Car headlights don't have to be this blinding

Yes, and this poor attitude of "safety" meaning "safe for the driver" extends to all sorts of terrible safety regulations.

41% of vehicle deaths are people not even in a car[1]. Yet car safety regulation is heavily focused on the 59% that are, nothing to regulate the ridiculous gender-affirming hood heights or aftermarket lifts that turn a survivable collision into a deadly collision.

[1] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/... Table 1, paragraph above

Car headlights are regulated. My hunch is that the regulations are based on technical background that is not up to date with modern light sources including LEDs and HIDs.

Styling works against us too. The ability to control the geometry of the light beam improves with the size of the optics relative to the emitter, but people want car with sexy little lights.

I designed optics for lighting in a past light, though never for an automotive application. This issue is actually on my radar because of the blinding brightness of bike lights on the local bike paths.

I think the problem is even worse because the mentality quickly extends from "more bright = more safe" to "drive faster."

Do you have any sources you can share about sock thickness and ankle injuries?

Yeah but more bright is more safe ... for me driving around with the light of a thousand suns coming out of the front of my care at night it seems pretty safe, "good luck everybody else".

Night visón comment is 100% spot on. Most haven’t even experienced it. Here’s a trick, when you go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, keep one eye closed the whole time if there are lights. When back in bed open that eye. That’s night vision.

Seriously. First thing I do when driving is turn off the screen

I was taught to adjust my mirrors so that I would have to shift my head slightly in the direction of the mirror to see the side of my car in the mirror. I didn't realize this approach wasn't the "normal" way!

I do this on long drives, but always have to put it back to normal when it's time to park. It would be neat if cars would implement some sort of automatic switch between this configuration and the straight-back mode when reversing.

That was me, sorry. My car has automatic high-beams that only turn down for other vehicles.

My observations from the UK, formerly almost 'Europe':

Boomers need cataract operations! A huge part of the car dependent population are elderly. These folks need ten times the light to see anything when compared to the seventeen year old learner driver (that doesn't go out at night, because their driving instructor clocked off hours ago).

My thoughts regarding this are somewhat anecdotal, however, I have heard a mystery boomer rant and rave about the headlights on his 'Italian car' (they make them in Eastern Europe and slap an Italian flag on). My observation from being in the offending car, shouting here because aforementioned elderly person had hearing issues too: I CAN SEE EVERYTHING FOR MILES!!!

Next: state of the roads

As a pesky cyclist, I used to prefer roads to cycle paths because of the smoother riding experience and improved speed. Not nowadays. In the UK, and dare I say it, the West, we have a problem with potholes. Cars also come with low profile tyres and they weigh 50%+ more than the cars we had before airbags and electronic safety systems came along. This is a combination that results in frequent flat tyres.

What was something that rarely happened is now practically inevitable. As a pesky cyclist, I should be the one getting punctures and fixing tyres, not the motorist. To compound the misery, few cars come with a genuine spare wheel, partly because of the weight problem with today's cars. My bicycle with kit and caboodle weighs far less than that spare wheel, so this nobbling of the spare wheel makes sense to me, but still, a normal car is two orders of magnitude heavier than what I roll with.

Back to the headlights, the elderly cohort with money for new cars, the boomers, don't live in cities, they have nice places in the countryside that require car dependency. With this, and the usage of B-roads, there is a genuine requirement for super-bright lights. Some brands, such as Audi, sell into the market for those that want innovative lights, where the primary innovation is yet more light.

As for built up areas, the lighting situation has also changed. Even as a cyclist, I am running what amounts to 'daytime running lights' because of the light pollution. I put my lights on well before sundown, whereas I never used to. The law is 'after sundown' and I used to be okay with that, but if it is four in the afternoon, mid-summer, I am putting the rear light on, at least.

It does not seem that I am alone in this, many cars have full lighting rather than what we used to call 'sidelights' on.

It is no longer pitch black inside a car, SAAB style. There is so much lighting going on, with a glowing iPad style screen at the minimum, ambient lighting strips on the deluxe cars. The headlights have to compete with this. So more brightness, please!

As I see it, we are caught in a cycle of degrading roads, heavier cars, brighter lights and an elderly cohort that actually needs massive amount of light to see anything. Sure there is clever tech so nobody has to dim their lights, and we have it on posh AUDIs and the like, but this is the spiral we are in, and the good old USA shows where it is going, what the end game looks like.

Into the mix we also have cyclists playing the stupid-lights game. Nowadays cycling is conspicuous leisure, not transport, and plenty of the carbon fibre crew spend hundreds on these stupid lights. Obviously I am somewhat 'shadow fleet' so I don't do that, I just have what heavy goods drivers 'want' from the well-behaved cyclist, which is standard issue, basic flashing lights, a complement of reflectors, high viz and manners.

I yearn for being able to see the Milky Way and the moon providing variable amounts of light throughout the night, with anything moving at night having modest levels of lighting. The situation as it stands means that, along with pedestrians, pets and other animals, I am as good as invisible at night on my bicycle.

Fortunately it looks like we will be losing cheap oil thanks to the tangerine person, unfortunately many millions will starve, but a lot of lights will be getting turned off soonly and the age of car dependency will be over.

> Same in europe, since a few years.

Yeah, since they started to introduce super duper led headlights and 144 Hz animations on turn signals it's been more and more blinding to drive at night even across the ocean.

The US is worse - an F150s headlights are at eye level if you're sitting in a Corolla. Nothing on European roads is quite as bad.

Actually, it's worse in the US due to our regs.

I wish they would go back to the old headlights from the 70s, they and a slight yellow tint to them and all headlights were at the same level.

