I feel the same way in America, I think there should be stricter regulations on how bright a car's headlights are allowed to be for it to be street legal. Wouldn't mind having a cap on blue-light levels in addition.
First, SUVs are really tall... If you're in a sedan (or worse, a Miata) and get close enough to an oncoming SUV, even well-aimed, legal lights are going to feel bright because they're pointed down at you.
Second, there's a decent sized market for cheap, unapproved HID/LED kits for older cars. They're often not aimed correctly.
This, so much this. I'm having no issue with new cars and their LEDs. The aftermarket kits that are installed on 1994 Swifts and Passat B5s are not at all configured properly. They just throw it on the car and "yay i can see more" and sometimes I even think that they are using their high beams. But no, it's just their incorrectly set up lights.
funny, its the opposite for me. brand new SUVs are by far the worst offenders,
I feel awful about essentially high-beaming everyone unless the road is flat.
That's normal. Low beams are aimed low and often have a illumination pattern reducing light over the median, high beams are aimed high and uniform illumination. Very often, they're the same intensity.
I wonder if it became normal around the time everyone started complaining headlights were too bright
I think complaints about headlights really started when different bulb types came out. HID, projector, and LED bulbs all cast qualitatively different light than the ubiquitous tungsten halogen bulbs that preceded them. A lot of these put out a lot of blue, especially in the fringes that I find very objectionable, and the lumen output seems to have increased quite a bit, as well as the spread.
Halogen bulbs were tightly constrained by power limits and output requirements; but the other types can hit the output requirements at well under the power limits, so they can cast a wider field of view (which is nice), but may need to be brighter in more of the the wider field of view to hit the output requirements in the central portion, and that additional brightness is more likely to cause glare. Of course, all of our eyes have aged as well which makes night vision more difficult, especially with light variance. I remember my parents sometimes complaining about other vehicle's lights when I was young and thought everything was fine, but everyone was using halogen lights back then.
[1] For older US cars, it was more about intensity as the masking sucked. I don't think it's that relevant to this discussion but you can look up "DOT vs Euro headlights" if it interests you.
This is the biggest problem. Even talk SUV headlights from the factory must meet standards for masking off light and the angles at which they can illuminate.
But when people buy LED retrofit kits and jam them into reflectors not designed for those bulbs, the reflectors don’t mask properly. Light spills everywhere.
I would bet that nearly all of the “headlights are too bright” complaints are coming from people seeing LED retrofit kits.
In EU most DMV equivalents check headlights yearly to catch illegal illumination envelopes (along with other safety-related aspects, brakes and whatnot).
Whether it’s done carefully or not, I doubt, though I did fail one year for headlight lenses too cloudy, requiring a fix and reinspection.
It's just not done though. There's a list of like 10 items to check, and you are only allowed to charge like $12-$18 for the check, so corners are cut, and your average 18 year old who was given the job of doing the inspection does not care, and enforcement is more concerned with the shops willing to give you a sticker for stuff that is outright criminal, like not really working brakes.
Heck, people will reinstall stock parts for inspection then swap back to the illegal parts. Common with emissions stuff as well.
But yes, if there was a safety inspection, it should include verifying that lights function and that headlights are aimed appropriately. A brightness test might be too complex, but safety inspection would be the place to do it.
There's probably a decent contingent of people replacing their lights with out-of-spec lights not realizing that the lights are not actually road-legal.
It's like how aftermarket brake hoses all say "off road use only" despite pretty much all of them vastly exceeding the FMVSS for brake hoses.
If you swap one side and walk around your car, you may see that they are significantly dimmer than the stock bulbs from some or all angles. Or it may work fine. Often times the aftermarket LED dual intensity tail/stop lights have barely any difference between the two brightnesses which is egregiously unsafe
But then I had to rent a newer car, and it came stock with super bright blue/white headlights. They were so bright to what I was used to I had to double check the high beams weren't on. The standard lights were as bright as my old car's high beams.
