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Comment by deburo | Hacker News Reader

Available in Europe since 2006? Why did it take so long for the US? LED lightbeams are so bright that high beams is almost unbearable for opposing cars.

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This feature is available indeed but I don't feel like it's significant improvement - sensors are too slow to react, too imprecise and moreover drivers seem to rely on them too much, are lazy and don't care about others - for example high beams should be disabled before other car ahead is already visible on winding road , same goes for hills and multitude of other various scenarios where automatic sensors and software just doesn't work. Tbh it seems that this is another "arms race" just like with car size/SUVs dominance and this arms race can make driving at night really painful experience

Oh. That's depressing. Maybe AI-augmented cars will perform better in that regard.

Yes they can be faster, but personally I don’t find them too bad. Half kilometre away the opposing beams are noticeable but not blinding you, yet some drivers blink theirs mostly just to warn you. Matrix headlights is whole next level.

People similarly freak out when you back up too quickly into them, because you have a reversing camera on.

> People similarly freak out when you back up too quickly into them, because you have a reversing camera on.

Much worse, your car freaks out nowadays. Twice I've had my car apply ABS while I was backing up, while I was fully aware of a car behind me but not in my planned path.

> your car freaks out nowadays.

yes, I almost had a crash in a rental because it freaked out.

Car in front of me is stopped at a light. I'm rolling towards it, well aware of the situation and ready to break in plenty of time.

suddenly a big red light is flashing on my dashboard (like as big as the spedo) and a loud alarm goes off.

Huge distraction.

Hell, some SUV low beams are already obnoxious at night...

US auto regulations are extremely conservative on the lights/signals front, have been for a long time. Some European car designs in the late 20th century were compromised when brought to the US because the headlights had to be made worse (in an aesthetic sense) even though there was no safety reason to do so — Citroen DS was one of these.

And maybe they should be conservative, but I don’t see how anyone can argue that it should take a decade to get something like this approved (or formally rejected).

Largely because we have a long inversion of how government should act. It should have never needed "approval" in the first place, government should have to seek to ban a product, innovation, etc based on their own creditable evidence the thing is dangerous.

Instead of we adopted a position of everything being illegal until it is blessed by a regulator, it is in effect guilty until proven innocent.

Until we put government back into the proper context innovation will continue to be inhibited

> Largely because we have a long inversion of how government should act. It should have never needed "approval" in the first place, government should have to seek to ban a product, innovation, etc based on their own creditable evidence the thing is dangerous.

Uh, no. There should be a well defined standard of what light need (light area of this and that size or at least this or that brightness) and can't (low beams blinding oncoming traffic etc.) do, then let market work within those limits. The regulation should have actual research behind it. Pretty sure that's how it works in EU.

Then if for some reason behavior of lights on the market causes problem, the standard should be revised, not ban random products for breaking rules that haven't existed when they were created (aside from extreme cases I guess)

Ford had to petition the government to switch from sealed beam headlights to composite lights by claiming they couldn't meet fuel economy standards without them. The truth was they just wanted to use them on the then new Taurus.

It was another 5 years before you could use a shape other than rectangular or round, even for composite lights. I believe the Dodge Viper was the first US car to get them.

Oh, so that's why old US-spec European cars look so weird.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/Mercedes...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c8/1988_560...

Oh crazy, never realize that either. That SL does look better with round ones though...

>US auto regulations are extremely conservative on the lights/signals front, have been for a long time.

Unless it involves red turning signals.

They’re extremely conservative there as well. Just very bad.

Same as side mirrors, apparently the technology of using curved mirrors to reduce blind spot has yet to make it across the pond.

I agree the NHTSA is way too slow, but damn am I glad they're doing the work! I love that they're checking everything carefully and doing the research before approving new designs.

They are not doing their work, their work is to allow highest available safety standards to be implemented, not to block progress. Their inability to allow curved rear mirrors killed god knows how many US people. You have decades of statistics form ie Europe to back it up, same as for this topic (OK decade and a half for lights).

I suspect its rather a typical lazy government bureaucratic hell case.

The NHTSA is regulating all the wrong things. How many people have been killed by wrong headlight shape? How would you even test that regulation? Meanwhile, people are free to go 100mph in cities, with the trivially demonstrable deaths that causes for no upside.

> How many people have been killed by wrong headlight shape?

Hopefully very few because standards keep ineffective or dangerous designs off the road.

As for testing, they have that very well covered.

https://www.nhtsa.gov/document/laboratory-test-procedure-fmv...

They could regulate cars to make sure they're incapable of going faster than a certain speed, but people seem to want faster and faster cars for some reason and I'm guessing most accidents aren't happening at > 100mph speeds

>Available in Europe since 2006? Why did it take so long for the US?

It probably wasn't invented in America, and therefore the US government refuses to believe that it exists.

This is why the US is happy to allow half-baked self-driving tech from Tesla, but won't allow automakers to adopt anything that became standard overseas first.

Did any European automakers ask for the rules to be reevaluated? Or did they simply sell cheaper headlights for the same price and pocket the difference?

From the article, in 2013 Toyota initially petitioned for the rule to be reevaluated and later both Volkswagen and BMW asked for an import exemption.

It seems to have been approved only in 2018 in Canada, so we aren’t much better. It’s also merely an (apparently expensive) option, so we will have to live with careless high beam drivers for a while.

4 years ago is 4 years better

only rented cars in europe for 10+ years before moving to the US, so I did not have a reference point. But I had no clue the headlights were different in that aspect and just assumed all of those SUVs etc had theirs ill adjusted. Its a lot of fun being blinded constantly on a busy road while driving at night :|

Brightness and angle should be regulated. Ability to adjust angle should be considered for regulation as well.

The article is old...dates back to February of this year. Furthermore, I haven't done digging, but I'm still trying to figure out the difference between what my older vehicles do vs what European cars do. It seems to be related to beam detection. My vehicle already dynamically adjusts brights vs "low" beams: if a car comes over a hill, it "sees" the headlights and shifts to normal beams.

My car does a pretty decent job and turning off the brights when it detects oncoming traffic, is this February Ars article saying that is illegal? If so, why is it implemented in my Hyundai?

EDIT: Based on other replies it appears that the difference is beam forming, exactly. My headlights simply go from high to low. It is pretty odd that would be banned, but okay.

There are also lights that adjust to slopes, such as when cresting a hill. And lights that greatly widen at T and cross intersections so you can see where you are going to turn too.

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