lean forward or angle the mirrors away.
The US National Highway Transportation Safety Administration actually has a suggestion for eliminating the glare and reducing blindspots [1]
https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.dot.gov/files/blindzonegla...
What is worse about the LEDs is that they are sold as "compatible" to various vehicles, when that means they will work mechanically/electrically, but not optically (some actually try to put LEDs in the same spot as the filament). All of the units I've seen cause the car headlamp to put out light at higher angles than a halogen bulb will, causing more glare for opposing traffic.
No. Retrofitting Xenon bulbs is an expensive pain in the ass compared to dropping in some LED replacement bulbs for a marginal increase in light and little to no increase in glare or change in beam pattern because they're made to be geometrically equivalent to the halogen bulbs they replace (which they kind of need to be in order to work adequately in all possible applications for whatever bulb they replace)
At the very high end you can get stupid bright LEDs but pretty much nobody does that because they are expensive.
Most of the glare you see is from OEM headlight assemblies (regardless of the type of bulb installed) that were simply not designed with not blinding other people as more than a "check the compliance box so we can get back to optimizing for every other metric" sized priority.
I know I sound like an old coot but frankly I'm glad my dad showed me how to install/aim headlights and along with explaining the benefits of a working unmodified exhaust system and how it should sound.
Reminds me of the hotrodding chapter of John Muirs[0] venerable How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive [...] for the Compleat Idiot[1] that starts describing the interplay between various systems and how just throwing a hot cam into an engine and calling it a day is a bad idea. Basically - How to hotrod your engine:
1) don’t
2) if you must here’s what you really need to know
Letting anyone do whatever they want can obviously lead to problems, like headlights that blind people or parts that fall off and kill the person behind them. But overall, I think I like the world where people are free to experiment and create.
Kind of like how smartphones are right now.
The obvious question here is - if you make these features work without paying(assuming you paid for the car outright), is that illegal? After all, you own the heated seats - you just installed an extra switch to put them on.
Versus something like hacking a subscription for satellite radio, where the feature in question is the content the service is providing, which is easier to frame as illegal.
Then there's the case of hacking hour Tesla to enable autopilot. The hardware is there (like the seats) but the functionality is continually updated via subscription.
I look forward to the lawsuits, with the hope that the consumer prevails.
If you try and hack through the DRM on the controller, they might try and get you for copyright infringement on the software on the controller. But if you just write your own controller, things might be different.
I don't mind soft-locked features too much since it can be cheaper for the manufacturer to just install it on everything than to build two separate models; plus it can be nice as a consumer to still have those additional features available if you change your mind later.
*Well, there's been one case where a second hand Tesla lost all the extra features that were paid for by the previous owner and Tesla argued that the new owner had to pay again, but I think after media complained they backed off and reenabled it
Then get a guitar or a paint brush.
Before Fast and Furious, I lived through the slammed mini truck / monster car stereo (speakers, speakers, speakers) craze of the late 80s.
And before that there were many, many trends, like muscle cars, etc.
It's always been like this...
The car modification scene is only slightly younger than the car.
A dragstrip is a facility for conducting automobile and motorcycle acceleration events such as drag racing.
Although a quarter mile (1320 feet, 402 m) is the best known measure for a drag track, many tracks are eighth mile (201 m) tracks, and the premiere classes will run 1,000 foot (304.8m) races
But honestly, why these lengths specifically?
Many short races, for feet or horses, that started way back when are some number of furlongs.
Right next to the parsec, but only because of the Star Wars references :-)
It's also a good reason documentaries, classical and jazz music, and non-fiction books in all but self-help and cookbooks sell poor. I'd love to see a huge textbook covering pre-Calc through intros to harder topics like Real Analysis and Stochastics top the bestsellers for 22 weeks. But instead, people are buying the 5,431st political commentary about how we'll never recover from Trump unless we do everything the author says.
It worked out so well because it gave people a way to experience car modding and illegal street racing in their own living room. If people are getting their kicks from street racing games... maybe we should make more street racing movies.
I think the nost blatent was when Tokyo drift came out, the next NfS had drift races.
It al boils down to how much money police can get out of fines and how many licenses they can suspend, AND how easy they can do that.
If they lack measuring equipment, the fine is too low, police won't bother enforcing a law.
In Germany, headlight aim is checked at the 2-yea mandatory inspection, dito for exhaust stuff. Is that not a part of US checks?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_inspection_in_the_Unit...