Lights in newer cars are literally just that bright, and I think it's a result of car safety culture being a matter of "I only care of the car protects me" instead of "the car should also be safe for others on the road as well"
Even when I upgraded my old car to HIDs (because I could barely see anything over the other cars), I checked over and over to make sure I was low enough. Also, I ensure I never light up the TOP crease of the trunk of any sedan behind me. If I light up anything inside another car, it's bad.
This theory can't work on its own terms. It'd be hard to make the car less safe for the driver than by automatically blinding oncoming traffic. Brighter headlights aren't a safety improvement for anyone.
They represent car manufacturers unilaterally making the product worse for the sake of having a worse product, just like the replacement of physical buttons with touchscreens.
There are no government agents going around inspecting all the vehicles coming off the factory line. Anecdotally, my friends Tesla has completely horizontal headlights from new. I could see oncoming drivers faces illuminate and wince in pain. A quick adjustment in the settings fixed that, however the majority of drivers are ignorant of the fact that headlights are usually adjustable.
Not sure there is any real solution other than going back to halogen lights or requiring sophisticated anti-dazzle systems.
Disagree. The "too bright" headlights are new cars. And sedans as well as trucks SUVs.
Another big problem is that the lights are much closer to "point source" than older headlights which were 4-6" in diameter. A modern headlight is more like a 2" or smaller diameter projector lens, which is even more blinding.
Maybe I just got old or my eyes are peculiar, but that's no longer the case. I cannot stare directly into the new white/blue/whatever lights cars use at all without an immediate reaction of being blinded.
In my opinion, we just don't need this level of lighting at night. My vehicle lights up giant swaths of the fields next to the road and I can see for a hundred+ feet in either direction. I just don't need this level of HD quality night vision, only just enough to see down the road a ways and immediate side of it to check for objects/deer/people.
So now we have these retina scorching lights that are generally fine if the road is 100% flat and the car brand new. Any other situation ends up feeling like everyone is pointing lasers into your eyes.
Seconded. And I guess this is about the same thing as has happened to streetlights ?
The older incandescent bulbs were a different color temperature (more on the yellow side of the color spectrum) and were not a point source (filament instead). Both contributed to them not seeming quite so bright, even if the net lumens was the same.
The newer LED's are much more on the blue end of the color spectrum (automatically making the same lumen level appear much brighter) and the LED's are much closer to point sources, which further makes the result appear significantly brighter even if the lumen level was the same.
Couple the "harsh blue light" and "point source" with "significantly more lumens" as well and you get modern headlights that are painful to look towards, much less to look directly at.
Anyway, occasionally F150 / Silverado lights are mis-aimed, so low beams seem bright, but more commonly (here) German and American cars with distinct fixtures for brights vs low beans are driving in daylight with both sets activated. Not sure why, but it's not unusual.
I don't think there's a limit to how bright they can be. The law limits the lights to "70 watts", which I believe is intended to limit brightness but misses the mark. I bet the law was passed back when headlights were incandescent.
The designed lighting for a room in my house is 2 x 60-watt incandescent bulbs.
The equivalent wattage in 3 x 40-watt led bulbs is equal to 2 or 3 fluorescent light fixtures in an office building.
It's ridiculous that an average SUV has headlights higher than an average semi (my own experience) given the latter's breaking distance is much greater.
Some car manufacturer (Ford?) recalled their cars to fix their cars' headlight settings to match US regulations in the last 6-8 months IIRC.
Also, light temperature has limits. I believe >4000K lights are already road illegal in UK and EU. They are also recently outlawed in my country, but there are many cars with after market 5000K+ bulbs installed. They also don't conform to the geometry of the bulbs these headlights designed to accommodate. They are painful to look at.
What needs to be done is a) Stricter regulation in retrofitting older headlights with newer bulbs b) Regulating the amount of light hitting the oncoming driver somehow. c) Stricter CRI and light temperature regulations for the LED headlights.
I don't want to be blinded from light coming from behind and front constantly at night, too.
At all?
It isn't just retrofits that are a problem, it's brand new cars.
It's not just about not wanting to be uncomfortably blinded by lasers shooting into your eyes at night. (Lasers well under 3000 lumens!). It's that this kills people. Frequently. It's a form of assault with hundreds of dead victims and thousands of injured victims a year.
