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Comment by serf | Hacker News Reader

groups like Audi/Porsche/BMW have trouble bringing their fancy LED setups to America due to laws pertaining to high / low beams -- meanwhile every Jack and Jill on the road has glaringly illegal aftermarket Xenon bulb setups in refractor headlight housings rather than proper projectors, blinding the hell out of everyone on the road, and the police seem to do nothing about it.

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.

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The worst thing to happen to America was Autozone and Fast and Furious. Cheap aftermarket modifications to your car being sold to people with no knowledge of what they were doing but wanted it too look cool cause they saw it in the movie. Its led to years of teenagers with no training putting things on their cars that turn them into obnoxious spectacles on the road.

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.

> 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

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Muir_(engineer)

[1] https://www.amazon.ca/dp/1566913101

I think it's great that it's relatively common to work on a complex piece of machinery that you use daily. You get the joys of understanding how a large system works and being able to tweak it according to your desires. It could easily go the other way, where every subsystem is DRM'd and only licensed professionals were allowed to touch it.

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.

>every subsystem is DRM'd and only licensed professionals were allowed to touch it

Kind of like how smartphones are right now.

BMW is doing it right now - some of their US cars will come with features locked behind a subscription model. Want heated seats? They are $99 a year, you get a free 14 day trial to see if you like the feature. Same with adaptive cruise, with more advanced media features etc etc. Their argument is that vast majority of new BMWs in US are leased, so it's "better" for customers to lease a basic model for less, and then pay extra for features you want.

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.

Because they're physical features already installed, it'll probably be okay. Will void your warranty, but nothing the MFG can do. Same way retuning your ECU to make more power works.

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 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.

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.

Having features like heated seats tied to a subscription crosses the line. It's one thing to install them in all cars as an additional feature that can be enabled, but charging a subscription for it is ludicrous.

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, Tesla has started some time ago - the most basic model 3(the one you can only order over the phone and in their centres) comes with heated seats disabled by software and you can pay Tesla to unlock it for a fee. But at least once you did they stayed unlocked forever*

*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

> But overall, I think I like the world where people are free to experiment and create.

Then get a guitar or a paint brush.

I guess I'm really old.

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...

Don't forget the folks in the 40's taking those old trucks and turning them into hot-rods.

The car modification scene is only slightly younger than the car.

My uncle told me stories about living in rural Michigan, and how the first thing that people did when a road got paved in the area was set up a quarter mile marker.

Car culture in SE MI is truly a thing of beauty and wonder.

For non mid west born ppl,

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

US people and their weird measurements :P

But honestly, why these lengths specifically?

As much as we like to point fingers over the Atlantic, here in the UK our roads are mostly imperial except heights and widths which are in both feet and metres, because lorry drivers from the Continent kept crashing into bridges!

1/8th mile = 1 furlong.

Many short races, for feet or horses, that started way back when are some number of furlongs.

Now THAT is an interesting information, never heard of "furlongs" before!

It's a fantastic unit if you need to convert distances from metric to imperial, because 1 furlong = ~200 meters. So if you tell someone something is half a kilometer away and they ask what that is in imperial, you can quickly respond "2 1/2 furlongs".

A furlong, the approximate distance that an average draft horse can pull a single-bottom plow before needing a rest, is my favorite measurement because it sounds so grounded in reality. It's just how long the furrow is.

Right next to the parsec, but only because of the Star Wars references :-)

Snails are rated in furlongs per fortnight.

They are even (in our wierd measument system), and reasonable distances for different engines to run out of power/traction/other factor and thus not accelerate as much.

Important also to note that a quarter mile is the unit at which one quantize one's life.

The Fast and Furious franchise is, not unlike the late 2pac, a reflection of the community. A percentage of America has always been modding their cars and an even larger percentage enjoys dreaming about modding cars - the films draw from that, not the other way around.

That's the reason the Fast franchise is some 8+ films in and still doing $500M+ box offices.

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.

How is Tupac relevant?

Artists being blamed for causing preexistent negative phenomena that served as the inspiration for their art. Tupac's lyrics were blamed for being a cause of violence while in reality they were a reflection of the violence that was already there.

ah good ol’ C. Delores Tucker (you’s a motherfucker)

...."got money for wars, but still can feed the poor"... #merica

It's a mutual thing. The Fast and Furious franchise draws from the car culture in America, but the car culture in America also draws from the Fast and Furious franchise. If the director had chosen to highlight slightly different aspects or de-emphasize certain aspects, car culture in America would be different (though stray too far, and F&F is potentially no longer the same mega-hit).

In other words, it’s the age-old question: does art imitate life, or does life imitate art? The answer, of course, is “yes.”

The street races in San Jose looked pretty much just like F&F long before the movie came out.

How did 2pac get in the conversation about aftermarket car modifications?