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX%3A...
Here (Italy) you have the first check/inspection after 4 years (for a new car) and from then on every 2 years.
Apart from that, not sure. Top Gear was always pretty good when it came to car culture, it's just a lot of surface level "car fans" just follow their word and end up being the face of the trend.
If anything, they get their inspiration from across the pond. TG is an older man's comedy show.
Untrained people fiddling with their cars didn't start with The Fast and the Furious! If anything, this era marked the beginning of the end of all that.
The old timers "aged out" and into better, stock cars, and the young kids coming in could actually only do less with the available cars (modding anything reasonably recent is a frustrating and expensive task, and so were limited to things like headlights and exhausts).
When I wanted to put a small new lip spoiler on my car I got an insurance quote for 4x because of it. Suffice to say I left it stock.
Life safety is certainly a bigger factor with the headlights, but all other aspects are orders of magnitude more disruptive on the acoustic side. Having bright-as-sun headlights driving around town at 3am is not going to cause a lot of trouble for most residents (as they would be indoors sleeping peacefully). On the other hand, someone driving around at 3am in a turbo diesel truck with muffler delete may be able to single-handedly rouse your entire town from its slumber.
Which one of these actors has the most adverse net impact on society?
I suppose in terms of net impact to society, there's no way of deciding without knowing in advance if the hypothetical victim is Mother Theresa or Hitler, so it's kind of a wash.
But for me (and feel free to disagree), I'm going to err on the side of preventing a devastating impact to a small number, over a minor annoyance to many.
I think I spent roughly half the drive back with stars in my eyes from people in Audis and BMWs blowing by me with their ridiculously bright headlights. If I made the mistake of checking my blindspot at the wrong moment of glancing in the side mirror when one of them was blowing by me I'd be left half blind.
I don't know whether they were driving with their high beams on accidentally on a crowded expressway or if their lights were just that bright but it was a damned menace. Give me shittier yellow old style bulbs any day over that.
When people improperly load vehicles, especially when towing things like boats, the headlights tip upwards. You were probably seeing overloaded vehicles, trailers with high tongue weights because they pushed everything to the front rather than center the cargo over the axle. That pushes the back of the truck down and the headlights up.
1) No tolls roads
2) No mandatory vehicle checks
3) No traffic cameras
My state gets a lot of things wrong, but they get those 3 things right.
1. Pickups are comparatively very popular in the US.
2. The US has more stringent regulations for towing than the rest of the world; a vehicle rated to tow 2000lbs in EU often is rated to tow nothing at all in the US. [0]
I used to drive a Fiat X1/9, which is a very low car by modern standards, putting me on eyelevel with SUV/truck headlights. Preserving night vision can be more important than stereoscopy
brightness isn't the issue, precision is.
You can see this effect clear as day when it's foggy - every other vehicle with projector headlights are aimed down, at the road, yet Toyota's (and Corollas especially it seems) are very blatantly aimed up, and at best are exactly level (which is still incorrect).
Honda drivers, on the other hand, seem to leave their high-beams on as a hobby. Over the 100k miles I've put behind the wheel of my truck in the past year, I could count on one hand the number of cars that have left their brights on, total. You'd need both hands to count the number of Honda's daily.
In the country I live in you’ll get honked to oblivion if you mess with that and blind the other drivers.
We should be glad the kind of person who would go out of their way to endanger themselves and others with something as useless and petty as... retaliatory light flashing is on a bicycle instead of a 2 ton vehicle.
The people who give cyclists a bad name are never self-aware
The Astrolux MF01 was all but made for this. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32976932742.html
After that, as a pedestrian I'd rather have a full beam to the face than think a car might not have seen me, even if I'm safely on the pavement.
This sounds suspiciously like "There Are No Bad Safety Measures"
How are you at risk from a driver not seeing you, if you aren't anywhere near the road?
If a driver has to travel that far off the roadway to reach you, that driver's issue isn't low visibility.
Another term for "What It Could Be" is "What It Isn't".
Your comment implied that drivers who instinctively switch on their high beams to get a sense of a situation where they need more visual input are "jackwads" which I tried to highlight isn't the reason they're doing it.
Wanting to see more when you're driving a massive piece of machinery at decent speeds isn't something that makes you an outright asshole.
