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Comment by everdrive | Hacker News Reader

I understand that currently this is sort of a collective action problem, but I'm a bit baffled why people ever thought they needed brighter headlights in the first place. In the city, it's so bright that you don't even need headlights to see whatsoever. When cars started automatically dimming the dash via a light sensor, there was actually a period of time where I totally forgot to turn on my headlights because things were so well lit -- even at night -- that I didn't need them whatsoever.

Out in the country, you still don't really need brighter headlights. Other cars' headlights will always be visible and they have reflectors, so it's not as if you'll struggle to spot other cars. The road lines are actually reflective, so it's not as if you'll struggle to see the road lines. And generally speaking out in the country, there won't be pedestrian foot traffic, so it's not as if you need the bright lights for them.

So who are they for? I think broadly people may just not be able to avoid excess unless restricted by the facts of their environment. Allow people a plethora of calories, they'll get too fat. Allow them a plethora of entertainment, they'll drive themselves insane. And somehow .. allow them too many bright lights and they'll all just blind each other.

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> Out in the country, you still don't really need brighter headlights. Other cars' headlights will always be visible and they have reflectors, so it's not as if you'll struggle to spot other cars. The road lines are actually reflective, so it's not as if you'll struggle to see the road lines. And generally speaking out in the country, there won't be pedestrian foot traffic, so it's not as if you need the bright lights for them.

I don't know about the UK, but out here in France, this is wrong on most counts. Many country roads have no lines, reflective or otherwise. There will be pedestrians walking around. Also, roads are not always in tip-top shape nor clean, so you need light to be able to see.

However, I do agree that maybe extremely bright lights mounted high are a nuisance.

Same for rural parts of North America, and you also have to worry about animals on the road.

But I find that bright white headlights actually make that second problem worse. The bright white light means your eyes don't adjust as well to the dark, so you can really only see straight ahead. So it's much harder to spot deer standing in the relative gloom along the side of the road than it is with older halogen headlights.

You're right, and it's actually even worse when the road has very reflective white lines. Basically, everything outside of the road is invisible. However, in France, they somehow haven't figured how to not have their lines disappear when it rains ever so slightly.

I think that there's some kind of middle ground. Older cars used to have pretty dim lights. When my dad got a Citroën C5 with Xenon lights many years ago, it was a game changer. That car and one almost identical one (Peugeot 407) were fairly popular around these parts when they came out, and I don't remember ever having issues with their headlights blinding me.

But something started to shift some 5 years ago: more and more cars started having blinding lights. Combined with taller and taller cars, it started being a pain.

I also think that people pay less attention to the state of their cars. Some (like that C5) have auto-levelling lights, and the Xenons seem to last forever (never had to touch them in almost 20 years of service). However, I have the impression that there are more and more cars with headlights which are simply out of whack. I base that judgement on the fact that most of the time, only one of the headlights will blind me, while the other seems fine. And I'm mostly talking "basic" cars, not some high-end mercedes with matrix lights or whatever they're called which may be misdetecting something.

The rain thing is true anywhere I've driven. Even worse, when there are old white lines grinded away for some change, and new white lines added 0.5 lanes away. In certain wet conditions the old lines become equally or more "white" than the new ones.

> Same for rural parts of North America, and you also have to worry about animals on the road.

You very much have to worry about that in europe as well in the conditions GP talks about (source: hit a deer in the dark not two weeks back).

But for the truly dark areas, you can turn on your high beams - which you aren't allowed to have on when there's oncoming traffic. Smart / adaptive lighting is another option, lower / yellower light in well lit spaces.

> Smart / adaptive lighting is another option

These may actually be part of the problem. My dad's 2022 Toyota has "smart" high-beams. That means that when it detects a car in front, it'll switch off the high-beams (as opposed to adapt their pattern).

This is supposed to work with cars going both ways. In my experience, it will detect cars going the same way about half the time, and incoming cars about 3/4 of the time.

Now, since it's not completely broken, I suspect many people who only pay the minimum attention to their driving, and the rest to their phone, will simply leave the high-beams on and figure the car will deal with traffic. So, when the car fails to detect the oncoming car, its pretty bright lights will completely blind the driver.

My 2020 Lexus has the same system. I’m amazed at how well it works for same-direction traffic and how terrible it is for opposite direction traffic (which seems like it should be a vastly easier problem to solve).

I wish it was usable, but I think it’s not.

This is also true for Germany, but your ability to see in the dark decreases at some point with increasing brightness, since you don't allow your eyes to get used to the darkness.

But you are not supposed to see in the dark while driving! If you were, we would all be driving by moonlight...

Adapting to the darkness is not a binary thing. You are supposed to see beside the road by light reflected from your beams. Otherwise you would only see animals when they come into your beam, which is generally too late, you want to see them when they are to your side.

When the lights are essentially so bright that I need sunglasses at night, so my eyes don't hurt, the additional brightness definitely makes me see less, not more.

> You are supposed to see beside the road by light reflected from your beams.

I don't think so.

If you are driving at normal speed (100 kmh in most of Europe) on an unlit country road, with a low beam, maybe with oncoming traffic, you have 0 (zero) chance of spotting a deer by the road jumping out from the dark in front of you. Zero. Nada. Null. LED or halogen lights, doesn't matter.

But regardless, I still remember driving with a halogen low-beam, it wasn't any better in that regard than with LED. At least with the LED I can see the road properly now, unlike with the halogen.

All roads in France except very small ones have white reflective lines.

