Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1j8ewy1p86o

863 867 8 months ago

Taek• 8 months ago

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.

jghn• 8 months ago

There are regulations. The problem is they're easy to game. [1][2]

[1] https://www.theringer.com/2024/12/03/tech/headlight-brightne...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42443406

nikanj3• 8 months ago

Usually in USA regulations apply to cars, but everyone drives a light truck that's exempt from regulations ranging from emission to pedestrian safety

rootusrootus5• 8 months ago

This is false. Light trucks are definitely regulated. Emissions regs do soften a bit for 3/4 ton and up trucks (think F250 and up), but the ubiquitous F150 as well as other half-tons, as well as mid-size trucks, are all very much regulated.

jonasdegendt• 8 months ago

It's much worse in America, in my experience. Much more deviation in cars/sedans/trucks on the road, with different road heights each, and MUCH more custom stuff on top.

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."

englishrookie• 8 months ago

I'm in the Netherlands and I DO find it bad. Probably also has to do with my age (early fifties) - your eyes adjust with more difficulty the older you get, it seems.

phito• 8 months ago

I do find it bad in Belgium, mostly on big cars like SUVs. Another reason for me to dislike them. Unfortunately they are getting more and more common.

JonKF• 8 months ago

In the UK it's exacerbated by our narrow roads, constant drizzle, disrepair of our streets and highways and by the fact that it gets dark by 4PM.

Lalabadie• 8 months ago

The rising height of headlights in North America is compounding the issue as well. At this point a good proportion of vehicles have headlights even or higher than the roof on a sedan.

JohnFen• 8 months ago

At least in my state, there is a law that restricts the location of headlights to between 22 and 54 inches from the ground. 54 inches is quite tall, though, I think that a lot of cars have roofs that are shorter than 4.5 feet. I'd love to see a much lower upper limit.

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.

kubanczyk2• 8 months ago

I'd go as far as to say that the height is the issue, and it's becoming global (although, yes, US is the leader).

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.

alistairSH2• 8 months ago

There are a two things contributing to "headlights too bright" in the US...

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.

pyr0hu• 8 months ago

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.

knome• 8 months ago

It would be fantastic if it were possible to dictate a headlight height for standard lights. just because your SUV is twelve feet off the ground doesn't mean the lights need to be positioned there.

fusslo2• 8 months ago

My 2024 outback has no 'high beams'. My low beams are the same brightness as high beams. The only difference is the field of view. I switch on the high beams on and height of the beam increases, but intensity stays the same.

I feel awful about essentially high-beaming everyone unless the road is flat.

Aurornis3• 8 months ago

Second, there's a decent sized market for cheap, unapproved HID/LED kits for older cars. They're often not aimed correctly.

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.

scythe• 8 months ago

Aiming and beam restriction is not enough and cannot ever be enough to prevent bright headlights from blinding people. It only works when the road is flat. You introduce a hill or even a speed bump and suddenly the headlight angle is zero. Brightness has to be managed directly.

silisili• 8 months ago

Well, and the fact they're just way brighter than ever. When I was younger you could stare at the yellowish glow of a car with headlights on and just not be blinded. We even used to park several cars around a basketball court behind the goals with headlights on at times to play at night.

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.

jjtheblunt3• 8 months ago

a third thing is some people drive with brights on all the time, particularly in snow-bird seasonal communities, I've noticed. when the seasonal people, many geriatric, are in town, the vehicles driving day and night with bright lights activated is noticable.

toast012• 8 months ago

I've seen lifted Miatas...

directevolve• 8 months ago

This isn’t the whole story. I’ve been driving the same Prius compact since 2015, and only I the last few years have I suddenly started experiencing these insanely bright headlights. The giant cars have been around the whole time. The brightest lights seem like they are on specific brands of new cars, although I’m terrible at recognizing car brands and obviously only experience this issue at night when I’m being blinded by headlights, so it’s not easy to figure out exactly which brands cause the issue.

bayindirh5• 8 months ago

The maximum brightness is already regulated in US and Europe. US allows a lower brightness level.

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.

mapt5• 8 months ago

Do we enforce it?

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.