If they've blinded countless pedestrians over an extended period, then they aren't considering anything. Inconsiderate people are jackwads.
Occasionally (and in my experience it is only a handful of poor actors compared with the number of cars on the road), I'd take getting intense glare as a pedestrian if it works in everyone's safety.
Appreciate it's a different call for cyclists etc, but as a pedestrian I'd welcome the trade off more than drivers not using their full beams when they deem it neccessary.
Disobeying traffic laws in order to be nice is tricky, especially if doing so has an remote possibility to cause an accident. The blame will always be on the driver.
The xeon light addon for a porsche in 2013 was $2k.
Unfortunately those fancy LED setups are a headache for the rest of us drivers sharing the roads with those models, because they're also bright as hell from the factory.
Fortunately the tacky way Audi had implemented its rear-lights signalling wasn't adopted by the wider industry, and I think the VW group itself is having second thoughts about it. A rear-light should only inform me about the driving intentions of the car's owner, not visually distract me with its rear-life <marquee>-like implementation.
Really? I'd say about 10% of cars here are LEDs and an additional 25% are Xenons, and honestly it isn't particularly bothering. They don't blind you because the beam is pointed downwards.
> Fortunately the tacky way Audi had implemented its rear-lights signalling wasn't adopted by the wider industry, and I think the VW group itself is having second thoughts about it.
Not sure about that, they're rolling it our across VW models now, and Renault (or was it Peugeot) have started copying it on some models...
My bad then. At least I think they made the newer implementations a little bit less obnoxious, I can only notice them on Audis that are a few years old (like 2013-2015, even newer), on the newer Seats or Skodas they are not such in "your face".
> They don't blind you because the beam is pointed downwards.
Maybe the drivers around these parts of the continent are doing it wrong, thing is that driving at night has become particularly challenging when there's even slight traffic coming from the other way. And I don't think I'm that old (I'm 39) or with a particular bad eye-sight. It also doesn't help that I drive a small 1.4l hatchback while the majority of newer cars seem to be higher CUVs/SUVs, in which case them "pointing their lights downwards" practically means them pointing the lights straight at me.
I agree however that the sweeping led indicator implementation isn't really of value
People don't realize that with these lights, they put their own safety at risk.
They're bright but they're not pointing to your eyes because that's not allowed in Europe either.
If you stand in front of your car and look at its LED lights, then duck down and look at the actual beam, you'll realize the great difference.
Even normal halogen bulbs can be blinding to other drivers if they're aimed too high. That's why such aim setup wouldn't let the car pass the MOT test either.
But then we have TÜV and all kinds of laws around that.
Granted, I'm no expert on fog lights, so I could be misunderstanding the details of the situation. I've never owned them, so I haven't had occasion to know how they're supposed to work. All I really know about them is that they regularly blind me when I'm driving at night.
They may be great for the driver, but getting blinded isn't much fun for oncoming traffic.
> "When a car approaches in the oncoming lane, the 911's headlights dim around it while leaving the rest of the pattern bright."
And what if it's a bike in the incoming lane? Or on the separate bike path on either side of the road? Will it detect that?
Because too often, clever car technologies don't properly account for other traffic than cars.
Does the oncoming bike have a headlight?
My car doesn't have matrix headlights (since I'm in USA) but it does have a necessary tool. It has a camera which detects oncoming vehicles.
In my experience the camera works quite well. It dims my headlights more quickly than I can react manually. It also dims them when there's a lot of overall lighting (such as street lights).
I can't attest to the specific situation of a bicycle. Around here, riding a bicycle after dark is a dangerous thing to do.
And that's the exact thing that needs to change.
When I was a teen, I rode 10 km each way to school next to a very busy road. In winter, it was still dark. The combination of rain and oncoming cars would make me completely blind.
Even people who design bicycle facilities don't consider this. They'll happily install a bidirectional bike lane where contra flow cyclists are effectively riding against motor vehicle traffic. This puts cyclists on the wrong side of the headlamp beam.
They aren’t even good for the drivers themselves. The blue light kills your night vision and makes it impossible to see into shadows.
Car headlights (and road lighting) should have a limit on the maximum power at each wavelength, with very strict low limits in the blue part of the spectrum.
The marketing of blue headlights is based on almost fraudulently misleading claims about the visibility and power efficiency they’ll provide. They should be banned.
Without the consumer demand that Google/Apple Pay (and later coronavirus) created, we still probably wouldn't have widespread tap-to-pay.
