(Apparently this has been successfully challenged in court as free speech though lol https://www.myimprov.com/flashing-headlights-in-florida-prot... )
Not that the contents of the message should be germane (in my opinion) when considering whether a specific act of speech should be considered legal or not.
Under the strictest scrutiny--applied when the law is restricting the expression of a viewpoint or opinion--it doesn't matter why the law is there; free speech wins. Under lower scrutiny, as seems applicable here, the government must show it has a "rational basis". That's what allows them to, say, require you to communicate your intention to turn via a turn signal. I believe that rational basis test is what's failing here.
* Strict scrutiny - The Government must prove there is a compelling state interest behind the challenged policy, and the law or regulation is narrowly tailored to achieve its result.
* Intermediate scrutiny - The law must serve an important government objective, and be substantially related to achieving the objective.
* Rational basis review - A challenger must prove the government has no legitimate interest in the law or policy; or there is no reasonable, rational link between that interest and the challenged law.
While I don't believe the Supreme Court has taken up a case of light signaling, it is likely that the Court would apply strict scrutiny due to the clear First Amendment considerations. If so, thus the government would need to prove that it's narrowly tailored solution to a compelling state interest. It would need to answer questions such as: is it okay to say flash your headlights for road hazard? Would the state prohibit the defendant from telling others at a gas station about the police officer? Etc. I'd suspect that it would be a hard case to win for the Government.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Carolene_Prod....
[1] https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/law-and-life/challenging-...
Oddly though, no one in Southern California holds Arizona drivers in high regard. Quite the opposite. Best I can tell they're the western equivalent of Florida drivers.
Edit: I do actually see this on the road all the time where I live. Just saying.
Easily 5/8ths or more of every vehicle I pass at night has their high beams on, and in areas without fog lines it gets old in a hurry - and dangerous.
[1] a road with lots of turns, not one where the wind is blowing
My MDX does it, and they have had that capability since at least 2017.
Press release about the feature I am referring to: https://ir.gentex.com/news-releases/news-release-details/new...
Some can, though I have no idea on how common it is. My 2013 Dodge can do this. Unfortunately, it's also pretty terrible at it, resulting in a lot of on, off, on again, not quite flashing. e.g., a slight bend in the road, it doesn't seen anyone if front, turns high beams on, only for the road to bend back and all of a sudden your brights are shining in someone's face as the road bends back again. Sometimes, I've seen even changing lanes be enough for it to turn brights back on again. It also doesn't seem to give as much consideration when following someone as leaves them on way too close for me.
I live in an urban enough area with plenty of street lighting anyway, so I tend to use the auto high beam feature almost never (it can be toggled with a position of the turn signal lever). I do, however, use the auto-on lights in general, though. Nice to just not have to worry about turning lights on (or off).
I've also been pulled over before for flashing my brights at a police officer. It was entirely unintentional, though. I was a relatively new and young driver (17 or 18 yrs old at the time) and I was driving an older vehicle that still had a foot operated switch for the high beams that tended to stick.
Driver A is used to vehicles with manual headlights and always turns their lights off when they get out.
Driver B is used to "everything is automatic" and touches nothing when they get in.
And I don't mean this in a, "I'm a luddite and wish cars were simple" type of way. I seriously think the number of controls on a vehicle (and burden of the owners manual) is so great that it is causing safety issues.
My car has more controls for the lights alone than my first vehicle had for everything. Literally.
"Automatic" features like headlights were supposed to make us safer, but I think that is backfiring as it is causing cognitive overload and making people complacent.
As someone driving a 2021 Subaru who grew up in a 99 Integra and an 01 Civic. I don't see this at all? The controls are extremely familiar for the lighting, except my new car has a no-friction option: I turn on the "Auto" setting and it automatically puts on DRLs or full lights for me given the lighting conditions. It even turns on my lights for me when I pull into my parking garage at midday.
How exactly could this be made less complex?
I have never noticed this, fingers crossed you didn't Baader-Meinhof me. The feature to aim the lights where you steer and auto-dim high beams when traffic is approaching and re-activate them works quite nicely for me as well, so I would consider the headlights to be a great strength of this vehicle. It is crazy to get into my partner's mid-2010s sedan and laugh at how bad the lights are at nighttime compared to the perfectly aimed and calibrated Subaru lights
On the other hand, that mid 2010s sedan's headlight system will age gracefully - there are no aiming servos to fail or autodim relay output to stop working or such thing. It's just lights with a switch to turn them on or off.
Increased complexity also implies increased maintenance and often more troublesome failure modes when something does fail.
My older vehicles had 3 controls for exterior lighting: parking lights, headlights, high beam. They were simple on-offs with feedback that indicated their current state. If people couldn't see your car, you couldn't see your gauges.