It varies a lot in the US. Major highway in Florida? Very visible lines. Minor highway in Colorado with all the paint and reflectors scraped off by snowplows, even if the road is in good condition? Not as visible. Rural somewhere? Good luck.

> Out in the country, you still don't really need brighter headlights.

I guess you don't actually drive at night in the countryside then.

You need lights to see where the road is, not where pedestrians might be - on none existent footpaths

I live in the woods in the northeast US, and also grew up in the 80s-90s in a very rural area and I've owned a number of cars when I was young, some with comically dim lights.

You really don't need the bright lights. You never have. Slow down, look for movement, and use your brights intelligently.

Slow down is kind of the general tip, but I find it kinda BS. I can drive slowly focusing on the bushes on the way to/from work in bumfuck nowhere, or I can get some beacon of god aux LEDs for cheap and turn night into day.

> or I can get some beacon of god aux LEDs for cheap and turn night into day.

But only if you don't care about other drivers on the road. And of course, how many of those other drivers on the road care about who they're impacting? A lot of them have your attitude.

My point is about bumfuck nowhere. Places where at night you may or may not see another car for the X km it takes you to get home. That with time people tend to forget they have their high beam bound to the beacon of god, with or without an extra switch, is a separate issue. The light itself makes sense.

If there's a constant stream of vehicles I'm not really worried about visibility all that much. The suicidal wildlife is mostly culled, for potholes you can track the person in front...

"I can get some beacon of god aux LEDs for cheap and turn night into day" they said, in a topic entitled "Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright"

don't forget "bumfuck"

> I can get some beacon of god aux LEDs for cheap and turn night into day.

And piss all other drivers off around you. This is the whole point of the thread you are posting in, but then if people cant realise or even care when they are blinding people I dont expect them to have fully read or understood the thread article.

Growing up in rural New England it seemed that people were constantly hitting deer with their cars—slowing down is obviously a good idea, but every additional foot of headlight distance certainly helps for spotting the glint of an eyeball on the side of the road.

Yes, those people were driving too fast.

>every additional foot of headlight distance certainly helps for spotting the glint of an eyeball on the side of the road.

Only if you are paying attention in the first place. The reality is that most people hitting deer and moose just are not, or the animal ran out in front of them and there was nothing that could have been done.

I dodged many a moose with half burned out incandescent bulbs in shitty sedans in the northest of rural new england.

Meanwhile the silly folks who have duct taped ten massive LED lightbars to their fenders still seem to be hitting moose up north, so I just don't buy the "I need more light" argument.

https://www.mainepublic.org/environment-and-outdoors/2018-09...

Note how the DOT doesn't call out vehicle changes. Note also that despite the raw number being only a few thousand moose hits over a decade, you will consistently find that someone who has hit one moose is much more likely to have hit multiple moose.

They just aren't attentive drivers. Every single person up north has almost hit a moose. Only some of them routinely keep hitting moose. They are being saved by moose population control.

In a densely wooded area, no. Your sight line is naturally blocked by trees, so a farther throw of light would be wasted

In more open areas it can be quite helpful to have greater throw and flood illumination.

In the American Midwest, being able to spot ice patches or deer on the interstate with your brights is quite helpful.

Normal driving lights have no need for the intensity they have today though

I also live in the woods in the northeast US, also grew up in a very rural area (in the 70s-80s), and I still own a few 70s and 80s cars with comically dim lights. Yeah, they're not good. 1) They're very noticeably worse comparing them back to back to modern cars, and 2) my eyes are no longer young. Can I drive with them? Sure. Is it less safe? You bet.

we're not talking about the northeast US

and sure, you don't need to drive over 20mph on a 60mph limit road ...

A lot of smaller US cities also have areas with no lighting and worn-out lines, which contrast with brightly lit areas and suddenly you're basically blind if your lights are too dim. Couple that with a wet road, which reduces visibility, and it can be hard to see where to drive.

Then we have pedestrians walking with no sidewalks or crosswalks, because city planning actively hostile to people walking.

The parent is talking about needing _brighter_ headlights, not headlights in general.

I just realized I bet it’s sometimes a speed issue. I don’t need bright lights, maybe because I’m a slow driver.

Drive faster and you have to have brighter lights shining farther into the distance to be able to see at least a couple seconds ahead.

And, notably, those couple of seconds can be key to seeing far off wildlife that may decide to cross the road.

Also notably, so bright they burn the retinas of said wildlife and any drivers or pedesttrians approaching you.

Well, the new stupid bright lights, yes. The idea of brights in general, though, not quite as bad.

I'm also not clear why someone would leave brights up once they are close to something that has eyes. The idea is you can see them further away. But, as you get close, drop the lights.

I think part of the problem is people drive at the speed limit regardless of conditions. If its dark and wet you really should not drive at the same speed as when its sunny and dry. If you are unfamiliar with a twisty road you need to slow down. If there are more pedestrians around than usual you need to slow down.

I agree with you 100%. The speed limit isn't seen as a limit, culturally, in the united states from what I can tell. Anymore, it's treated as the minimum socially acceptable speed on roads.

Well this is why headlights have dipped beam and full beam. The issue is the dipped beam is getting as bright as the full beam used to be, and is mounted higher on the car as well.

I do, and old school yellow high-beams were plenty on a 205 to do 80+mph down b-roads back in the 00's, I would happily go back to that if it meant I could avoid being blinded every ten minutes.