Similar to stuff like the common free international roaming, SEPA is something that the EU massively fought for the consumers against the entrenched players.
Basically it pays to be backward with these things - you skip many bad solutions and can learn from others. Our bank system was reconstructed almost from scratch in early 90s so it's quite modern now.
I honestly can't remember the last time I actually used my debit card to buy anything. With tap limits of $100 per transaction and $200 per day, 99% of my regular purchases can be made through my phone. It's very rare I take my wallet out of the car.
According to our sales guys who say that US banks are the worst when it comes to new technology, Australian banks are the best apparently. Apparently there were some government initiatives to force the banks to use new technology, some really leaned into it and even changed entire management layers.
But are somehow fine with crappy magstripe easily cloned cards. Bit odd how they judge risk
Since it lacks a second authentication factor the compromise is to limit how much can be spent if the card is stolen.
The US could skip chip and pin if it switched directly to contactless mobile payments.
(Really!)
I'm not old enough to have had to do that anywhere else - 'Chip & PIN' was required in the UK from 14 Feb 2006; I'm not sure how long before that it became available/widely used.
Some places used to check IDs though.
We see this in other systems like NYC’s metrocard VS London’s Oyster. Metrocard was an early system that works reasonably well. Now the MTA is deploying a new modern system as metro gets near its planned lifetime.
I think the USA has been far more innovative with credit cards that give rewards. Many of my EU friends complain they can’t get more airline points, etc with their cards.
So did many other places.
> I think the USA has been far more innovative with credit cards that give rewards.
US credit card schemes charge merchants massively more, so yes, these fees can then be used to give "rewards". EU cards have lower rewards because the fees are limited by law.
It's not something to be proud of. You're paying higher prices as a result.
It’s weird though that 3x as many Western Europeans move to the USA than the other way around.
I think you do have higher incomes, generally, and a lower tax burden. Fewer government services too of course. Not sure that's much to do with credit card reward schemes though :)
The UK had well developed credit card infrastructure before Chip and Pin too. This is not the reason.
The US market was just massively more resistant to change, and was able to put a stop to the banks' liability shift tactics.
Apparently they pay with their phone. They scan a QR code and get the bill on their phone... or something. I've never experienced it myself.
But they always say that doesn't count. And I see why. You still gotta wave down a waiter, ask them to go fetch a machine, wait for them to come back, potentially sending them back because they split it incorrectly. That's not the same as scanning a QR code on the table, having it load up your bill, splitting it if needed, and making the payment. If that works as well as I imagine it to, that could all be done in the time it takes to wave down the waiter.
They're pretty neat! You can drive on a highway, have high beams lighting up signs but not dazzling other drivers.
This allows you to block out certain portions of the beam so you don't blind other drivers as they approach.
[1] https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1827/4457/products/3_03867...
My apologies if it sounded to you as something I was saying could realistically be done with projector headlights.
“Each of the 911's lighting units includes 84 individually controlled LEDs that allow the car to continuously morph the pattern of its beams. When a car approaches in the oncoming lane, the 911's headlights dim around it while leaving the rest of the pattern bright. The other driver doesn't get blinded, but you still have blazing lights on your side.”
Adding localized and very complex feature is likely very low on their to do list, especially as their RD spending is ridiculously low, and trending downward for last few years.
It was very short lived option.
> It's silly to call them simple because they lack some esoteric features
Esoteric to people buying used 10 Toyota’s (there nothing wrong with that btw). But standard in high end cars. I’ve listed only few that come to top of my head, but it’s very long list, from features, through tiny gadgets in interior, sound insulation, and many others
> while ignoring useful features they have that other cars don't, such as dynamic software updates
Exactly as I said, powerful computer.
Tesla is really good at computer stuff and drivetrain stuff. But they are very poor at rest of the car stuff. There’s nothing wrong with that - different people have different priorities for what they want from their cars.
But let’s not dismiss validity of the features, just because someone’s favorite toy doesn’t have them.
They won't do it though, because as you say Tesla does most stuff just as well, if not better, on their native UI. And they want to keep people in their ecosystem.
The main advantages of CarPlay on Tesla would be: 1) ability to install 3rd party apps, and 2) Much better voice support. But both of these are things that Tesla could implement/improve in their own software.