My 2021 Honda has SEVEN pages in the owners manual dedicated just to the headlight operation -- not counting the several other sections it calls out for related information. Some sections are called out as US specific and some called out as Canadian model specific.
Let's take just the high-beams for instance:
Flashing the high beams is a different physical control than turning them on. Activating the auto-high beam functionality is somehow not a separate control, but is done flashing your high beams, and there is a not-very-clear symbol in the instrument panel that indicates the current state. This means that when you flash your high beams, you are also changing the current state of the auto headlights. If you flash it an even number of times you will keep the same state, if you flash them an odd number of times, you change the state. Furthermore if you hold the stick in for 40 seconds, you disable the auto headlight feature entirely. If you hold it in for 30 seconds, you turn it back on. Yes, there are two independent levels of "on" and "off" respectively just for the auto-high beams.
It works perfectly fine when you know what it's doing, but it isn't something that a person would automatically know if they were someone who started driving when you turned on headlights by pulling a knob on the dash.
Besides that one specific gripe, there's 160+ pages dedicated to just to controls and the instrument panel alone.
Anyone who reads a modern 600+ page owners manual will learn something. The problem is that people don't, and sometimes the thing they didn't learn is important.
I read nothing and intuitively understood my car's controls, this is what I also agree should be the clear state, and it seems to me in some sense it should be legislated to prevent what you describe. It is an interesting point though, should each vehicle manufacturer be obligated to put a light stick with some exact set of controls for the headlights in?
The annoying thing about that design is, if I want to turn my high beams on manually, and the car decides that a street light in the distance is a vehicle, it will ignore my request to turn on my high beams when I push the stick forward. I then also have to set my primary headlights to manual mode in order to override the car. This requires turning the knob at the end of the stalk which is not backlit and therefore not legible while driving at night. This is one area where I like the Honda design better: I can always turn my high beams with one operation.
I think the page count is relevant because it is indicative of complexity and is likely inversely related to the number of people who read it.
While I am sure you probably do understand the controls on your vehicle -- I think it is important to note that the people driving around with lights in an improper state at night are also under the impression that they understand their vehicle's controls. They're just mistaken.
I personally wish licensing and enforcement was more stringent. But this is not politically possible in the US.
It's an Outback for what it's worth, but... High beams work directly by pushing the stick forwards. I haven't experienced it denying such a request, only correctly toggling off when traffic is both oncoming and within a reasonable distance, but if it did behave incorrectly in this way, I would simply pull the stick back and push it forwards to re-activate high beams. I don't think there is any complexity in managing state with this implementation, it seems inherently obvious to me it would be this way. I am very surprised with everything else you've written here because it seems quite extraneous.
In the Toyota that I had, if it thought there was an oncoming car, asking it to do the same thing again wouldn't result in a different outcome. Maybe Subaru's system is tuned better, or maybe my driving conditions are an edge case.
Either way, this was just an anecdotal tangent to support my above point that vehicle controls are more complex than they used to be. What was once one single boolean value is now a logic tree containing four boolean values ([auto headlight system engaged][vehicle detected ahead][vehicle speed within operational parameters][highbeams commanded by driver]).
Why wouldn't the result of the action the second time be based on exclusively the stick's position and the current state the vehicle is in? Then it is a pure function of time. If they truly mixed up previous states in there, and somehow it's aware that in the history of positions it was at this position and at that time it rejected your request so it will also reject it now, that's braindead and you should phone Toyota and scream at them
My car's headlight's current state is a pure function of time T and position P. That's my mental model and I haven't observed deviations. I will look at these manuals later perhaps to understand if they really argue there are more stateful factors than this
On the other hand, we have legally required boilerplate sections like "how to decode tire ratings" that take up 20 pages, so there's definitely useless bloat.
BUT, and this is a BIG BUT, it sometimes fails, and at the worst times - like when it is drizzly & foggy at night, in a tight bit of road and a lot of wet pavement glare from the oncoming car — so the workload is already high with bad visibility & grip, and now I have to ALSO flick the lever and move my eyes to the dashboard display to check whether or not I got the lights to the correct state (it may unpredictably finally work and my action goes back to high beams a half second later).
I keep being lulled into giving it a few more chances, but I'm pretty sure it'll get turned off for good. I already reliably switch the hi/lo beams at a subconscious level with near-zero mental workload, so I'm better off just letting that instinct work by feel, rather than randomly having to engage another higher-level attention task at particularly high-workload moments.
This is a Ford and I read that they had this same feature about a decade ago and had to remove it because it just wasn't good enough. It seems that they're a lot closer, but not enough.
Something like the uncanny valley of tech features - almost good enough makes it really bad?