I’d be happy with other drivers just turning their main beam off slightly faster than 5 seconds after they have seen me.

or at all, but when they're higher than you, or climbing a hill a casual blinding is unavoidable with the current laser-based headlights.

Id be happy if most drivers just realised they have a dial which adjusts the angle of their headlights and used it accordingly.

I need to drive through the countryside to get to other towns.

A lot of it is A roads - few pedestrians and they are on pavements.

On country lanes, I think traditional lights are usually bright enough. if not, slow down at might.

Not to be pedantic but you do need to be able to see pedestrians at night too, who can legally walk on country roads on either side, without reflectors or illumination.

It’s the car drivers responsibility to not mow pedestrians down wherever or whenever they are walking.

Not least because hitting a person at 50mph on a country lane will cause serious amounts of damage to your car and ruin your day!

My point was that it is not pedestrians I worry about walking on the carriageway on a 60mph limit road, it's the trees

It’s not what’s meant by pedestrians but usually you’re also looking for wildlife, like deer, that you could hit.

All cars in the U.S. used the same headlights up until the early 80s. You could literally walk into the auto parts store and buy a headlight to replace yours, regardless of make and model

Somehow we all did ok back then with standard high/low beams from lights which are very dim and warm compared to the harsh white LED lights of today

It seems to me that this is just another example of the arms race of modern cars. You need a big SUV to feel safe on a road full of SUVs and trucks. You need an array of dazzling LEDs to compete with every other car out there. And we all lose.

The red queen effect. We'll end up all driving flood-lit bulldozers.

"Somehow we all did ok..."

This is an anecdotal fallacy. We also did fine without seatbelts, with parents who smoked, with open containers in cars, with DDT sprayed in our neighborhoods. Until we realized that was crazy.

Not all improvements are without side effects. Increased headlight quality is one of those.

These same exact 1980s headlights were used just fine on 2000s Fords

https://static.cargurus.com/images/forsale/2021/04/17/22/52/...

Just because everyone smoked in restaurants doesn't mean they didn't have other things figured out.

> All cars in the U.S. used the same headlights up until the early 80s.

Hey, there were several models.

For a long time you had the two filament bulbs vs single filament. And then around the late 70s, you could have circle or rectangle, so there were 4 bulbs to choose from! Tremendous variety.

>>Out in the country, you still don't really need brighter headlights. Other cars' headlights will always be visible and they have reflectors, so it's not as if you'll struggle to spot other cars. The road lines are actually reflective, so it's not as if you'll struggle to see the road lines. And generally speaking out in the country, there won't be pedestrian foot traffic, so it's not as if you need the bright lights for them.

Have you actually driven in the country?

Out in the country where I live, some roads are single track with no painted lines, cats eyes or street lights. There is occasional foot traffic, sometimes not wearing reflective gear. There are also animals, and 6" deep potholes that I would rather not hit as well.

> And generally speaking out in the country, there won't be pedestrian foot traffic, so it's not as if you need the bright lights for them.

Animals, specifically deer. That said, you can use brights when no other cars are nearby, and when there is a car coming its worth a few seconds of extra risk to not blind the other guy and put him at risk.

> its worth a few seconds of extra risk

There really isn’t that much increase; when there’s another driver then you both have the combined the light output of both headlights, coming from two different directions.

Once we figure our deer wasting disease, we need to start the breeding program for reflectorized deer. It'll solve a lot of problems.

Why does nobody think that if these lights are dazzling oncoming drivers, they are also dazzling these precious deer and pedestrians people keep saying they need to see so well.

> there won't be pedestrian foot traffic

You think kids aren't running across the street at night out in the country? Chasing a soccer ball?

There are all sorts of things you need to be able to see to avoid. People, deer, fallen branches, large roadkill, garbage cans blown into the road by the wind, the list goes on and on. Not to mention spotting dangerous icy patches at night in the winter.

I take it you don't really drive in country? Which is fine, but it's good to be aware of the many potential hazards.

> You think kids aren't running across the street at night out in the country? Chasing a soccer ball?

Only in well light areas, usually with a low speed limit too.

> People, deer, fallen branches, large roadkill, garbage cans blown into the road by the wind, the list goes on and on.

Of those only people are at all common, and not on large roads. I have never even seen roadkill large enough to be unsafe to drive over.

I have only once come close to hitting any of these on country roads in the UK. I have been dangerously dazzled by oncoming bright headlights all the time.

>> You think kids aren't running across the street at night out in the country? Chasing a soccer ball?

>Only in well light areas, usually with a low speed limit too.

Not something I've commonly seen when driving, but certainly as a kid out in the country I ran around in the dark near the road.

>> People, deer, fallen branches, large roadkill, garbage cans blown into the road by the wind, the list goes on and on.

>Of those only people are at all common, and not on large roads. I have never even seen roadkill large enough to be unsafe to drive over.

>I have only once come close to hitting any of these on country roads in the UK. I have been dangerously dazzled by oncoming bright headlights all the time.

I've seen all of these multiple times (tbf the trash cans were in the city, not the country) out in upstate NY and rural Indiana and Kentucky. Maybe trees don't drop branches over in the UK, but over in the US that is certainly a hazard to be expected during and after severe weather.

To be clear, I agree that excessively bright running lights and people who can't seem to properly transition between hibeams and lowbeams are problem. I just don't agree with the sentiment from the gp that "[o]ut in the country, you still don't really need brighter headlights."

I've lived in Montana for 25 years, a place where there are deer (and moose and bears) rampaging all over the place. People hit them all the time. But the only place I ever hit a deer with my car was North Yorkshire.