I quite enjoyed CarPlay in my Honda, it solved a huge hole. But I really don't find that same hole. The only apps I really used was maps, and podcast app. I have both in the tesla info-tainment section.
Would be cool if they opened the market for third party apps, could be handy for some stuff... perhaps someday?
I guess no reason that couldn't work. It wouldn't not anything about battery health, and it would require a cable which most people don't use, but it could work.
They destroy any natural darkness adaptation, which takes some time to set in again and then already comes the next car.
These super fancy lights don't give a shit about the sidewalk or wild life. To me they increase no security whatsoever and contribute mainly to the ongoing light pollution.
Probably they even decrease safety overall by randomly blinding humans/animals.
Studies/Exp needed.
https://www.design911.com/Porsche/Porsche-992--911--2019--/9...
The headlights are not that cheap. Expensive optics, expensive LEDs with carefully selected emission spectrums, cooling solutions.
Not for Porsche owners. They sell at a premium, all the time.
That sounds low. My Toyota's headlights are $1,200 each.
Also the quote I looked at was used, someone else here posted it might cost more like $5K each, new.
Your dealership may not tell you this because they're incentivized to sell you that 2k housing, but do some research and you will almost certainly find that you can replace the bulb for $50 or less.
Yes, because the vast majority of OEM head lamps are still not LEDs.
You must be thinking about HIDs.
OEM LED housings almost universally have no user serviceable access for their LED components, nor do they have standardized "bulbs". You can find plenty of videos of people 'opening' LED headlamps on YouTube [0][1] -- it is a destructive process. The housings are sonically welded with the LED components inside, and the only way in is by cutting them open.
While there are retrofit bulbs for halogen housing (made in the shape of halogen bulbs) for the aftermarket, no OEMs use these for factory LED lighting.
But you don't have to take my word for it:
1. Go look up any vehicle with factory LEDs on the websites of Sylvania, Philips, Hella, etc. You will find that they do not list bulbs for those lamps.
2. Read the owners manual or parts diagram for any vehicle with factory LEDs -- you won't find bulbs in the parts diagrams, and the owners manuals will explain that the housing must be replaced.
You get matrix light as an extra from nearly all manufactures in in Europe (or at least Germany). Certainly from all "premium" manufacturers but e.g. also from Opel or Volkswagen. In fact Opel (formerly owned by GM) was one of the first to introduce them.
The lights last the lifetime of the car.
>after the car dies
I see what you did there :D
It's not fair but it gives software devs an opportunity to bike-shed on the tech and clutch pearls over other people's behavior (god forbid the poors install $10 Ebay LEDs that aren't even as bright as the halogens they're replacing) so 300+ comments later here we are.
The article never mentions, but how does the Porsche detect oncoming cars and overly reflective signs?
If it involves a computer doing real-time image processing, I can certainly see why the US government might be cautious considering headlights are an important safety feature for a car.
I also assume a system like that would probably be very expensive. Is this just a luxury feature or are matrix lights actually common in European cars?
Couldn't that also have been said about anti-lock braking systems (ABS), if you go far enough back in automotive history?
I had to disable the sound alerts. If someone had told me how many exceptions make the alerts bogus, I wouldn't have believed it. Not a single time the alerts responded to a real danger. On the contrary, I was alarmed for nothing, creating danger as I nervously looked around trying to understand what was wrong.
Sensor that switched lights on or off was nice though.
Our 2017 Suzuki Kei car has a stereo camera system and it will brake if you’re about to run into a car stopped at a red light.
I hopr you don't say "band-aid" or "xerox"
It's relatively high-end, but it's rapidly trickling down - you'll find adaptive headlights on many mid-range models from Mazda, Ford and Volkswagen.
>I can certainly see why the US government might be cautious considering headlights are an important safety feature for a car.
I'm pretty sure it's just institutional inertia. Compared to a feature like adaptive cruise control or autonomous emergency braking, the risk of an adaptive headlight system failure is quite minimal.
My previous car in the sub €60k (2017) and my current in the sub €40k (2019) price category have automatic matrix headlights as well. Besides the usual detection of cars it will also turn off specific areas when signs are reflecting too strong or even completely turn off the upper headlights when you are on a road with continuous lighting, drive through a tunnel, drive through a city or town (GNSS and/or sign detection assisted I guess), it's really foggy and so on. While I had to manually activate automatic upper headlights on the previous car, my current car basically turns it on at start, no matter what time of the day, even when turned off previously. When it's bright it will basically turn off the headlights all together by itself and just kick in as needed. Really convenient.
