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Comment by josephcsible | Hacker News Reader

This sentence stood out to me:

> Due to a software data set error, the affected vehicles were programmed from the factory after the Economic Commission for Europe (ECE) specs, whereas U.S.-spec vehicles need to conform to the requirements of the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS).

Presumably, if there were a way for the headlights to comply with both US and EU regulations, they'd just have them be that way everywhere, rather than having to deal with multiple configurations at all. So are the US and EU both saying that each other's way is wrong and too dangerous?

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There are some notable value judgements that are different between US and EU regulations.

I remember reading that the US car safety rules generally assume that the people in the car do not follow the rules, whereas EU regulations assume they follow the law and use seatbelts.

US crash safety tests don’t care about the damage the car does to pedestrians, but EU regulations do factor that in.

https://www.npr.org/2015/10/16/449090584/why-arent-auto-safe...

> US car safety rules generally assume that the people in the car do not follow the rules > US crash safety tests don’t care about the damage the car does to pedestrians

As a EU citizen living in the US, this makes perfect sense.

The quality of driving here is far lower, I often see vehicles without plates or temp tags and it's not unusual to hear about uninsured drivers hitting people.

It's ironic that such a car centric country naturally ends up with terrible drivers because of the low barrier to entry.

The US driving experience varies by state to roughly the same degree that the EU varies by country.

The parts of the US that are within about an 8hr drive of Mexico are like the US's poor eastern europe, at least as far as driving goes.

You might make it an hour in the northeast or southeast without a plate. The cops would see dollar signs like Mr Krabs.

Pacific Northwest also does not enforce any vehicle identification or registration laws. No license plates, different license plates, only one license plates, fake plates, expired car tax sticker, none of it is enforced.

Nor are moving violations.

IMHO, there’s diminishing returns in regulations that try to protect someone who actively doesn’t want to protect themselves. It just adds extra cost (R&D, complexity of design/manufacturing, different parts for different jurisdictions, different parts SKUs to stock, etc).

The upside? It probably saves the lives of some people so reckless they shouldn’t be driving.

And the pedestrians?

Pedestrians are uncommon in most of the US, and where they are common people are supposed to be driving slow anyway. If somebody is flaunting the speed limit and hits a pedestrian and sends them flying fifty feet down the road, the value of their car being ostensibly built for pedestrian safety is very dubious.

Fewer people will walk when infrastructure prioritizes drivers and makes it uncomfortable and unsafe to walk. This isn’t the only option.

Cars being built for pedestrian safety is one piece of that picture. As you note, impact safety falls into this category and provides limited benefits for collisions at speed. There’s a lot more to that story though, as we can see in societies that value pedestrian lives. Automatic braking and avoidance, driver attention monitoring, and speed limiters are all options. Add in safe infrastructure, safety enforcement, etc.

There’s a broad range of tools available to reduce pedestrian deaths. None are perfect, none apply universally, but we should consider all of them.

For various reasons, Americans broadly opted to live in suburbs with car-centric lifestyles instead of dense urban areas where walking is viable. Where I live now I'm about 100x more likely to encounter a deer than a pedestrian. This is the context needed to understand why Americans generally aren't interested in prioritizing pedestrian safety. Making pedestrians safer so people can give up their cars is just a bizarre proposal to most Americans. The American anti-car niche is very small, comprising mostly of terminally online people with anxiety problems.

For what it's worth, I did personally live in a city and had a pedestrian lifestyle for about 15 years. I never felt particularly imperiled; the national statistic for pedestrian deaths may seem spooky but some very basic precautions, like making a habit of looking both ways even when you have the right of way, eliminates almost all of the risk.

The cost of car accidents is extremely high so I doubt that you would ever reach diminishing returns.

There's a reason that driving safety is the #1 public policy when a country develops.

Pedestrian safety is one of the reasons it will be hard to ever sell the Cybertruck in Europe without significant modification. People who have imported them themselves have had to fit rubber strips on all the sharp edges, and I'd imagine that if they were to sell them locally the rules would be even more strict. The shape is inherently dangerous to pedestrians, particularly children.

US car “safety” rules are basically the the bigger/higher the vehicle you can afford, the safer you deserve to be.

Conservation of Momentum applies in every country.