> Of those only people are at all common, and not on large roads. I have never even seen roadkill large enough to be unsafe to drive over.

I moved from London out to the sticks ~4.5 years ago and since then have seen deer, pigs, and cows multiple times each year on the larger roads around where I now live. Animals roam. People leave gates open or damage fences. It happens. Plus the named storms frequently bring trees down onto or even across roads.

>> You think kids aren't running across the street at night out in the country? Chasing a soccer ball?

> Only in well light areas, usually with a low speed limit too.

It would certainly be safer if that were true, but it's not. Kids play in front yards with zero street lighting all the time. And drivers speed.

>> People, deer, fallen branches, large roadkill, garbage cans blown into the road by the wind, the list goes on and on.

> Of those only people are at all common, and not on large roads.

I think there are a lot of places you haven't driven. In parts of the US, deer are everywhere. And who is limiting the subject to "large roads"? Headlights are used on all roads.

Also, we drive defensively because of the uncommon things we encounter. It only takes one collision to potentially kill you or someone else. Over a lifetime of driving, "uncommon" things have an unfortunate tendency to still happen at some point.

> Kids play in front yards with zero street lighting all the time

Street lighting is consistent enough to be used to define built up areas for speed limits in the UK.

> in parts of the US, deer are everywhere.

which is not relevant to a discussion about car headlights in the UK

> we drive defensively because of the uncommon things we encounter

but its not worth making a common situation riskier to make an uncommon one safer.

> Street lighting is consistent enough to be used to define built up areas for speed limits in the UK.

I thought we were talking about the country, where things are not built up.

> which is not relevant to a discussion about car headlights in the UK

Nothing about your original comment suggested anything about being specific to the UK.

While the original article is about the UK, it seems very clear that the HN discussion is about car headlights everywhere. HN is a global site, and more US-centric than anything else.

> but its not worth making a common situation riskier to make an uncommon one safer.

This type of thing needs statistics to determine the exact right balance. But the picture you're trying to print of what it's like to drive in the country is just completely false, as many commenters here have pointed out. I don't know why you're continuing to insist on things we all know are not true.

> I thought we were talking about the country, where things are not built up.

Where there are houses its a built up area. Even a hamlet. If its nota built up area there are virtually no kids playing in "front yards". There will be the odd isolated house, of course, not to many.

> While the original article is about the UK, it seems very clear that the HN discussion is about car headlights everywhere

Nothing in the thread I replied to says that. Most people discussing other countries say so. I am discussing the UK which should be the default and nothing above me in the thread suggests otherwise.

> I don't know why you're continuing to insist on things we all know are not true.

So "we" know better than someone who actually lives at the edge of a small town in England and drives through the countryside all regularly.

> If its nota built up area there are virtually no kids playing in "front yards".

I guess the UK is different then. Here in the US, there are lots of houses in the country that are not part of any "built-up area", that have big front yards, and where there is no street lighting.

So yes, "we" know better because we drive too. And this is a global conversation, not a UK one. You were the one trying to making claims about how there's virtually nothing meaningful to collide with on country roads, and we're saying that's just false.

Despite the "I need this in the sticks" responses here, I think the most common answer is the silent group that didn't ask for it but it just comes with the car. This group is silent anyway, they didn't have the issue/need but also won't complain about the extra light, whereas a few other people did and so you can just make 1 size fits all with no repercussions (besides perhaps selling more replacement lamps)

If i may add, they won't complain because the headlights of their cars aren't the ones that are flashing directly at their own face. To them the problem will always be the other's cars having the lights too bright.

In the early 2020s, I was driving at night in rural America on a daily basis in a nineties car with pre-LED yellow lights. There were plenty of animals in the road, and I never felt they were hard to see or stop for, even with no street lights.

I really don't know what everyone's talking about when they swear they need all this extra light.

What I will say is with newer cars where the center console had an LCD screen and far more lighting, it did feel genuinely dangerous to drive through these same areas. Any real solution to this should start with all this being adjustable (I assume it actually is in most models?), or even far dimmer in its stock state with your lights on.

I have always lived in the sticks and I hate these new headlights, you could always see fine with the old ones on a dark country lane.

I wonder whether some fraction of the population has shit night vision and whether this fraction's preferences are driving this trend to too-bright headlights.

That would explain scenes on TV and in movies with very low "key", which to me are awful and frustrating because I cannot see anything, but maybe that is just how the (dimly-lit) scene would actually look in real life to the cinematographer or editor responsible for the visual design of the scene.

In the country you need decent lights on the road to spot the potholes, animals, and people. And of course you get pedestrian traffic, especially at this time of year when people are walking dogs after getting home from work.

The problem isn't as much bright lights though, it's lights shining in your face.

1) "auto dipping" headlights don't detect oncoming traffic

2) "matrix" headlights don't detect oncoming traffic

3) Headlights are adjusted to point as high as possible, on cars with ridiculous high headlights, so although they are pointing "down" (just), they are pointing into your car

4) My 2005 car's headlights are yellow. Modern ones are white. If I drive with full beam on, I don't even get flashed. Yellow isn't as dazzling.

Of course it's all rather meaningless, nobody chose brighter lights

> The road lines are actually reflective, so it's not as if you'll struggle to see the road lines. And generally speaking out in the country, there won't be pedestrian foot traffic, so it's not as if you need the bright lights for them.

Reading these comments is a reminder that a lot of people aren’t familiar with the diversity of roads and environments across the country and around the world.

