Hacker News Reader

Comment by a2tech | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com