What struck me back then, was how Fast and Furious and Need for Speed influenced each other.

I remember some Underground or Underground 2 cutscene or run that was identical to a run in FnF; I always assumed that they did a collab.

It makes sense, the game devs saw how well the FnF movies did and wanted a slice of the pie.

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.

The really cheap and blatantly illegal headlight craze took off with Amazon and Ebay. Brick and mortars like Autozone have to abide by some standards.

This is much more down to improper enforcement. If having illegal headlights meant losing your license, people would think twice about it.

This so much!

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.

> 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

In Germany, headlight aim is checked at the 2-yea mandatory inspection, dito for exhaust stuff. Is that not a part of US checks?

Most states do not have the equivalent to TÜV or MOT.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_inspection_in_the_Unit...

The joke is that in the US, vehicle registration is handled by the states, and while some states have strict inspection requirements, many states have none whatsoever, or only check emissions. You can still get ticketed for unsafe equipment, though.

I've never had my car checked when I did registration. Other states have done it. For a while the next city over did some emissions testing, but it was well known that it was hard to fail and they eventually got rid of it. Rumor is the company making the equipment made out well...

Here in South Africa, inspection happens when you buy a vehicle. After that, it's not inspected again unless you sell it to someone else who will have to take it to roadworthy inspection. The test is pretty good and covers everything from suspension to oil leaks. It does however not cover emissions, as far as I know.

Depends on what state you live in. In my state there's absolutely no routine inspections whatsoever on automobiles, where I grew up there was yearly comprehensive safety inspections required - that being said, you only get a ticket if you fail to get an already registered car inspected.

I think it is more or less the same in all EU:

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.

Here in the UK Top Gear has a lot to answer for in promoting an utterly moronic car culture (and I like cars).

How so?

The almost wholesale shift of obnoxious drivers moving from BMW M cars across to Audi's RS line after Top Gear started mocking the former and talking up the latter was a fast, pronounced change.

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.

Where I live we have countless boy racers with farty exhausts obnoxiously informing everyone at all hours of their amazingly unique and original ideas about how to modify cars. I pin the blame in no small part on Top Gear for spreading a dumbed down car culture to the masses. That's not to say I didn't enjoy watching it. I just don't enjoy what it contributed to bringing about.

That's nothing to do with TG. They've been doing that for decades. Top Gear's mods were stupid, and no teenager uses it as the motivation for modding their car.

If anything, they get their inspiration from across the pond. TG is an older man's comedy show.

> Its led to years of teenagers with no training putting things on their cars

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 worse thing that happened to driving was we were convinced it should be fun. Sharing public space with big, heavy, dangerous boxes of metal should never have been been spun as fun.

And yet, it continues to be fun.

Pep Boys was a thing for like 20yr before the first Fast and Furious movie came out.

In the UK we were doing Jap-style and had Max Power long before F&F. Fast and the Furious might be responsible for widening the pool of people though. Although in my experience, the modding scene didn't actually massively increase in size from what I saw.

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.

Wasn’t there a whole 1950’s musical about this?

My parents live near Lake Michigan (although decidedly NOT on the lake) and I made the mistake of visiting them last weekend and driving home on Sunday night when everyone was migrating from their lake house back to the city.

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.

Lake country + Sunday night = high beams.

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.

All it takes is aftermarket lighting with the cutoff in a different position and nobody willing to bother reaiming the lights. I see this a lot. The low beams are notionally not too bright but they are pointing forward without any effective cutoff.

Isn't it checked? In my country it is part of the standard check during the mandatory technical certification of the vehicle every few years.

The only thing i ever have to do in California is a smog check. I drive regular cars and I take care of them, but I never had to test for anything other than smog check here to renew the registration.

Checked? Here in Michigan we have 0 car inspections. No smog, no safety check. Its great. We have 3 things that almost everyone in the state can firmly get behind:

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.

Inspections don't really improve road safety much and they screw the poors right into the arms of predatory lenders so many US states don't have them.

This reminds me of the “not sure if bumpy road or literally everyone in the oncoming lane is flashing their lights at me” phenomenon.

Made even worse by levelled or lifted trucks with headlights that aren't even properly adjusted in the first place.

Whats funny to me is those leveled trucks get going at speed the wind pushes their noses up making them squat down the road. Blinding everybody in the process.

Most of the European Audi and BMW range is equipped with adaptive LED or laser headlights that selectively dip for oncoming traffic; self-levelling headlights are mandatory on new cars in the EU.

Nobody tows with an Audi or BMW in the US. People here tow with an F150, which is equipped with an incandescent bulb in front of a chrome-plated plastic reflector.

People tow small boats and jet skis with their cars. HN just never crosses paths with those people because they're both above and below the income range around here.