Painted reflective road lines in good shape are a luxury, especially in areas with heavy snow and snowplows coming through a lot.

Pedestrians aren’t a concern, but deer and other animals are. The deer are much worse than pedestrians because they move faster and don’t understand how to avoid cars.

Country roads also have very different conditions across the world. In some places you have clear visibility 100 feet to the tree line. In some places I drive, the trees are dense right up to the road with only a couple feet of clearance to the car. Some roads are also so rough that the biggest hazards are avoiding pot holes. Some roads I drive are up against mountain faces and the road may have large rocks that have fallen on it.

I personally don’t feel the need for brighter headlights because I keep my headlight lenses clear, washed, and waxed, and I’m young with good eyesight. I also use brights in the countryside and toggle them off when other drivers are coming.

However, downplaying the challenges of country road driving is weird.

>However, downplaying the challenges of country road driving is weird.

This is a total non sequitur, but we live in the country, and we had a few friends who had only ever lived in the city. A few of them independently expressed anxiety about visiting us due to needing to drive on "curvy country roads." I'm not making a broader point here, but I'd never heard this concern expressed before and was really surprised that it was a big obstacle for some people.

I have close to two decades of driving experience and I dread driving on the rural roads. Roads where you can barely fit two cars side by side, or even narrower, unexpected cars rushing towards you from the closed dead corners, badly signed crossings etc. But mostly its narrow roads, it is extremely stressful for me, and double so in the twilight and in the darkness.

> downplaying the challenges of country road driving is weird.

Only if you cant drive very well.

I have always lived in the sticks and drive fast fine on dark lanes with old headlamps. I have never hit anything, never even a near miss. These new headligfhts are a nuisance and completely unecessary. Driving on country roads at night is not hard.

Just because this is YC, I thought I should pitch in -

A high-trust society that solved coordination problems through legislation, could solve this with a win-win technofix solution where everybody's headlights are as bright as the sun and nobody suffers ill effects.

That technofix solution is polarized headlights, and right-angle-polarized night driving glasses or windshield tints.

Wouldn't that, uh, make your own headlights invisible to you?

Polarized light reflecting off a textured surface scrambles into nonpolarized light.

There are modest costs (signage & road markings shouldn't be perfectly smooth, retroreflectors work a little differently, and you lose a certain percent efficiency), but they're much less intense than the costs of the current situation.

> high-trust society that solved coordination problems through legislation

What is the point of being high trust in the first place if you have to have a government violence backed law for everything?

High trust societies don't have governments dealing BS minutia like automobile headlights. That is expensive in all sorts of ways, assuming you even do it right and don't accidentally create some perverse rent seeking bureaucracy or certification group that has incentive to push things in a dumb direction over time. And high trust societies don't need to do that stuff because they're high trust and collaborative in the first place so those problems solve themselves. The big players identify the problem, mostly solve it with some sort of industry standard, and whatever rounding error is left is a nuisance so small it's not worth addressing.

This is how like the overwhelming majority of automotive (and a million other industries too, computer stuff being a particularly relevant one here) stuff was done before regulation and how a lot of the more cutting edge stuff is still done now with the added step of the regulator saying "hey that thing everyone's mostly doing, it's law now, errybody do it" once things settle.

I don't mean to pick on you specifically, the questionable take you're peddling is pervasive all over HN.

The first thing you do, if you think you're coming into a business partnership where you and your partner are on the same page, mutually committed to communal success, is have a lawyer write up a bunch of provisions binding you to the continuation of that attitude and mitigating a bunch of incentive misalignments and opportunities to defect against your partner profitably.

Successful government regulation is the operationalization and protection of self-regulation by legal bonds against defectors, more often than it is totally opposed by capital.

High-trust societies are not some Moldbug-Thielian neofeudalist-libertarian ethnically homogeneous blob, they're just societies that try to fight against their coordination problems with social norms, and when social norms prove insufficient*, by collectively bargaining with each other on a code of conduct. We call that government.

*Money is the root of all evil - it is historically synonymous with an attempt to bargain with opponents who refuse the same social norms, with wergild, with denominated debt-slavery, with foreign trade interactions. Monetary exchange is a mode of interaction for when trust breaks down. In the other direction, money is what poisons relationships and wrecks norms; Consult The Social Network or Treasure of the Sierra Madre for examples.

People were pushing for those in the 90s. I think it never got adopted because of the loss of transparency on the windshield (AFAIK, there's an international standard that most countries go beyond, and it's way above 50%).

There is also some dispute over the direction, because polarized sunglasses filter out horizontal light, but we would want this system to filter out vertical light because of the way things reflect. I guess this wouldn't be a showstopper to turning it into law, but it was loud at the time.

Well.. deer, for one. It's much easier to spot animals crossing the road with bright headlights than without.

I still also agree headlights are too bright, by the way, but I'm just providing an example for your question

Not necessarily... I had H4 or H1/H7 before, which were dimmer, but the edge cutoff was much smoother...

With current car that has Xenon headlights (+ LED for day), they have a much sharper cutoff at the edge, making it harder to see pedestrians and other stuff near the road.

Probably the LED/laser headlights are even worse in this aspect.

Most people don't change the brightness of their lights. This is driven by industry using HID and LED lights that have a higher color temperature than the old lighting. It's really a failure of governmental regulation (or lack thereof, in this case).