And it turns into an arms race, with everyone buying increasingly larger cars to feel safer.

That is the point, zero restrictions on car size/weight/height and zero standards on driving licenses mean whoever can afford the more dangerous vehicle deserves more safety.

>> whereas EU regulations assume they follow the law

That isn't generally true as the EU favors driver assist technologies such as automatic emergency braking, lane departure warning, and speed limiter features.

Since the brightness seems to be the issue, the only way I his makes sense to me is:

The US limits the brightness to X, the EU limits the brightness to Y, and Y > X.

Porsche could just make every car globally use X, but they’re a luxury brand so they probably try to use Y where they can, even if it is a bit of work to differentiate between markets.

It's a significant difference. I doubt any manufacturer would want to limit their European vehicles to the American maximum:

> European lighting standards (UNECE) allow over two times the light output from high beam headlight systems as compared to the U.S. (Broertjes, 2018). U.S. compliant systems allow a vehicle maximum of 150,000 candela while European compliant systems allow a vehicle maximum of 430,000 candela (Official Journal of the European Union, 2018). This provides for gains in sight distance, but also increases the potential for glare to affect oncoming and preceding traffic when high beams are not dimmed.

And

> 3. European specification systems consistently provided more roadway lighting when an oncoming vehicle was approaching, or a preceding vehicle was close.

> a. Based on static target illumination data, the increase in roadway lighting could be as much as 86 percent (comparison of average European specification high beam to U.S. specification low beam).

https://www.aaa.com/AAA/common/AAR/files/ResearchReportEuroS... (scroll to at least page 19-20 for illuminating illustrations).

The low beams on newer US cars are already blinding.

Do people in the EU consistently behave politely and turn them off when appropriate?

The study is comparing "premium" headlights, which in the USA auto-lower for oncoming traffic, and in Europe auto-shade just that vehicle but leave the rest of the road fully illuminated.

I don't have enough driving experience between the two countries to compare driver behaviour.

> Do people in the EU consistently behave politely and turn them off when appropriate?

In the EU countries I usually drive in, yes they do. If they don't, you turn your own high beams on until their turn theirs off and generally they do it within a second or so, they had probably just forgot them.

One point here: nowadays most new cars have auto high-beam which turns off almost immediately when it senses light coming from the opposite direction. Some higher-end models have matrix led lights which allows them to have the high-beam on even when there's oncoming traffic and they turn off just some parts of the beam to avoid blinding the opposite driver.

Most new cars in Europe are using LED arrays that shut off specific zones based on oncoming traffic. Like a hyper specific "auto high beams" feature.

> shut off specific zones based on oncoming traffic. Like a hyper specific "auto high beams" feature.

and for a fraction of second they are indeed blinding, disorienting, and irritating other drivers and pedestrians

People don't turn off low beams at night, why should they? They turn off high beams even if everybody forgets them on sometimes but that's inevitable.

Low beams are getting too bright. I never turned my rear mirror into the anti glare position so often as in the last couple of years.

I'm not sure why you'd bother trying to converse with me if you thought I was asking about people turning off low beams at night.

Plenty of people turn on their high beams and don't bother to manage them. I guess automatic dimming systems should help with that. Looking a bit, they don't necessarily default to on in US vehicles, which is likely to minimize the benefit.

The auto-dim systems don't always work, either. My mother-in-law's Toyota has this feature, and it seems to work when it wants to.

Same with a 2020 Honda Civic. Those auto-dim headlights shut themselves off in a timely manner about 50% of the time.

No, cars in EU actually have periodic inspections that include lights test.

I wish we had inspections where I live in the US. We don't even have emissions tests. Some of the vehicles around me are just horrible.

Yes. Do people not reliably dip beams in the US? that must be horrible!

The problem is, lately you can't tell if they are normal or high beams. Something about the cooler color and sharper quality of the LED lights maybe? Often as I curse an oncoming driver for not dipping their beams I notice in my rearview they turn them on after they pass me. So they were low beams to begin with.

> The problem is, lately you can't tell if they are normal or high beams.

Properly leveled lights should cast the beam below the horizon: any person seeing the headlights situated above the their height should not be blinded by them. I suspect the etymology of "high beam" is because they project higher to allow seeing further (and blinding everyone in the path)

I remember when driving in the EU (France) that most cars allow you to adjust the angle of the beams, so you may have more light but it's often pointed down.