Yes, I’ve seen it. Comparatively very few people in the US tow with cars compared to the rest of the world. For two reasons:

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]

0: https://oppositelock.kinja.com/tow-me-down-1609112611

In my experience it's more like a lifted GMC Yukon XL that came with incandescent bulbs but has had them swapped out for something 10x brighter and angled perfectly to hit the rear view mirror in any car less than 50 ft off the ground. God, I hate SUVs.

Not just "new cars" - a 2001 car that I drove had xeons with the leveling already mandatory. And it's checked at the bi-yearly technical inspection, and the police can forbid you to drive the car further if it's not working and they catch you (not sure if all around EU, definitely in Czechia and Germany).

And with all that fancy auto-leveling and auto-dipping they have snuck in a massive increase in practical brightness levels which is extremely blinding to those for whom the systems don't auto-dip.

The worst are trucks (like mass cargo, not Ford F), they have the headlights placed way too high and usually drive with high beam always on.

Pretty much all the EU; although the 1st three years after new car purchase there is no technical inspection.

From experience in Cyprus, they don't care even a little bit over there.

Xenon, not Xeon :)

The pirate eye patch is a legitimate solution for this.

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

Even the came-with-the-car headlights are often dangerously bright, no need to assume they're aftermarket.

I assume they're aftermarket when they're on an early 90s economy cars, they're two different colors, and the refractor is scattering the light up past street signs -- not when they're just bright.

brightness isn't the issue, precision is.

Part of the problem stems from the fact that as cars age the headlight lenses oxidize and the original bulb's light becomes insufficient to light up the road ahead of the car. Some drivers are fixing the problem by swapping in much brighter aftermarket bulbs as opposed to replacing or resurfacing the lenses. It's easy to verify this by looking at the headlights of the offending cars after they've parked.

There are a few products that clear that up. I remember my mechanic doing it for me and it does make a noticeable difference. I would think any auto parts store would offer it to anyone buying bulbs as an up-sell.

In my experience at least, the cars I always have issues with are new ones with stock headlights, not modded cars. There are far less modded cars of course, but they always seem to be aimed lower to the road because they are lower cars in general.

I've noticed newer Toyota headlights's are really bright and angled too high up. That or Toyota drivers leave their brights on more.

It's funny you say this, because I got a lot of flak on Reddit for saying the same thing.

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.

Isn’t there a knob to control the angle of the projectors? So that if you have heavy cargo at the back you can adjust the angle?

In the country I live in you’ll get honked to oblivion if you mess with that and blind the other drivers.

No car I have ever seen in the US has this.

Technically yes, but you need a screwdriver to turn it. Just as well, most people wouldn't know how to turn it and make things worse.

Uncommon in the U.S., sadly. My Jeep had that feature for the Canadian market, but not here, weirdly.

Two of the five cars my family has owned in the last 20 years have had that feature.

>groups like Audi/Porsche/BMW have trouble bringing their fancy LED setups

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.

> 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.

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...

> Not sure about that, they're rolling it our across VW models now,

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.

The light is also blue tinted, so when they drive past gates or anything that makes the light flicker on and off, I always believe it’s the Police.

People in Europe drive on much tighter darker roads and drive more modern versions of said vehicles and I've noticed no such issue. Aftermarket and self maintenance 15 years ago yielded significantly worse conditions.

I agree however that the sweeping led indicator implementation isn't really of value

> 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.

People don't realize that with these lights, they put their own safety at risk.

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.

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.

The funny thing is, German tuners complain the other way. Why are factory cars allowed to have a certain noise level (or something else) and I am not allowed to do the same thing with after market parts.

But then we have TÜV and all kinds of laws around that.

In my area, the police cars themselves have blinding LED beams.

Somebody read that visibility saves lives but assumed brightness = visibility

re: "aftermarket xenon bulb setups"

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.

IMO it’s WORSE. The new craze are the LED light bars. I had one on my old truck for off-road use, but there are idiots that drive with them turned on driving down public roads. They’re so bright it can take 10+ seconds to see normally again.

LED light bars should immediately result in an attempted murder conviction.

We also missed out on the yellow sodium headlight craze in Europe during the 80s or 90s. Headlights in the USA must be whitish in color. Anyone know why?

As far as I remember that didn't happen in all countries. I remember seeing them when going on vacation to France (Corsica) in the mid 80s, but never at home.

No, it was only France, where they were mandatory.

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":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_yellow

Yellow headlights used to be a legal requirement for driving in France and we had to put yellow film on when driving there until the EU standardized white headlights.

Apparently it was to reduce dazzle and glare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_yellow

I have no idea but could be related to use of the color yellow for caution / hazard lights, construction vehicles or turning lights.

The 2000s are just starting to reach the Dakotas and the rest of the Midwest.

You will see them far more often on large trucks in the USA these days.

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.