LED upgrades were very popular in the early 2000s. IIRC that style of light was introduced by Lexus and Audi around 2003

The tuner community naturally started retrofitting those lights into their cheaper Hondas and Toyotas, as they were signals of luxury and performance. Those times were bad, since those folk were not aiming them properly.

Mainstream brands followed shortly afterwards, and now they are standard equipment. Honestly there is no going back. People won’t want a car with dim lights when every other car has “nicer” ones.

I agree it will take regulation to fix, and I am not at all confident in that ever happening. What used to be a $30 part at the auto store is now at least $300 in special parts and labor to replace a headlight, on the low end

This is pretty detached from reality. Many places in the countryside don't even have road lines, never mind reflective ones. People walk out in the countryside all the time. Animals are a very big reason to have bright lights in the countryside, too.

Headlights dazzle animals, which is why they stand there staring into your lights until they get hit. The less light your car is giving off, the more chance wildlife has to get out of its way becasue it can actually see your car not just a massive bright light like the sun coming towards them.

Most of my driving is down small, unlit country roads and I'm constantly coming across deer, sheep, people in dark jackets (walking back from the pub) and people riding bikes (occasionally with no lights on).

I'm quite thankful for bright headlights.

Driving in the countryside, good headlights are *so* much safer.

This is exactly what high beams are for, and even 20 year old cars have very bright high beams that are plenty safe.

The problem referred to in the article is dipped beam headlights being too bright and often too high, which are making things less safe by dazzling other drivers and road users.

> This is exactly what high beams are for,

Judging from comments in this thread, large numbers of people are suggesting that they are actually entitled to blind others because toggling back and forth is an inconvenience for them, and/or the "smart" cars that are auto-toggling high beams have left many drivers completely ignorant that toggling is actually possible.

Related question, are cars that have completely removed manually controlling high beams actually street legal?

I'm pretty sure a technical solution can be found that improves normal headlight visibility compared to non-xenon lamps from 10-15-20 years ago WITHOUT blinding incoming traffic.

High beam were always blinding, and unless you are completely alone you will not use them, even in the middle of a rural area, so they are out of the equation.

Good headlights are. The modern levels of brightness do not qualify as good headlights. Modern headlights become unsafe as soon as any other person is on the business end of them, due to the fact that they can no longer see properly. It puts other vehicles at the risk of crashing from being blinded, both cars and smaller vehicles like bicycles.

Smartphones, infotainment systems, and large LCDs in the cabin are killing drivers' night vision.

I find it easier to drive my wife's modern car with all that than my 2005 car which has barely any internal lights (dim light around the speedo, dim light on the radio)

You're not wrong, but it's a minor contribution at most.

Thats probably because it has ridiculously bright headlights to compensate.

Could be because the driver seat is a little higher, but the poing being that ripping out the maps screen isn't going to help

Lights in other settings that were upgraded to LEDs became much brighter: night clubs usef to be mostly dark for instance.

I don't think it happened through any plan, if anyone was looking at the specs, they probably just thought "bigger number better".

Nightclubs are still too dark. Streets are too bright.

Not correct on all counts. Depending upon "where" out in the country, you can very well be the only car on the road for as far as you can see to the horizon.

A very many country roads do not have any reflectors (those are often only installed on highway roads, not the roads you use to get to/from your destination to the highway.

Some country roads will have reflective paint lines, but a good many will have non-reflective paint lines, and/or no lines at all or the paint is so worn down that they may as well have no lines at all.

And while the rate of encountering pedestrians will be way less than in a city, it is very much not the case that there "won't be pedestrians". There very much will be pedestrians, sometimes. And for those rare sometimes you very much want to be able to recognize them from as far away as possible.

The purpose of high beams in the country is not "brighter" (calling them "high beams", while correct, causes many to believe that "high" refers to "brighter"). The purpose of "high" beams is longer throw (the light goes further down the road, so you can see obstacles from a greater distance). The "high" in "high beams" refers to the fact that the angle of throw is set "higher" to cause the lamps to illuminate a greater distance down the road.

You must not live where there’s wildlife… I can tell you it’s basically impossible to see deer at night without your brights on until you’re basically hitting it.

This can also be adjusted to by reducing speed.

You have to go so slow that you double the length of the trip, which is a big deal when a 2 hour trip turns into a 4 hour ordeal.

Sure but you should be able to safely drive the speed limit under normal (Ie not pouring rain, snow, etc) conditions. Night is a normal condition.

Bear in mind that the UK has a “national speed limit” of 60mph for much of the countryside. This is very much a limit, a maximum, and you’re expected to drive to the conditions of the road. If it’s perfect weather conditions and twisting roads not wide enough for 2 cars, you shouldn’t be driving at the speed limit.

Absolutely. The legal speed limit is 60 in the country - on any road not marked with a lower speed limit. This means that legally, you can drive at 60mph down a twisty single track road with 1.5m earth and rock banks topped with hedges.

You would be an irresponsible nutter with a death wish to try through! And if you crashed, "I was driving at / under the speed limit" wouldn't wash - you would be charged with Driving without Due Care and Attention, or Dangerous Driving depending on the consequences of the crash.

Driving too fast for the conditions (but within the limit) would usually be considered Driving without Due Care and Attention even if you don't crash (although the likelihood of anyone being around to enforce it on a deserted country road is pretty low).

That's not the purpose of that law. That's just the pretext they use to get the useful idiots to endorse it. The purpose of that laws is if you do something stupid but below the speed limit and not violating any other specific laws they've got something to nab you for.