OGWhales• 8 months ago

We also need to be far more strict about enforcing properly alignment, so many are pointed too high especially on larger vehicles and pretty much always on anything that's been lifted

chrisBob• 8 months ago

The US has clear regulations on headlights that limit the number of Watts. That worked when everyone had halogen bulbs, but doesn't fit with LEDs.

tonyedgecombe• 8 months ago

Some people don't seem to know that you can adjust your headlights from inside the car.

touristtam• 8 months ago

Ooooh so I am not the only one to swear at those blinding headlights? Interestingly (or not), I think there should be a regulated height for the headlights all private cars; I drive a B-segment type of car, and I find all those European SUVs have their headlights right at my shoulder level meaning I will always be subject to be blinded by this type of vehicle vs a similar lower car. That goes for the vans as well.

nanna• 8 months ago

Same for bicycle lights too, and street lights.

4ndrewl• 8 months ago

Nearly all UK drivers say bike lights are too bright?

Do you have a citation or was that an edgy culture war comment?

jabbywocker• 8 months ago

I think it’s his personal opinion, so no need to provide a citation.

But don’t let that stop you from starting your diatribe

egormakarov• 8 months ago

I have a problem with many fellow cyclists here in Germany, because they seem to use something that shouldn't be street-legal as bicycle lighs (very annoying in the night on unlit road)

Not sure what UK drivers would say about that, though

barbazoo4• 8 months ago

The sun as well, too bright.

skirmish• 8 months ago

The whole big blue room outside is much too bright, we need strict regulation so that nerds are finally comfortable leaving their caves.

jeffwass• 8 months ago

I don’t understand the seeming lack of regulation for flashing bike lights.

I don’t mean a simple “normal” flashing light, but the super bright ones that are like a camera flash strobe going off 2-3x per second which hurts your eyes and kills your night vision, making it hard to see anything including the actual cyclist.

mnw21cam6• 8 months ago

It used to be law that a bicycle had to have a solid on light front and back at night, and any extra flashing lights were optional extras that didn't count, but they scrapped that law several years ago.

macintux3• 8 months ago

Meanwhile, brake lights and running lights are frequently too dim because of an aesthetic obsession with "blacking out" tail lights.

kaelwd• 8 months ago

Luckily that's illegal in my country, instead we have the opposite problem where new cars have LED taillights that are just as blindingly bright as their headlights.

sanex• 8 months ago

Honestly I'm seeing the opposite. Some new cars, I THINK Camry's, have taillights so bright it's blinding to wait behind one at a stoplight. They don't need to shine just glow so you can see them.

mnw21cam6• 8 months ago

I have never understood why everyone seems to immediately forget everything in their driving lessons as soon as they pass their test. When you're waiting at a red light, you're meant to have the hand brake on (which does not illuminate the brake lights), not your foot on the brake, unless you know that the light is going to turn green very soon, or you're trying to catch the attention of someone coming up behind who looks like they haven't seen that you have stopped.

MSFT_Edging2• 8 months ago

I'm regularly blinded by some of the ultra-bright rear LEDs. I drive a fairly small/low car so traffic at night is miserable. I tend to avoid driving at night all together for the most part now.

attila-lendvai2• 8 months ago

actually, this is on my list of signs that our civilization is fscked...

Aachen10• 8 months ago

fsck report: some bad sectors are worse than others

alt22716• 8 months ago

It certainly is a sign that people are note very considerate of others.

attila-lendvai2• 8 months ago

i think it's much worse than that: first, most drivers are probably not aware of the problem at all (i mean that their (often brand new) car is part of the problem).

just consider e.g. the number of people who are driving in fog or rain without their headlight turned on... because nowadays the front lights are always on due to some law... but the back of their car is completely dark. and no amount of flashing any lights makes them realize this.

or the number of people who are clueless about the fact that the headlight agle can be adjusted on most cars today, and what that means and/or how that works.

second, it's the institutions that are failing here, which is *way more concerning* than some clueles people driving around on the roads...

wintermutestwin• 8 months ago

Where are the AR driving glasses that automatically dim oncoming headlights (and alert the driver to possible road hazards, and…)?

Seems to me that all of this tech to create autonomous driving could be also used to augment human driving.

amelius2• 8 months ago

What if it suddenly shows a blue screen?