> It's not just about not wanting to be uncomfortably blinded by lasers shooting into your eyes at night.
I mean, being uncomfortably blinded creates the risk of being dead already. I believe I made it clear that it's dangerous.
From a previous post on the subject https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42449068
> They measure at a certain point. Jason Cammisa points it out pretty clearly in an episode of Carmudgeon, with the money quote either here[0] or in the link direct to YouTube here[1]:
> On a recent episode of the Carmudgeon Show podcast, auto journalist Jason Cammisa described a phenomenon occurring with some LED headlights in which there are observable minor spots of dimness among an otherwise bright field of light. “With complex arrays of LEDs and of optics,” he said, “car companies realized they can engineer in a dark spot where it’s being measured, but the rest of the field is vastly over-illuminated. And I’ve had now two car companies’ engineers, when I played stupid and said, ‘What’s the dark spot?’ … And the lighting engineers are all fucking proud of themselves: ‘That’s where they measure the fucking thing!’ And I’m like, ‘You assholes, you’re the reason that every fucking new car is blinding the shit out of everyone.’”
No, the regulation does not measure lights at a single spot. The regulations are published and very easy to find.
e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHKCmmH-x9mIbtnKiNfg2...
He tells the stories, interviews with the people who built these cars (if possible), gets and drives a copy of the said car.
We're talking about a person who painstakingly perfects the pronunciation of the brand and model names just because he feels doing otherwise is not respectful for the brand, model and people involved with the car.
---
Let's talk about specs. The spec[0] (pg 4) states that:
Photometers are placed at fixed locations on the test track to record the visibility and glare illumination of the test vehicle on each approach. To correct for changes in illumination that are due to changes in vehicle pitch, multiple photometers are used at each measurement location to capture illuminance readings at different heights. The illuminance readings are synchronized to the vehicle position and pitch using a common GPS time signal. The synchronized data are used to produce pitch-corrected illuminance versus distance curves that are used for the headlight rating. All data are processed using the DIAdem software package distributed by National Instruments. The processing scripts are available at https://github.com/iihs-hldi.
This is a fixed receptor, fixed path, multiple approach test and is susceptible to optimization of the illumination map designed by the car manufacturers.
Moreover, test document states that:
Illuminance data are collected with Gamma Scientific photometers (Part # U68401). The photometric sensors provide a very close match to the spectral response of the human eye. They are fitted with diffusers to reduce the illuminance measurements for off-axis incidence angles in accordance with Lambert’s cosine law. The sensors match the targeted cosine response to within 3 percent at angles up to 25 degrees, which is the maximum angle between the test vehicle and sensors on the sharpest curve (at distances greater than 10 m). The sensor signals are passed through a low-pass filter with a cutoff frequency of 35 Hz to allow for accurate measurements of pulse width modulated light sources such as LEDs. Each sensor is connected to its own transimpedance amplifier board that has fixed gains to yield a fast response while still minimizing linearity errors in the range of illuminance values for which the headlight ratings are assigned.
Again more places to optimize the headlight.
If the test finds the lights are "in-spec", and people are increasingly unhappy/uncomfortable, then something is wrong.
[0]: https://www.iihs.org/media/0e823704-32d1-4500-b095-15d064d82...
An entertainer who's keenly aware of what his audience demographics are, what they want to hear, what'll piss them off, and what he ought to be doing if he wants the money to keep coming?
I'm not saying he's lying, but all these guys have an incentive to say whatever it is they're gonna say in the way that makes their audience as hysterical as possible.
Listening to Camissa makes me feel like I’m listening to someone who appreciates all cars for being cars. He has no biases and preferences like Clarkson (German cars being cold, Italian cars being awesome, etc.).
LED retrofit regulations are not enforced. We should equip safety inspection stations with ways to measure this, but it’s an expensive change to demand they do safety inspections in a dark room when most safety inspection businesses are small shops that don’t have the room or buildings to do it.
I'm in Belgium and headlights don't generally bother me too much, but a month in California recently had me going "no wonder everyone has tints here."
[1] https://www.theringer.com/2024/12/03/tech/headlight-brightne...