How Bright Headlights Escaped Regulation – and Blinded Us All | Hacker News Reader

How Bright Headlights Escaped Regulation – and Blinded Us All

autoblog.com

46 pointspseudolus26 comments

Why are countries so reluctant to do anything about this? Is it the massive recall for existing cars they’re worried about?

Because when they're not blinding everyone they work really, really, really, well (to the safety and convenience of the users) and so anyone who tries to "do anything" will be caught trying to mediate between the two groups of screeching idiots and this is a fairly mundane issue so the upside is pretty small. Nobody's career takes off because they brokered a revision of headlight rules.

The whole situation reeks of the kind of thing that'll be mostly solved with technological progress over time (one of the german makes already has something that exempts a car in front of you from having the LEDs focused on it, I assume development is ongoing) and it really just remains to be seen if we get some law (which probably won't be decisive since this is a fairly subjective issue with no "obvious" answer) along the way.

It’s not an issue with limitations of current technology. In some cases it’s just greed and laziness. I’ve had two vehicles that have the ability to be more friendly to other drivers, but that functionality is only enabled outside of the U.S. (matrix headlights or the equivalent).

GM vehicles had been notorious for having poorly adjusted headlights from the factory. The fact that Xenon systems seemed to always come with auto leveling and LED often does not is crazy.

emphasis on "other drivers." AFAIK, matrix headlights do not handle cyclists, pedestrians, or animals, but I would be glad to hear otherwise.

> The whole situation reeks of the kind of thing that'll be mostly solved with technological progress over time

Stuffing ever more controllers, cameras, and sensors in there to focus and aim LEDs just sounds like the most over-engineered solution to this problem imaginable. The dealers are just going to love all the income from repairing all these points of failure. All for what gain? Yes, yes, “safety,” I know. Consider, though, that as drivers feel more comfortable on the road with their white dwarves, they are likely going to drive faster and more recklessly. It’s the same as American Football helmets switching away from leather—the hits get harder.

>Stuffing ever more controllers, cameras, and sensors in there to focus and aim LEDs

I agree it's all overcomplicated bullshit in order to polish another percent or two out of the turd but the overcomplicated bullshit is already in the field so why not write software that uses it a little better?

>Consider, though, that as drivers feel more comfortable on the road with their white dwarves, they are likely going to drive faster and more recklessly. It’s the same as American Football helmets switching away from leather—the hits get harder.

Faster when adjusted for equivalent safety sounds like a good thing to me.

High beams also work really really well when they're not blinding everyone. We managed that tradeoff by putting them on a toggle switch and teaching drivers to use them only when appropriate, rather than making them the only headlights the car is equipped with.

Not blinding other traffic on the road is a safety critical concern. A few seconds of being blinded is enough to cause a serious accident. This means that any technology that is intended to legitimate brighter headlights by masking other traffic needs to have something like a ≥99% efficacy. (Exact number doesn't really matter.)

> one of the german makes already has something that exempts a car in front of you

… and this technology does not have that level of efficacy, and neither do any of the others.

No, you don't understand the problem at all.

The issue is not the technology or the absolute brightness of a bulb.

The problem is that replacement bulbs have a different beam pattern and the headlight mount needs to be adjusted. That's it.

In the vast majority of cases, car headlights are blinding simply because they're aimed too high. On most(all?) vehichles there is an adjustment mechanism under the hood. Problem is it takes special tools and procedures that nobody knows or cares about.

As a sibling commenter said, we've managed to survive for the better part of a century with toggleable high beams. This isn't a complicated problem.

>In the vast majority of cases, car headlights are blinding simply because they're aimed too high.

No, it's almost always true that the light output is far, far too bright. Adjusting headlight aim is good and should be done, but it does not solve the problem, and notably is not effective in road conditions other than smooth (bumps cause lights to go up and down), flat (inclines cause the harmful light level to change), and dry (water or ice on the ground cause reflective glare).

These headlights are a menace.

Also, I think it was a mistake switching street lamps over to cool color tones, something that happened amid the clean energy push.

> Also, I think it was a mistake switching street lamps over to cool color tones, something that happened amid the clean energy push.

I believe this was a combination of coincidence (newer lighting technologies just happening to be a cooler white) and other intent (cooler light being supposed to keep you awake). I'd say the connection to clean energy is strenuous at best.

Also there are AFAIK various initiatives to go to more yellow LED lighting.

Yes, the connection to clean energy was just a coincidence. Newer alternatives to incandescent bulbs at the time just happened to offer cool color tones, so getting off incandescents meant switching from warm colors to cool ones. But now we have all this light pollution that incidentally disrupts sleep cycles and makes the nighttime atmosphere less cozy.

On the advice of a 19 year old (I'm 60) I tried using the polarized sunglasses i keep in my car, at night.

I helped.

Ida know, can someone comment on whether that actually does reduce noise in whatever information is needed to drive safely?