Driving a lot at night I'd roughly guess from experience that about one out of twenty cars have automatic matrix headlights, maybe less. Anyway, I'd say it's common, but far from the norm.
Edit: As I drove to work today, one of the things that's not so convenient is that you have to keep your car clean or at least the smudge off the cameras. :^)
For now it seems more like an technical interesting concept than a feature. I do not like false negatives in an technology that could cause result in car accidents.
The speed limit sign detection is more useful as the false positives and false negatives is noticeable but mostly harmless.
My Jeep Grand Cherokee does this, auto-dims the headlights when oncoming cars or reflective signs appear. I assume it's just the dumb way, if something "bright" is ahead of me then dim the lights. I don't think you have to do a lot of "image processing" to single out the direction a very bright light is pointing.
The difference between between FMVSS and UN/EU regulations could also be considered a regulatory moat. In today's globalized world, I can't imagine that the moat is worth it anymore.
(Disclaimer, I work for General Motors, this is strictly my own opinion)
It's, well, a night and day difference. It's been 8 years and no one has noticed.
edit: Err, so I guess no, actually? But I think I answered what you mean, not what you said :)
one disadvantage of all of this cool headlight technology is that the modules often cost over $1000 each - painful repair cost for even minor accidents!
So, for no good reason, I had an econobox with OEM wood-look dash and trim, chrome handles, OEM gauges for oil pressure, voltage, and fuel economy, upgraded stereo and suspension, leather trim, etc. It's silly what kind of hobbies spring up when you're living in central Pennsylvania and maybe aren't using your free time as productively as you could be.
Point is, definitely check out the factory options available in your car's country of origin - but also make sure you know they'll definitely be compatible with the increasingly computerized systems you're swapping them in to, and make sure you're not doing anything that's going to end up failing annual inspection.
Years ago (`70s-90`s) when I built custom cars it was a pretty huge deal when the rectangular headlamps were approved. It created new ways to style the front end of a car, but we all were jealous of what they were doing in Europe with headlamp designs.
The new LED headlamps offer way more styling opportunities and better lighting, but it's not surprising to learn we're still behind Europeans in regards to this.
Also, I've had adaptive headlights on my subaru forever.
jesus christ you don't need to jail people because they used bright lights.
> because they used bright lights.
Why are people doing this in the first place. I don't understand.
It is not and should not be used as a punishment. This is ridiculous.
I don't think people are especially concerned about the exact punishment schedule here, they just want consequences that result in safe cars, much like with drunk driving laws.
Someone mentioning jail doesn't mean they want it as an immediate first-line consequence. It's a simplification, so please recognize that before crying 'ridiculous'.
I'm not going to take a hard position on it, but I'm at least mildly skeptical that jail would ever be appropriate for something that can be just as easily solved by progressive fines and revoking a license. Jails in the US are really awful, so they'd need to produce great results for me to prefer putting someone into one of them. And it's not clear to me that they even reduce recidivism rates for crimes of this nature any more than other alternatives.
We should be pretty hesitant to send people to prison. Particularly with the knowledge of how calls for increased "tough on crime" policing typically go in America -- well meaning people should keep in mind that advocating for the expansion of carceral laws often results in unintended consequences.
Also, have a choice of getting your car booted with some electronic boot that you can unlock after sunrise, or getting your car towed. You'll have to show up for the checkup anyways, so that's when you can drop the boot off.
Either way, imprisonment won't fix the problem, which is a faulty vehicle. The inconvenience of not being able to drive the car until after sunrise, along with a typical towing/booting fee, should be sufficient incentive to not drive with faulty lights, given how easy they would be for police cars to measure/detect with an inexpensive, small camera unit at a proper location on the police car, which then signals the driver about a suspected violation.
Passing a police car that doesn't have anything better to do, while you have your faulty lights on, should be common enough to make driving like that a risk too high.
Okay, so now we're talking about a completely different scenario that isn't confiscation.
Why am I getting downvoted for that? Jeez.
How can you possibly not know that. You are literally making them bighter so it would obviously be brighter for the drivers too. why do you think its illegal in the first place.
You're likely not thinking about if this is going to bother someone else or not. And most US law isn't even clear on whats street legal and whats not.
