It’s like either 30-40% of folks are driving with their brights on or (what I’m guessing) is that the average brightness of headlights is going up.
Is that a true hypothesis?
It's another example of regulatory capture where owners of pickups and large SUVs have free rein to dazzle lower folk.
Interestingly lights on heavy trucks are regulated in height and aim so that they don't dazzle other drivers.
Poorly educated 'libertarians' like to call everything the fault of regulation or government whether applicable or not.
It's just asshole or clueless drivers with no regard for others on the road.
I still drive a sedan while it seems like 99% of the world has moved on to driving monster trucks and mini school bus sized SUVs. I hadn't considered the impact of the height difference.
There are a ton of super annoying people driving with their high beams on at night.
One of my many pet peeves actually…
It does amuse me to no end to light people up going around curves, keeps me awake on the long nighttime drives.
On the pickup trucks/SUVs my theory is people change the ride height but never get around to adjusting the headlights so they aim too high and blind people. Plus towing and/or loading down the truck bed raises them so same effect.
The Corolla is the litmus test of if a given technology has hit the mainstream in cars. Once upon a time LED headlights were too expensive to ever be standard on a car that basic, so halogens, which tend to be dimmer and at a less glare-prone temperature were standard.
Now they've gotten cheap enough that one of the most simplified cars on the market features them, so it's a given that you are seeing many more of them than you used to.
Bonus: HID lamps, which were the popular "blindingly bright" option back in the day were legally required to be self-leveling in some markets. In my 4 series for example, the HID lights are on something like a gimbal and can aim down if the car is pointed up, and side to side depending on which way the steering wheel is pointed.
LEDs don't have that restriction, and these self-leveling assemblies aren't exactly cheap to design and manufacture, so naturally higher volume cars are skipping out on them. So now the most common cars are most likely to blind you.
(there's also manual leveling switches in some cars, but most people barely know what their temp gauge means, so the odds someone both knows what it's for, and knows when to adjust it, are incredibly low)
I can't ever make out the grill after being blinded, but it seems like GM trucks (perhaps the 2500 series?) also have exceedingly bright lights.
Other vehicles seem to have "are those low or high beams" bright headlights, but not enough to "old man yells at clouds" about them.
Well that's part of the answer. If enough of us flash the cars with annoying lights then maybe manufacturers will get the message.
Some headlights are always bright, moreso than 10-20 years ago. Probably due to the recent surge in prevalence of LED assemblies.
It also does seem like the quantity of clueless people driving with the highbeams on 24/7 is on the rise.
Do people not know how to operate their vehicles? There is no good excuse for the highbeams to be on in excesse.
As a pedestrian, Teslas really suck with their auto-highbeam tech. It's friggin' blinding. Every. Single. Time.
The auto high beams also turn on every time you stop and start the car.
The first thing I do when I start the car at night is disable them.
The auto high beam does sometimes turn off when the car detects oncoming traffic.
If it's any consolation, when autopilot is enabled, it also force enables auto windscreen wipers, so it will wipe my dry windscreen with a low frequency and a screetchy sound as it ruins the eye sight of oncoming traffic.
Eh, not quite even... would you do us all a solid and toss a few thumbtacks into your seat?
(In any case, a lot of people around me very clearly have their fog lamps on in non-foggy conditions, which I don't understand.)
You are getting older, and your ability to adjust to changes in light gets much much worse in your 40s onwards, but modern LEDs are also brighter, colder, and there are also a lot of poorly regulated after-market halogen→LED conversion kits doing the same to older cars.
Yellowed glasses are a thing. I've used them for shooting in winter but people swear by them for night driving. It's obviously important not to dim your vision too much though.
Wonder if this is why several countries in Europe have yellow head lights on their cars.
Very jarring to see in person.
Furthermore, the rearview mirror had a new feature to automatically "dim brightness from cars behind me". Which confirmed for me the problem of bright lights in general.
And finally, and most annoyingly: the Honda would automatically turn on the brights if it was night and it thought there was no car coming towards me. This feature was so buggy I had to switch to manual lights like 1992.
Writing this I am so happy I gave up cars.
I think we're all casualties of a sort of trench warfare. Luxury brands started putting High-intensity discharge (HID) lamps in their high-end cars in the 1990's. HID lights put out more blue than halogen light bulbs. This led to the association of blue-white headlights with expensive cars. I suspect the marketing departments of the automotive companies told their engineers to use blue-white LEDs when these first became available.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-intensity_discharge_lamp#...
No one had the answer to my AskHN: What prevents the automotive industry from using safe LEDs? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27334405
Another problem is people retrofitting LED bulbs into housings that were designed for halogen bulbs. The fine print on these bulbs usually say "for off road use only". The LED bulbs have a totally different light output than the halogens. The housing for the halogen bulbs are designed with the assumption that there will be a filament at a precise location. LEDs retrofit into a housing designed for a filament usually just blind everyone on the road.
I've also seen people driving around with LED light bars turned on. I don't think it's legal to add supplemental light to a vehicle.
I have a few self-defense strategies to protect my eyesight. Mainly this is wearing yellow glasses whenever I'm likely to be exposed to blue-white LEDs.
(minor edits)
Pickups and SUVs don't have this, for reasons... I guess the regulators don't want to piss off the large majority of the voting public, who feel entitled to blind other drivers?
Freight trucks are hit and miss, but generally not as bad as the suburban dad trucks, yes.
1. low convertible drivers 2. standard sedan drivers 3. pedestrian, and 4. SUV drivers
At least top and bottom of the range, preferably at least one in the middle.
Something to stick on a street corner. Would want to anonymize data: license plates and faces. And want to share designs so others can do the same.
I'm not sure there's much of a business in this, but a hacker and passion community possibly. I've seen noise pollution sensors made by passionate folks, sharing plans online. The technical architecture of the company (to self-sustain in monitoring or addressing this) would have the same shape as PurpleAir.
Mount some on your own car. Other car too bright? Mirror deploys to return same light to sender.
Not saying the other comments are untrue, just adding my own experience :)
Headlights are brighter and aimed higher.
Paint and signs are getting more reflective. And there are more of them.
In my opinion all this extra blinding light has been making it progressively more dangerous to drive at night.
(Then there's the occasional cars with weird LEDs that rapidly flicker like looking at a screen with the wrong refresh rate. Not sure what that's all about.)
Makes me wish I could buy some nighttime sunglasses.
Corey Hart - Sunglasses At Night (Official Music Video)
You are getting older (and it takes your eyes more time to adjust), and headlights are brighter (because, well, why wouldn't my drive be less comfortable when I'm legally allowed to blind you?).
Yeah, car manufacturers are prefering look to safety now.
And bicycles are also very bad, mostly for pedestrians, because they point their super bright LED straight up instead of downward.
You can easily check yourself by comparing lumen values on the car accessory websites.
Fucks with my astigmatisms.
Nicer for you, but maybe not for the oncoming traffic