Since the late 90s I think, no matter what setting is used, everyone is blinded when by people in back of you and people coming towards you.

As an EU citizen, I notice that our regulators tend to target industries that operate outside of the EU. There is a massive car lobby in Europe with dozens of big companies and regulation would have a big effect on them.

There are headlights that are illegal in the US but legal in Europe. Opposite world of what we normally have.

This feature must be old. My Subaru Forester 2018 has it. What non-US cars have are those new zone dimmable lamps.

Regardless I keep my auto dim off and just down. I don’t usually need the headlamps in high beam mode.

What would be useful is a taller median between both sides on a highway since often the blinding is because of a difference in the direction facing due to the grade of the highway. Facing people who are looking up a hill is awful.

It is true, that many drivers drive with the high beam on. My cabin is frequently illuminated by their lamps. My lamps never illuminate the cabin of a car I follow by comparison. This strange asymmetry does annoy me and I am certain I’m in the right but it’s usually resolvable by allowing them to pass.

This has been available in the US for a long time. I had it on the car I bought in 2016, and on another I bought in 2023. It's just not mandatory, so it usually comes as a part of some safety / driver assistance package. And even if you have it, you need to enable it.

I think most if not all US cars do this now. My current one doesn't even have a way to keep the brights on permanently. Now to wait 8 or so years for all the old ones to cycle out :(.

For a long time it was aftermarket HID kits. Installing those was a bit of a pain because of the separate ballasts and associated wiring. They were blinding because the projectors required a cut off and most were installed in halogen housings.

Now most people are installing aftermarket LED kits. For the most part those are less blinding. I upgraded our old Impreza with some but chose the lowest lumen numbers I could find and they are also engineered to emit light in the same locations and angles that the halogen ones did. I did some tests with the garage door and standing in front of it where a car would be and it's non-blinding for oncoming traffic.

There are even worse offenders. Some super cheap aftermarket kits seem to have the same horrific flashing as minimum viable Christmas lights.

Barely perceptible flashing yet somehow gratingly and distractingly so.

I have brown eyes, still hurts to drive at night. Canadian situation is just as bad as our neighbours down south. Now I long for the days of being blinded by yellow headlamps again.

Unfortunately the first TUV inspection is three years after initial registration. In Spain it’s four years. Plenty of time to blind people.

They work okay on straight roads with no median. But often fail in these cases:

- cresting a hill. Normal people can see the cone of light from the approaching car and often turn classic high beams down before it blinds fellow drivers. These do it only when it detects the actual light source, giving a 0.2-0.5 (about) flash of bright light.

- Wet and snowy ground. Even when they re-align themselves somewhat properly they can be blinding due to reflections which are not part of the angle-calculation algorithm.

- Failure to detect pedestrians and cyclists. Self-evident, but when I am not in a car I am impressed by how blinding it is.

Personally I consider them to decrease safety for everyone except the car with those headlights. I also feel like it is yet another badly designed automation which adds to the ability to slightly doze off and pay a little less attention to traffic.

They can be pretty shitty if you're a pedestrian or cyclist, because quite a lot of them don't "see" you, so you just get blinded by the full beams.

I've heard of people around my parts sneaking around at night with black masks, taking baseball bats to specific headlights on trucks late at night. Apocryphal or no, stories like that are being cheered by regular people.

The federal government took upon itself responsibility for things like this, because it's impractical at best for cities or states to regulate these. It's too bad that politics and bloat has made governance of this particular issue more or less impossible. Self regulation is obviously a joke, the standard suite of choices mean the default options for consumers are obnoxious as hell.

It'll have to become a big enough issue to warrant attention and action by the President, either this one or whoever comes next, or nothing will ever be done.

Maybe a convention of states that runs all current politicians, judges, and bureaucrats out of their jobs (in a sane, phased way) and establishes term limits and bans on careerism and bloat. Citizens can bypass the feds and kick their asses to the curb - imagine a total reset, in which we put forth competent, responsible people.

This problem will never be fixed. Gonna have to wear adaptive sunglasses at night for driving.

I think the gigantic prevalence of huge or lifted trucks is a bigger influence, especially given the tendency to mod them out (poorly) with aftermarket lights.

Truck headlights are already on a level with sedan drivers' eyes. There are far more F-150s on the road than there are Teslas.

Not only is this NOT the case, but all Tesla vehicles since something like 2021 have included matrix lights. They have adaptive beams to automatically darken sections of the headlight beam to avoid blinding other drivers.

I'm sure they don't. The law requires a 10 degree downward angle for directed headlights out of the factory. It would never pass NHTSA testing without it. High beams are a different matter: They are designed to scatter in a wide arc, but people shouldn't be using them when there's opposing traffic.

YES! Tesla account for the majority blinding headlights in my area. The rest is idiot drivers who just drive with their high beams on.

While all automakers are incentivized to make driving in the competition's vehicles as hellish as possible, Tesla is doubly so. The worse it gets to drive, the more likely people are to want self-driving.

No they don't.

I dunno, I think all manufacturers are at fault. Even the ones that are properly aligned are ridiculously bright, but aimed down. Which is fine if two vehicles approach each other on flat ground. But if two vehicles approach the crest of a hill, then the headlight that was aimed down is now aimed straight at the other driver.

And don't get me started on jackasses that put LED bulbs in old halogen housings.

There are already regulations forbidding the use of unapproved LED retrofits in housings designed for incandescent bulbs in most countries. The fact that your mechanic gets away with installing them, and you get away with driving your now-illegal car shows how well they are enforced.

Unless your car's design is particularly evil (a real possibility), changing a headlight bulb is usually easy to do yourself, and approved, incandescent headlight bulbs are easy to source most places.

There are a lot of options if you search online