I've started to see some of those lifted trucks (almost always white, for some reason) with LED strip arrays mounted into the front grill fascia at just the right height to glare directly at the eye level of passenger cars.

I’ve given thought to getting one of those strips of LED lights and mounting them on the back of my car. Then we can see whose lights are brighter.

> Some cars have a rear mirror that can dim them to tolerable levels, but not the side mirrors

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...

That's OK if you have a reverse camera but will make driving or parking in reverse absolutely impossible if you don't. Clever suggestion, otherwise.

You can lean to one side or the other if you need to see the sides of your vehicle when reversing.

There are cars where all three mirrors dim. It was a hard requirement for my last car purchase because I live in truck country.

Its becoming more of a problem as aftermarket LEDs get more popular. The xenon kits were only installed by people who wanted to be 'cool', but LEDs are getting installed by people who want to save money or effort in replacing their halogen headlamp bulbs.

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.

>Is this still a big problem?

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.

Don't forget people with raised pickups that now have their headlights above the height of your eyes. I've had to point my rear-view mirror at the ceiling with those behind me.

Also fog lights being left on at all times. When I'm being followed by an SUV with a relatively high chassis and a set of fog lights that the owner blithely keeps turned on, it can be very nearly physically painful for me.

Fog lights? Mine are mounted and shine low. I thought they all were so they don't bounce back into the driver's eyes when there is actually fog.

What's low relative to the height of the driver in the kinds of vehicles that typically come equipped with fog lights can be quite high relative to the kinds of vehicles that typically don't. Also, a lot of fog lights don't, from what I can tell, seem to be anywhere near as focused as headlights.

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.

When I am cycling at night, I sometimes carry a flashlight to shine at the windscreen of people who can't not blind me.

Are you sure temporarily blinding someone coming toward you in a vehicle is a wise tantrum to throw?

Eh, as someone who rides a road bike pretty often, this is par for the course for the "community"

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

I'm not trying to be petty, or throw a tantrum. I'm not talking a 10000s of lumens here. It's just the only sure fire way to educate the driver about the problem fast enough. It usually works out that we both stop shining lights in each others eyes, and and pass safer and wiser.

Yes. A four-wheeler will just go on straight ahead in a stable and predictable manner when I stop giving control input. But a two wheeler will quickly come off course when I lose visual feedback because it's a dynamic balance that requires continuous recalibration. It's a very good idea to signal that you are getting blinded.

These are very good points.

Also appropriate for the jackwads who compulsively & pointlessly slam on their high-beams, whenever their headlight field captures a pedestrian (who's on the sidewalk, way away from the road).

The Astrolux MF01 was all but made for this. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32976932742.html

You say that, but I was once driving on a dark, national limit road through the forest one night - and had turned off my full beams because I'd just passed a run of cars coming the other way. I caught a glimpse of a pedestrian and instinctively turned them back on just to catch a glimpse of a (complete f'king moronic) person in full black pushing his bike (with no reflectors) in the road talking to the pedestrian.

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.

People not wearing reflectors while wearing black is so silly.

>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.

PSA: A situation is what it is, not what it could be.

Another term for "What It Could Be" is "What It Isn't".

We have a number of tools at our disposal as drivers to minimise bad situations. Personally I think overuse of high-beams is more valid than under-use in quite a number of circumstances (and exceptionally bad in others).

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.

Those points weigh in favor of someone who thoughtlessly high-beam'd a pedestrian, for the first time - which is reasonable. Also reasonable is considering their actions and realizing they gained no meaningful amount of safety by blinding a pedestrian.

If they've blinded countless pedestrians over an extended period, then they aren't considering anything. Inconsiderate people are jackwads.

I misworded my point on that bit, I more meant I'd rather take a full-beam to the face when I'm on the pavement if it means the driver is aware of the hazards around them.

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.

I would start with lobbying politicians to change the traffic laws and driving license exams that explicitly tells drivers (at least in my country) to not turn of the headlights for cyclists and pedestrians.

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.

Aren't fancy lights exactly what you want ? The projector LEDs have detection and selectively turn off beams aiming at others.

The base price of the car in the article is $217k. I would expect it to have superior lights.

The xeon light addon for a porsche in 2013 was $2k.

having had several german cars in the past, it's not that hard to import euro-spec headlights and install them, but your jaw might drop when you see the price.

I just put yellow tinted glasses. No problem at all. Also modern cars have a lot of light inside the cabin so it is harder to get blinded.

I challenge you on the assertion that this trend of illegal lighting is many times worse than obnoxiously loud exhaust.

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?

Make it 9pm rather than 3am. I'd say the headlights are worse.

Let's see, what's worse? Being rudely awakened, or being maimed/killed by a driver who literally cannot see?

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.

Being rudely awakened too many times in a night results in a driver who cannot drive safely the next morning.

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