Not polarized since glasses, but I've start wearing specially made night driving glasses at night. They have a yellow tint, and so they strive to reduce glare. Doesn't solve the issue of some asshole in a Tesla who tunes his lights to be aimed as high as possible, but it helps

I would suggest you check your eyes as well.

Age progressively adds deposits in the lenses in your eyes, and at some point cataract surgery replaces the lens with a clear one.

Thing is, these deposits work like a dirty windshield in sunlight - you can't see because of the glare. The glare is just off-axis light hitting a surface and scattering - it illuminates the entire surface reducing contrast.

The more deposits and/or the brighter the light, the more it behaves like an completely fogged windshield.

(there is also another kind of glare that affects young eyes - a very bright point of light can cause pain in the retina where it focuses)

I thought I'd say something meaningful. Instead, it is more of a rant:

This is hard to discuss without context: country, big city, town/village, and freeway.

Big city driving: in a well-lit city, one could almost get by with just the position lights on. I say almost because of 1. driving in unusually dark areas and 2. regular headlights project light at a good angle to catch reflection off of cyclists. My point is that not much light is needed. Also, anyone driving in the city with their high-beams or fog lights on should be ticketed at an increasing rate.

town/village is roughly the same as a big city, but with less public lighting and fewer marked crossings. So, basically, this is just a reasonable low bean scenario. I'd argue that setting up for this situation and accepting it for the big city is good enough.

Country driving: bright and wide. Doing 80-100 km/h+ in the country and I want to see far and wide. Great use of high beams. Auto high beams do not function well enough to respect other drivers and drivers seems to have forgotten what it means when someone flashes their high beams. I attribute that to ignorant/lazy/entitled drivers

freeway: Need to be able see directly ahead and be visible to other drivers. Low beams when other are around, high beams when no one is in front of me and the road isn't lit.

Trucks vs cars: As we all know, headlights on trucks are too high compared to small cars. While this can be mitigated by not looking directly at the lights. A problem with this: If I'm at an intersection and there is a truck with bright lights that I am trying not to look at, I miss the immediate area near the truck with a possible pedestrian. Plus the contrast of the bright lights hides dark pedestrians. My quick Chat GPT'ing says that physically lowering the lights would not decrease the effectiveness of retroreflectors, so mounting the lights lower seems like a good option. There could even be separate high beams that are mounted physically higher when needed.

We all know this is bad and we just can't work together to get something done. Not to mention that even if there are new standards, it would take 10+ years for them to really matter because of the existing cars on the roads.

> Also, anyone driving in the city with their high-beams or fog lights on should be ticketed at an increasing rate.

At least in my neck of the woods, it seems like lighting enforcement has gone from slim to none. I regularly see vehicles with only one of three brake lights functioning... and sometimes I've seen the same vehicle with the same lighting issue for several months.

If there's no enforcement on vehicle lighting from behind, there's definitely not going to be much on the front lighting, because an officer would need to see the lighting, turn around and give chase. Well, that or inspections, but the vast majority doesn't want inspections because they cost money.

All that said, what's the problem with fog lights? They're not actually useful, but they don't present a safety hazard and it's always fun to wonder how long a car has had one fog light out, and if they'll figure out how to turn the fog lights off before the other one burns out.

I'm in the big city. I've experimented with using my running/position lights only on slower, congested streets at night when the street is well illuminated. I know I have a car with annoyingly bright LED headlights, so it feels like I'm being courteous. The LED position lights are surprisingly bright too, but at least it' s diffuse. When the street is less illuminated or traffic is more sparse my regular headlights go on.

This does not influence the behavior of oncoming traffic with high-beams on, whether due to ignorance, entitlement, or because their low-beams are burnt out and they can't be bothered, or afford to replace them.

It's also not legal to do what I do, so it's ironic that I'm probably at higher risk for ticketing for not driving with headlights than people with high-beams or broken lights (to be fair not a lot of people get ticketed for basic violations in STL city).

I do wish I could have them angled down on demand, or follow a set level point regardless of vehicle tilt (like on hills, speedbumps, etc). They do have a feature where the lights steer into the direction of travel, if only they did that vertically too.

Why nobody riding a bicycle ever complains about it? Because people don't correctly clean windshields on a regular schedule and the light scatters on the film of dirt. Clean the glass and then complain.

Umm, as a frequent bike commuter for a lot of my career, hell yes I complained. Every time going across Seattle’s I-90 bridge to Mercer Island, for starters. Where ever did you get the idea that cyclists aren’t complaining about headlights that easily overpower whatever 500 lumen light they’re using on their bike?

Where are you and they complaining? It's always drivers complaining about LEDs in my feeds.

Sampling bias. Far more drivers than cyclists.

I'm still getting 0 including cyclists, walkers, runners, skaters, etc. Find me a study showing its too bright and there's no glass between the source and eyeballs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com