_joel2• 8 months ago

You crash, both systematically and through the windsceen.

DougRisk• 8 months ago

They call it the Blue Screen of Death for a reason.

rawling• 8 months ago

Eye tracking camera in the cabin, LCD film on the windshield, it'd be like reverse matrix lights.

spike0212• 8 months ago

It's also like this in America.

Earlier in the year I got a replacement rear-view mirror with an anti-glare coating and it's paid dividends. It helps so much at night on dark sections of road when newer cars with bright headlights are around me. Finally decided to also replace my side mirrors with ones that have a similar coating.

xeromal• 8 months ago

My old 2003 Lexus has some sort of anti-bright headlight feature for the rear view mirror that was a gamechanger when I got it. I always notice when I drive another car.

spike0212• 8 months ago

yeah, some cars have powered dimming. most have the little tab/switch at the bottom you need to flick whenever you want to use the dimmer angle. in my last car that would always mess up my optimal rear view mirror angle and position, which would get annoying and turn into a hassle.

everdrive5• 8 months ago

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.

nikanj3• 8 months ago

Out in the country: moose and other animals

Lio• 8 months ago

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

(I'll give you other animals though.)

jonahrd• 8 months ago

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

silon42• 8 months ago

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.

Lammy• 8 months ago

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.

geerlingguy• 8 months ago

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).

Magnets• 8 months ago

animals and other objects on the road, and potholes

jansper393• 8 months ago

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.

Maxion2• 8 months ago

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

DiogoRolo• 8 months ago

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.

thedanbob• 8 months ago

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.

ComputerGuru• 8 months ago

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.

toast012• 8 months ago

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

alt22716• 8 months ago

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.

stuaxo• 8 months ago

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".

chipsrafferty• 8 months ago

Nightclubs are still too dark. Streets are too bright.

linuxftw• 8 months ago

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

gadders• 8 months ago

>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.

robot-wrangler2• 8 months ago

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.

crazygringo14• 8 months ago

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.

graemep6• 8 months ago

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.

shortercode• 8 months ago

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.

pjmlp• 8 months ago

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.

delaminator3• 8 months ago

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

everdrive5• 8 months ago

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.

redwall_hp• 8 months ago

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.

hampowder• 8 months ago

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

barbazoo4• 8 months ago

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.

lozenge• 8 months ago

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.

jpfromlondon2• 8 months ago

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.

graemep6• 8 months ago

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.

danw19792• 8 months ago

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.

Frost1x• 8 months ago

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

mingus883• 8 months ago

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.

Aachen10• 8 months ago

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)

Tox46• 8 months ago

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.

doctorshady• 8 months ago

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.

alt22716• 8 months ago

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.

xxs• 8 months ago

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

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

widforss• 8 months ago

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

skeletal882• 8 months ago

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.

alt22716• 8 months ago

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.

thedougd• 8 months ago

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

iso16313• 8 months ago

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.

tw04• 8 months ago

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.

barbazoo4• 8 months ago

This can also be adjusted to by reducing speed.

everdrive5• 8 months ago

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.

DannyBee5• 8 months ago

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

catlikesshrimp• 8 months ago

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.

iso16313• 8 months ago

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

DeathArrow• 8 months ago

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.

k1rd• 8 months ago

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.

mapt5• 8 months ago

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.

Spoom• 8 months ago

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

potato37328429• 8 months ago

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.

marcosdumay2• 8 months ago

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.

taeric3• 8 months ago

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.

vladvasiliu3• 8 months ago

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.

bunderbunder• 8 months ago

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.

Cthulhu_• 8 months ago

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.

17186274408• 8 months ago

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.

abyssin3• 8 months ago

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

johnwalkr5• 8 months ago

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.

breppp• 8 months ago

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

kappi• 8 months ago

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!

phatfish• 8 months ago

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.

Aurornis3• 8 months ago

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.

everdrive5• 8 months ago

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.

alt22716• 8 months ago

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.

icetank2• 8 months ago

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.

globular-toast3• 8 months ago

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.

rickydroll• 8 months ago

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.

mingus883• 8 months ago

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

htek• 8 months ago

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).

mingus883• 8 months ago

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

arethuza• 8 months ago

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

Yizahi2• 8 months ago

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.