There are wishes for gross authoritarianism because US has problems with lesser, appropriate regulations. The way other countries handle this is periodic vehicle inspections - just like smog checks but with more points - which also measure from the lumens and angle of your headlights to whether your wipers work properly, failure of which bars your car off the public roads. If this was suggested in the US eyes would roll, heads would turn, nanny state arguments would be invoked. In the absence of reifying such moderate measures, people let go of their pent up frustrations of failing to be a cooperating society in the form of wishing imprisonment or worse onto each other.
Yet several states do this, including Texas of all places.
Since you don’t seem to have any statistics to go with your assertion that most of the bright lights are because of aftermarket installations, I have no reason to believe it over any of the alternatives such as:
- Lights being too bright from the factory (because some regulations don’t specific peak lumens). - Lights being misaligned from the factory (a small amount makes a big difference).
Or the most likely to me:
- People carrying a significant amount of weight in the back of the vehicle. This would be most commonly seen on trucks and SUVs, but could also be a smaller car with something heavy in the trunk.
Not sure on the authority of this resource, but they list the most common reason headlights would need to be adjusted as:
https://www.yourmechanic.com/article/how-to-adjust-your-head...
> In most cases, headlights simply slip out of adjustment over time. In fact, most headlights will need to be adjusted every few years. Here are a couple of reasons your headlights may be pointed at the sky: > > Reason 1: Too much weight. One of the most common reasons that headlights are not shining on the road or are blinding oncoming drivers is due to excess weight in the trunk or cargo area. This will push down the rear of the vehicle enough to tilt the front of it up, along with the light beams.
In a case like this a ticket or warning from a traffic cop would likely be sufficient for someone to adjust their headlamps, but you instead jump to jailing someone? That’s a bit extreme.
https://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/threads/great-info-on-th...
I'm sure I'm consuming cherry-picked media and if I went looking I could find the U.K. government with its pants down over here or Japan up to something silly but I have been wondering of late.
"Boring" bureaucracy like the headlights is rarely a significant problem. The idea that the government is fundamentally incompetent and shouldn't be trusted even to tie its own shoelaces seems uniquely American -- in Britain, if part of the government isn't working the people look for a politician to blame, usually either for interfering or cutting the budget.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news (centre-left, free to read)
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ (centre-right, parts behind a paywall)
And despite the MSRP, many trucks don't have them (not without buying the fanciest trim level).
Can't you just adjust the headlights?
Mechanic should be able to adjust them for you or search for a guide online or the device manual.
May need heavier duty springs in the rear suspension to accommodate the weight.
Automatic beam cutoff is overrated since it too ofent just is a bit too late.
I mean an old Land Rover Defender - a working vehicle that rattles and doesn't even have air bags. It still has a headlight adjustment wheel as it's a functional feature, not a luxury.
Cockpit adjustable lights have been required by law in Europe for about 20 years. When Xenon lamps arrived, auto-leveling was added as a requirement for them.
https://wiki.relexsolutions.com/display/MOR/Isengard+High+Le...
The manual adjusters on the headlight are not intended to compensate for daily variances in vehicle load.
The only equipment you need is a screwdriver, and the only knowledge you need is which screw to turn and a basic understanding of "that's too high" vs "that's too low". It takes ten minutes tops.
The point of real democracy (versus what I call model/book democracy) is to extract useful value from fallible individuals while preventing them to do too much harm (like seizing too much power).
The better questions are then:
* Is it getting worse?
* Are politicians more preoccupied with their interests than in the past?
* Is it because it is easier now to manufacture misinformation?
* Is it because people vote for parties and not for individual politicians?
* Is having less focus on individual character an inevitable result of polarization of society?
* Would more truthful and unbiased news coverage help?
* Would more education on the principles of civic life help people make better voting decisions?
* Is technology causing general disease of attention deficit and focus problem on the scale of entire society causing it to make worse decisions overall?
But our headlight market and rules are pretty ridiculous. Most "fancy" non-HID bulbs are a ripoff and actually make visibility worse, and it's also illegal to convert a halogen setup to HID. Combine this with the fact that some designs are just crap no matter what the bulb type, and we have a general market failure to understand the real performance of headlights. People think they can generalize headlight types, but it doesn't bear out in practice. https://www.consumerreports.org/headlights/are-hid-and-led-h...
Clicking a button or switching a lever with tactile feedback, immediate response that does exactly what is expected is vastly preferable to any smart system.
