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Comment by blacksmith_tb | Hacker News Reader

I see quite a few searing LED headlights that don't blind me because they're angled low enough, I think the biggest problem (so to speak) is when they're on towering pickups and SUVs. I suspect there's no good way to angle the beams on those to allow their drivers to see the road without also frying the retinas of normal-sized vehicles, cyclists, and pedestrians. There also seem to be quite a few iffy aftermarket LEDs, which apparently don't always allow for much fine-tuning when they replace halogens.

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LEDs are often straight swapped into housings designed for halogen bulbs. Doesn't matter if it's a tiny sports car or a huge F350 truck, replacing bulbs this way to going to throw light where it shouldn't be. For vehicles with headlights higher up from the road, they're more likely to end up shining in the eyes of other drivers, but it's still a problem of wrong bulb, wrong housing. Larger vehicles can have LEDs that have a beam pattern that casts light the appropriate area but this usually means a whole new headlight assembly instead of a bulb swap and even then, many of the aftermarket products aren't designed with property beam patterns in mind.

While there are guides available on adjusting headlights, they can only help so much when there's a bad combination of LED bulb, halogen housing, and high headlight height. Merely angling the housing downwards won't solve the problem of improper equipment combinations. Wish places like AutoZone offered free or inexpensive a beam pattern analysis service like they do with checking batteries and error codes. Lots of people don't even know their bulb swap is causing problems for others.

This is especially an issue with non projector housings.

Wait, are you saying aftermarket LEDs are road legal in US, no strings attached?

Throughout Europe it's either straight prohibited to retrofit LEDs in place of halogen bulbs, or it requires special certification where beam patterns are checked.

For things to be illegal the laws have to be enforced…

Sadly this is not the case with headlights and most of things in the US… unless youre a minority, then you cant even walk down the street without being worried.

To the best of my knowledge there are no DOT legal LED bulb retrofits. There are some entire housing units but not swapping just the bulb. Whether or not your local law enforcement / inspection scheme checks for this or not is another matter

Theoretically things like that are supposed to be restricted to code but in practice it seems like enforcement ended a couple of decades ago. In the 90s, I knew guys who got tickets for having window tinting which was too dark or off-brand headlights but those are incredibly common now, and it appears that DMVs stopped checking for them at inspections and the police ignore it unless they’re looking for an excuse to search the car. If you’re a white guy in a vehicle which doesn’t radiate poverty, you’re probably more likely to get hit by lightning than stopped.

The policy is probably the de facto assumption that driving is a right: the United States has been rebuilt around the need to drive everywhere and the entire system tends to implicitly assume that anything which would impede someone from driving is unconscionable unless you get to the point of a serious collision or fatality.

> DMVs stopped checking for them at inspections

The vast majority of states don't even have safety inspections, and some have recently discontinued them.

Yeah, it’s just wild to me that anyone can say that’s how you save money. Each serious accident costs more than a couple of full-time DMV employees.

It's not for the government to save money, it's to make transportation affordable for poor people. Some of the states that require inspections do it for almost free, because they delegate the task to private mechanics to do, and they charge for it.

It’s been explicitly billed as a cost savings in a few places I’ve lived (nothing is easier for a politician than bashing the DMV without mentioning that the parts voters don’t like are ensured by your legislative decisions) but if access to the poor is essential, driving is already so heavily subsidized that we could have some kind of assistance program. Most of the people benefiting from lax enforcement are not poor - those luxury trucks and tricked out cars are a middle-class hobby - and the resulting injuries aren’t free to treat.

Ehh, I feel like if I go to a poor neighborhood and I see a lot more minor inspection issues than I see lifted trucks in suburban areas. Rust perforation, bulbs out, bald tires, worn bushings, bad shocks, missing panels, etc.

This is the collective genius of everyone driving around looking at their phones. The government realizes that worrying about vehicles’ mechanical state is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

I mean, we’re a big country, we can do both. There’s also a strong correlation between people who are unsafe in one dimension making bad choices in others so things which are easy to enforce would be useful for re-establishing the idea that use of public roads is governed by laws.

"The policy is probably the de facto assumption that driving is a right: the United States has been rebuilt around the need to drive everywhere and the entire system tends to implicitly assume that anything which would impede someone from driving is unconscionable unless you get to the point of a serious collision or fatality."

They take away driver licenses all the time in the US though. DUIs being the most notable, but even getting enough tickets can result in losing your license, or having it suspended. I know at least a dozen people who lost their license at some point.

Auto repair stores sell a lot of 'offroad use only' equipment that people use on the roads. There's no effective enforcement for proper headlights. You're unlikely to be stopped because your lights are too bright or pourly aimed. Many (most?) states don't do a periodic safety inspection, and if they did, you could swap in stock headlamps for the day and then back to your super bright things.

> you could swap in stock headlamps for the day and then back to your super bright things.

That's why it is penalized by driving license cancellation in some countries. And people do get stopped for too bright headlights, because it's so easy to notice and check.

There was a big NYTimes article about this a few weeks ago, and somebody in the comments complain that the bright white LED headlights were ruining the proximity sensors on their Volvo and they couldn’t install optical filters without voiding the warranty. To me this seemed weird cause I thought those things worked on IR. I’m wondering if there’s some sort of CV solution to this? I don’t see how narrow color temperature of LEDs would affect IR sensors, etc.

Leds can output 275nm-950nm.

IR is between 780nm-1mm.

These aren’t exact numbers.

Probably something in that overlap was damaging them somehow. Or it might be something totally different and the person had misdiagnosed.

What I’m uncertain of, is if the led is intended to produce a certain color (white, blue) how much it would be emitting on the IT spectrum.

Example: https://toshiba.semicon-storage.com/us/semiconductor/knowled...

And most people who lift their trucks don't angle the headlights to downward compensate.

However, the lift is done to compensate for something else.

why can’t Hckrnews have a laugh react

It’s because headlamp housings are really expensive at like $500-$2,000 for mostly plastic.

So someone just trying to make it easier to see at night cheaps out and spends a fraction for a LED bulb replacement for a few hundies, tops.

You can buy brighter halogens but they burn out much faster.

I personally suggest everyone save up for the housing and do it proper if you’re gonna do anything. At least try replacing your current halogens first because they do dim over time.

Plus halogens melt snow with all that waste heat :)

> when they're on towering pickups and SUVs. I suspect there's no good way to angle the beams on those to allow their drivers to see the road

This is one of the main reason why I hate trucks. Their "I will walk on your face" makes their high mounted lights right at the level of my normal-sized car's rear view mirrors. When approached from the rear, this is blinding enough that I can't tell the difference between a truck and someone with full beams on. Same goes when crossing them. If it's raining or foggy, those new white lights are outright dangerous.

I'm wondering if they could simply mount them lower so that it's at a normal size car.

>I'm wondering if they could simply mount them lower so that it's at a normal size car.

They certainly could, but they're not going to because that's not the look that truck buyers want. They want to look and be intimidating.

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