Having driven in the US and UK, this is a significant difference between the two. In the UK, you might sometimes drive 30 under on a road that is nominally 60 mph. In the US, that road would have a specific posted speed limit that is safe to drive. US roads are also more consistently designed for constant speed or have additional advisory speed limits for curves. You can nearly always drive as fast as the number on the sign unless there is some additional hazard.

I have not yet found a road in the UK where i couldnt safely drive the maxiumum speed limit.

No. The speed limit is the maximum for a dry road, in the summer during the day.

Its literally not in the US

Care to educate us, what it is in the US instead?

Where I live there are speed limits but rarely minimum speeds, only on divided highways as far as I know. Everyone is different, some people just aren't comfortable driving the speed limit at a given moment. We should literally back off those folks, they're not what's making traffic horrible in my experience.

I have seen people with the same expectation drive off roads in hilly areas in europe because some turns were impossible to do at speed limit. Not sure if what you say is a legal requirement

In the US it mostly is. Depends on whether it is federal or state road but it's true in the vast majority of cases

We have quite a lot of wildlife around us; deer, moose, coyotes, hedgehogs, pheasants, nearly non-stop turkeys. It really hasn't been an issue.

It's not as if you cannot see with normal, old-fashioned headlights. That's what I'm confused about; the problem with headlights at night is that they have a distance. So rather than being unable to see, what you actually get is less reaction time. ie, rather than seeing 'til the next hill or turn, you can really only see to the end of your headlight beam. Ultrabright headlights actually make this worse; you have no night vision whatsoever due to their brightness, and and anything outside of the beam is completely invisible. This isn't as much of a problem with old fashioned headlights as they don't trash your night vision quite as badly. In any case, the problem is that you have less time to react due to only being able to see within the beam of the light -- and brightness really does not affect this.

This is totally aside from that fact that the moose threat is NOT that they're in the road 1000 feet ahead of you and it's too dark to see -- it's that they come right out of the woods before you have time to react -- and brightness, again, does not actually affect this.

Moose aren't invisible to a normal headlight.

I agree with all of this. For wildlife, using long distance IR or something to augment makes more sense than higher brightness normal lights , given how falloff works.

I have "Night Vision Assist" on my car. It has an IR sensor up front and displays a live image on the instrument cluster. It uses AI to highlight pedestrians and animals. When I'm being blinded by lights I rely on Night Vision far more than I wish I had to. It would be even better if it were integrated into a head-up display, overlaying objects on the windshield. (I suppose it would need to track the driver's eyes to know where to display them.)

They should just use cameras with the ir cut filters removed and let you superimpose the result onto the windshield.

The first time I used the hi-beams in my life was when I came off the ferry on Manitoulin Island and drove to my hotel from there. This is what that road looks like: https://maps.app.goo.gl/L7JajQbGQA7Fog1g9. No reflectors, the road lines aren't reflective, no ancillary lights from civilization to be aware of, and of course since it's so rural, you get to deal with all of the wildlife running around. I turned my hi-beams and realized for the first time in my life all the things I wasn't seeing before.

I don't even use my high beams usually, and neither do I have LED, xenon or laser headlights. But I often do wish that I magically had brighter headlights without being an asshole, both in the city and rural. In the city any 2 lane or smaller road can be unexpectedly crossed by pedestrians, on crossings and not. And pedestrians nowadays are wearing all black, completely invisible on the side of the road. And on the rural roads, I want as far visibility as I can get, because the load is usually 1.5 lane, barely fitting two cars at below walking speed, so when I see an opposite traffic I need to immediately slow down and take to the right, almost touching the ditch or the wall, to pass safely. Additionally I need to spot opposing car in the dead corners, where there is zero visibility etc. And finally the same problem as in the city with pedestrians crossing rural roads, which is even more dangerous because it is unexpected and darker.

So I can see a powerful motivation to fit bright headlights in the cars, regardless of the other's comfort.

I don't need bright lights, most people don't and we havent done anything to get them, they just come with the car for most people.

You bought a car which had them, that was a choice.

I have never bought a car with extreme bright headlights, and I never will.

My car does not have extremelty bright headlights

But the choice of headlight is probably one of the lowest factors when deciding on which car to buy, you just live with what the car manufacturers are shoving on us.

...or you choose to buy from a manufacturer who aligns more with your personal morals and opinions.

I remember light used to be much paler and became brighter around the 2010. just go drive in an old car (20+ years) and a new car.

You are right also especially that there is a good side to it: in countryside roads you will able to see pedestrians/bicycles that don't use refractory lights better. Surely you are blinding everyone else.

I confess this is why I just assumed my eyes were going bad. I am getting old, and this shift seemed to have coincided with about the time I moved to a more rural area. In the city, I don't know that I ever used "brights" on my cars. In rural, it helps to see when there are basically no road lamps.

Low beam lights were previously much dimmer and angled much lower. Rural driving absolutely required high beams.

Many places don't pay for reflective paint, unfortunately. Here in Missouri they used it for a year or two and it was a vast improvement... but then they cut the paint budget and now we're back to invisible lines with even a small rain (no matter what the brightness of the headlights).

We needed some brighter lights before the current craze.

When you aren't using strong lights your pupils open more. Now we need much brighter lights than traditionam because the lights from other cars leave you blind for too long.

Context: I live in 3rd world country with non lit interurban roads. People must to walk and ride bicycles, only they do irresponsibly without anything reflective, maybe only with their cellphone screens lit because they are using it. I sometimes reduce speed to 30 km/h when a car comes from the opposite direction.