These matrix ones that add in adjustments for other cars and for signs are maybe a little too far on the curve for me as well. Anything using computer vision is not something I'd be excited about.
The more complicated a car is - the more training will the driver need. So standard drivers license at some point may not be enough.
That is amazing. And I suspect that one could incorporate more autopilot technology. Perhaps to better illuminate pedestrians, bicyclists, motorcyclists, and wildlife. Also perhaps police vehicles, identified through markings and/or tag number.
Blue led are equally vile. Really destructive of my night vision
https://www.mazda.com/en/innovation/technology/safety/active...
Forget low beams and high beams. All that needs to be regulated is that the headlights can't point to other drivers, cyclists and pedestrians at a too great intensity above N inches/centimeters from ground.
Set those intensity limits to safe levels, make NIST (or some equivalent organisation) come up with a national standard test to enforce them, and let car makers use whatever technology to make headlights as long as they pass that test.
Unless you're frequently driving at night, you'll be just fine with halogen or xenon lights.
[0]: https://www.motortrend.com/news/get-lit-adaptive-headlights-...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=rRHogyYXFiQ&...
https://jalopnik.com/a-tribute-to-the-most-un-appreciated-li...
But that could get especially interesting when you connect it to a self driving system. The car's AI could become a more active participant in 'looking' at things.
Here is a demo: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0OJjvYPV3oc
A quick look shows that they are an option in Opel Astras that start at 21390€ (inc. 24% VAT plus 2000€ car tax) in Finland and under 20000€ in e.g. Germany, though.
The median price of new cars is around 30000€ here. The most common models are Skoda Octavia, Toyota Corolla, Nissan Qashqai (all three start at around 24000€), of which Skoda Octavia is available with matrix headlights and the two others are not, if I looked correctly.
Most people buy used, though - ~85% of car purchases are used cars.
A quick look through used cars market at nettiauto.com seems to show that there are many Opel Astras with matrix headlights for sale starting at around 14000€, but not many others at those prices.
I'd be interested in more context on that.
I have encountered situations where I might need to operate the locks without being immediately in line-of-sight, like when I leave the vehicle before other passengers, someone else needs to get something out of the vehicle, etc.
The noise only happens if you want it to, anyway. All of the US manufacturers who add that feature only make it occur if you press the button 2x in succession.
Saving lives is less important than a companies bottom line.
Being able to make your car honk from your remote is magic to someone like my that always forgets where the car was parked. I’ve tried to see if I could turn that feature on on cars in Europe but so far, no luck.
There's security arguments for having it (i.e. confirming locking/detecting jamming) but pretending people cannot see you or otherwise hear you, but can hear a single honk isn't a realistic set of seemingly contradictory circumstances.
First press: locks car and flashes hazards, with no sound.
Second press within a couple of seconds: honks horn.
If no flash and no sound: a door is open and it's refusing to lock.
Most of the time I don't annoy anyone, but when I lose it in a car park I can get it to honk at me. Why is this so hard for other manufacturers?
They aren't red indicators, the car just flashes the brake lights. There's no difference for the observer between indicating and a dodgy connection.
I've never encountered a car in the US that honks when they're locked the first time -- but many domestic models honk when you lock them twice in quick succession. Many people like the feature, for audible confirmation that the vehicle is locked, or finding your car in a parking lot. Abusing the feature is also a suburban dad pastime.
> have indicator lights flashing in the same color as the tail-lights
This one is a safety issue, and even US regulators own data shows that amber lights are safer. However, the US does have a minimum lamp size regulation that most other countries don't. I guess the original idea was to allow the combination of the two lights in exchange for a larger minimum lamp size.
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/are-led-lights-damaging-y...
This stuff isn't new.
No, it's built on money. Sometimes that leads to progress, sometimes it doesn't.
It would be full of ongoing software bugs that can only be fixed if you pay for a $75 oil change at the dealership. Sometimes the headlight firmware will crash while you're driving down the road and somehow the owner will be 100% liable not the mfgr kinda like self driving car crashes. The module will be designed to crack the first time a piece of road gravel touches it and the module will cost at least $1000 and require disassembling the entire front end of the car to replace.
I'm just not looking forward to it.
Give me sealed beam lights that cost $20 and if they're not bright enough then give me more of them (e.g. 2013 Ford E-series).
They should be yellow, not red. And work independently of the brake lights.