US safety regulations make it difficult to automakers to add adaptive headlights

Here, Headlights are automatic. Imho a matrix LED is at work. And it illuminates wonderfully the surroundings and helped avoiding physical contact with animals, that might have crossed the street. Sometimes, on bumby roads, i get the occasional flashing back to me, or on Autobahn some trucks are bothered by the light. If true or light is only brighter than usual, i can not judge. These things are registered, so i hope they are just brighter than usual.

I suspect that they also drive around with their high beams on too.

It’s easy to tell on common older vehicles that have separate high beams.

It’s pretty common that people do this with one low-beam out, but blinding everyone to avoid a fix-it ticket is annoying.

Headlights haven’t gotten much brighter, many LED equipped vehicles actually put out less than a really good Xenon from a decade ago, but they have a cooler color temp. Also, lower priced vehicles with LEDs don’t often have the self-adjusting leveling systems that are/were common when HIDs were only available as an expensive option or on pricey cars.

Combing Xenon-like or exceeding brightness, cooler temp (appears brighter to human eye), a lack of self-leveling with poor factory alignment and you get our current situation.

I see three major categories of blinding lights on the roads in California:

New cars that are really bright and with appropriate beam shape/cut-offs, but annoying on hills or because of the taller cars you mentioned.

New or not-so-old cars where the driver is using the wrong light settings. That is fog lights and/or high-beams in inappropriate conditions or sometimes the opposite: somehow having daytime running LEDs at night instead of proper headlight activation.

The aftermarket retrofits which have none of the appropriate beam shape/cut-offs or projection. This can be a bit like the daytime running LEDs above in being diffuse but much brighter and often obviously anachronistic on some older car I know is from the basic halogen sealed-beam era. But it also includes trucks with various "offroad" lights being inappropriately activated on streets.

And there's nothing we can do about it. The aim of the lights can't be adjusted. Unintended consequences.

On the other hand, why do we have a new car? Because the old one got written off. Why? Because one of those gigantic SUVs whose hood is at about chest level, with way bright headlights was tailgating and blinding the spouse from behind so she pulled over to let it pass. Only to have the driver lose control (it was winter with some ice/snow on the road) and hit her on the rear corner. If it wasn't for those high-mounted, blinding lights none of this would have happened.

Insurance companies should encourage it.

I gradually slow down under such conditions of limited vision.

For reasons that are inscrutable to me, people ride track bikes—lacking brakes—on the streets. It's such a thing to the point where people will buy track-style bikes that include brakes and remove the brakes, even though they never ride at a velodrome.

Hard to argue that this rule breaking is a problem when literally millions of people saw the rule breaking on literally billions of occasions before the violation was noticed.