Assuming that the lines on the road are in good condition or even exist. Uneven roads, potholes, and corners/junctions with no signage can all be a challenge is poor conditions with old style headlights ( our 2 cars have old and new style lights respectively ).

That being said while I don’t struggle much with the glare from oncoming headlights I find that visibility beyond the oncoming vehicle can be severely limited by the bright light. This often causes me to slow down and squint to be careful of any dangers beyond the vehicle.

I think everything is just way brighter now. We improved LEDs and stuck them in everything and amped them way up. Just going outside at night in a residential area gets your eyes blasted out with unshielded 8000K streetlights and spotlights people put up on the outside of their houses. I have to keep my computer monitors' brightness levels almost all the way down just to be able to use them, and they're not even the ones marketed as ultra-bright.

Worth pointing out that headlights (and tail lights) aren't just for your ability to see things, they're also for the ability of other drives to see you.

So, headlights are still needed in the city, even if the streetlamps are good enough to see the road, and even during the day.

Running lights help, but it's still easier to identify a car with two (normal, non-blinding) headlights on than one with just running lights on, and much much easier when compared against a car with no lights on at all.

What road lines?

There are plenty of country side roads in Europe that really dark with normal medium lights.

Now I fully agree that full intensity is too high as shipped in most cars.

> In the city, it's so bright that you don't even need headlights to see whatsoever.

And, in the UK at least, you don't legally need to use them either. If it's lit and the speed limit is no more than 30mph, you only need sidelights and taillights on in the dark.

Unfortunately most people will flash their lights at you if they see it as they assume you've forgotten to put them on.

Out in the country there's no lines on the road. In fact, the road could be gravel for many, many miles, or just a dirt road.

And I NEED those lights, especially this time of year where it's getting dark earlier and the deer, moose and elk are moving around during light transition hours.

People who drive in rural New England.

Headlights don't illuminate far enough to stop in time at 40 or 50 miles an hour, let alone at highway speeds. Snarky view is you may wreck your car, but at least you'll have a year's worth of venison.

Where I live, it doesn’t matter how far your lights throw down the roadway, you still have less than a couple seconds to notice the deer sprinting out of the woods directly in front of you

Where they pass through rural areas the high-speed, multi-lane roads in the UK and continental Europe are unlit. Partly for cost, partly to avoid light pollution. Brighter lights mean being able to see hazards further ahead of you.

Maybe it all comes down to allowing people to feel comfortable driving more quickly on country roads. Also, the number of people who actually choose new cars is quite limited, and they may be influenced by stupid factors.

You assume country roads have painted lines? Not where I live. And you also need to watch for deer, racoons, and other critters crossing ahead of you. High beams are essential on dark country roads.

Bright headlights dazzle wildlife. You do not need retina burning suns for headlamps to see animals on country roads.

You need to be able to see as far down the road as you can, and off to the sides, to have a better chance at seeing and avoiding a deer.

In the countryside, outside highways, the pain is usually non-reflective or just in such a bad state that you can't even see it.

Usually bright headlights / highbeams are useful in there.

> I understand that currently this is sort of a collective action problem,

There's something really obnoxious and antisocial about this that makes me really mad. Test your lights on yourself, people. If your manufacturer did something stupid here it's unfortunately on you to fix it. Usually the mentality of "got mine, fuck everyone else" is self-destructive but maybe not obviously so because cause/effect are a few steps away from each other. But if you blind everyone else on the road so you can see better then it's kind of endangering you directly and immediately!

This is a huge issue in US western states especially, since they are full of long dark drives. You'll literally be blinded for several seconds if you encounter another car even if you're averting your eyes. Bad but not horrible if it's 1/10 of chance encounters that are antisocial, but it's been getting worse for years and odds are now much closer to 1/2.

>Out in the country, you still don't really need brighter headlights.

Animals and pedestrians (along with pot holes) are the prime reason.

I never wanted bright lights, I just paid extra for LEDs in the hope that I won't need to change these anymore

I live in rural Scotland - a lot of minor roads round here have no markings?

My guess is that the average population of car drivers is aging. With age comes worse eyesight and and the ability to see in the dark. So a lot of people are probably more comfortable with having brighter headlights.

Ah, the old "I am a free-thinking rational being, but everyone else are a bunch of NPCs who can't be allowed to have what they want without enlightened supervision" argument.

animals and other objects on the road, and potholes

I have poor night vision, many times there are no road marks at all. I need to see whether the road continues straight, goes left or right, so I need decent headlights.

Out in the country: moose and other animals

Moose are less of a problem in the UK than you might expect. ;)

(I'll give you other animals though.)

There are other countries than the UK.

The story is about the UK. it would b ridiculous to set UK brightness levels on the grounds of what would be needed in Finland.

No thanks, I have no where to keep them.

So who are they for?

Marketing.

Have you seen what a moose can do to a car?

When you are driving in the night during heavy rainfall, good head light is difference between life and death. Get out of your bubble please!

And when your ridiculous LED lamps blind the oncoming driver on a corner during heavy rain and they crash into you, you wish weren't so selfish.

I guess it is more likely they crash into the car behind you or just run off the road themselves. Unfortunately being a selfish pays off most of the time.

> So who are they for?

They're so machines can see better, not so humans can see better. There are so many more doorbell cameras, ALPR cameras, fixed building cams, PTZ building cams, dash cams, external vehicle cams, etc than ever before, and they all want to be able to spy on you as effectively as possible even at night.

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