Unsure if that was just the few vehicles I drove or if it's EU-wide.

The adjustment you’re mentioning is most likely the knob for angle adjustment which are used if driving with a heavy load in the back. Some cars has suspension which levels the car automatically, for those the adjustment isn’t necessary.

Angle adjustment is useful even when not carrying a load. Angling the beams down onto the road at dawn and dusk provides good be-seen visibility without creating glare for other drivers.

Cars without manual angle adjustment have lost that courtesy gesture and just drive around glaring all the time.

Brightness of two headlights is not a single floating point number.

There are regulations governing the spread/angle, the minimum brightness, the maximum brightness, how much an object at X distance is illuminated, whether the angle of the beams is too bright in the vision of oncoming drivers, etc.

and most manufacturers are guilty of dieselgate style skirting of regulations while upping the ante in the war to create the brightest most blinding headlight

This recall is for the high-beams. And yes, the EU allows brighter high-beams than the US.

This seems to be the extent of the recall. But there are other differences between the EU and US. For example, on what the headlights are illuminating. US headlights shine more light off to the right of the vehicle than EU and I think it is due to the assumption that roadside signs are more often lit via headlights/refection in the US vs sign-mounted lighting in the EU.

I think most people agree that EU regulations allow for significantly better headlights than US regulations allow. But those better headlights must be paired with an expensive adaptive system or they become terribly dangerous. If you compare "cheap car" headlights in the US vs EU they are probably very similar in performance.

Porsche is also based in the EU so starting with a design that meets EU specs and then adjusting export models as needed is probably their procedure anyway

Bear in mind that matrix lights are the norm in EU on high end cars while in US they are prohibited. I bet that explains the brightness: you can have overly bright lights if they are matrix while obviously that would be detrimental in regular headlights.

Things like matrix lights used to be prohibited on new cars in the US.

This has subsequently changed: https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/nhtsa-allow-adaptive-dr...

Oh, that's good news!

(Why do I have a feeling that all the ways I can come up with to compliment the US for this achievement sound like irony?)

It's kind of meh news at this point. There's a ton of blinding vehicles on the road in the States, and it is getting worse at an accelerated rate, and even if fancy matrix-ey headlights became the norm it will take a Very Long Time for the old stuff to get cycled out.

Up next, let me tell you about that time that we held onto analog AMPS cell phones for years longer than any developed country that I know if, and how when we did finally begin to transition to something digital we made sure that we failed to standardize on any one format and made all of them as incompatible with things like European GSM as we could.

Oh yeah, tell me about it.

> held onto analog AMPS cell

*cough* faxes, anyone? *cough*

But also, since it's a software-addressable issue, and because this process is likely such a headache, I wonder if in a couple of years they'll have a version that picks its headlight configuration based on your location. You'll drive over a border at night and do a slight double-take as your lights change their beam width or something.

Presumably, if there were a way for the headlights to comply with both US and EU regulations, they'd just have them be that way everywhere...

Unless someone in the marketing department has determined that headlight brightness is a selling point for 0.001% of customers, in which case they'd configure them to the maximum allowed in the region.

>So are the US and EU both saying that each other's way is wrong and too dangerous?

Real life disagreements on minor technicalities between competing bureaucracies are not zero sum or conducted in breathless hand wringing internet rhetoric. It's more like a disagreement on a FOSS mailing list.

I believe EU allows directionally controllable projector headlights (my description, I don't know the official name). These can be brighter because they can be directed away from oncoming traffic. The US, in contrast, is lagging in approving this technology and puts an absolute limit on the brightness.

I'm not surprised there's a disagreement. I'm surprised the disagreement is both sides saying "our way is safer", rather than it being one side saying "this safety benefit isn't worth it" and the other saying "yes it is".

> I'm surprised the disagreement is both sides saying "our way is safer"

That's somewhat common for US/EU safety disagreements. Here's the canonical example, from back when the TTIP was still seriously being considered: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nadiaarumugam/2012/10/25/why-am...

The problem isn't the disagreement in specifications. It's the poor German quality control that doesn't prevent these mistakes from happening. This wasn't a significant problem when the parts were physically different for different markets and the assembly line would ensure the wrong parts weren't present.

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