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Comment by Aachen | Hacker News Reader

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)

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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.

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.

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.

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