Etheryte• 8 months ago

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.

alt22716• 8 months ago

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.

psunavy032• 8 months ago

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.

jcranmer2• 8 months ago

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.

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.

esseph2• 8 months ago

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.

gorgoiler3• 8 months ago

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.

7952• 8 months ago

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.

SoftTalker4• 8 months ago

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.

alt22716• 8 months ago

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

pwg5• 8 months ago

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.

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.

nullhole• 8 months ago

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.

userbinator3• 8 months ago

So who are they for?

Marketing.

duskdozer8• 8 months ago

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.

nikanj3• 8 months ago

The bane of my existence is the new "smart" matrix lights, which claim you don't have to switch to low beams for incoming traffic. I bet they work great in AutoCAD or perfect vacuum, but in reality you have the pesky atmosphere scattering the bright photons every which way - guaranteeing at least 40% hitting my poor retinas.

semi-extrinsic2• 8 months ago

The only solution is to fit a 300W LED bar and consistently flash those guys until they are bothered enough to go into the menu of their computer-on-wheels and turn off this "feature".

WesolyKubeczek5• 8 months ago

...or piss those guys enough that they will call police on you for blinding them and creating a road hazard, or someone unhinged enough gets pissed off and will follow you, after which your behind will dearly regret buying such a long LED bar.

This is the same kind of useful advice as the one to brake check those whose driving style you don't like very much, fight (real or perceived) road hazard with deliberately creating more hazard.

cbzbc• 8 months ago

The problem is that they react to lights from the opposing vehicle, but they are going to hit your eyes before they detect your lights.

That's with simple high beam assist. The matrix ones you refer to actually have another feature which makes things even worse; they progressively dip the light in parts, but combined with the first effect this means that you have a few seconds of being blinded before all of their component leds have been dipped.

Not to mention that they are only reacting to something directly in front of them for the most part -- meaning you can be blinded on curves, or when turn around and looking at them off axis (say as they wait to turn into a road).

veltas3• 8 months ago

They just don't work, they blind me all the time reflecting off of side mirrors or just don't detect that you're in the zone at all.

MarcScott• 8 months ago

I think this is an area where stricter regulation would be appreciated. Just needs an additional checkbox on the regular MOT forms, and all cars would be compliant within a year.

Additionally, car designers should leave headlights and indicators alone, unless they are making the vehicles safer. The first time I encountered an oncoming car with a horizontal LED strip between the lights, I had no idea what style of vehicle was oncoming.

varispeed2• 8 months ago

It was a monobrow car.

HPsquared• 8 months ago

A lot of this is due to differing heights. There are more tall vehicles with headlights that are high off the ground, which dazzle drivers of regular cars.

Even if the dip angle is the same (1% gradient or so), this can still dazzle most people nearby.

Aachen10• 8 months ago

Vans and other bigger vehicles, that have the lights mounted higher than usual, are indeed particularly bad, but I don't really want to get into an arms race of taller and taller vehicles just to be able to see at night. Better that the manufacturers just angle it down a bit more if they want to put the lights up that high

close04• 8 months ago

Headlights are brighter because when you are behind them, it's a game changer. The road visibility is so much better now, I still remember the dull yellowish lights I had on my first car (1970s model) and realize I was more driving by feel. But in front of those headlights it's a pain.

Then there's the height of the hood, headlights are so much higher than they used to on average. Amplifies that pain.

17186274408• 8 months ago

That was the case, when you were the only one having them. Now you see less, because everyone has them.

veltas3• 8 months ago

The problem is the road visibility doesn't need to be 'better', it just needs to be 'visible'.

We went from the road is visible to everyone, to the road is only visible to some people because the rest of us don't have ultra bright lights and are getting blinded.

comrade1234• 8 months ago

Are they just not aimed properly? I don't think replacing headlights is something you should do unless you're a professional.

I don't drive much here in Switzerland but I haven't noticed a problem when I do drive, but in the USA when I drive, especially in rural areas it's a pain.

1970-01-012• 8 months ago

It's this. They aren't inspected for alignment. It's fairly obvious that you can't be blinded by a light unless it's being sent directly into your face or reflecting off a mirror and directly into your face.

zimpenfish• 8 months ago

I thought they changed the MOT to better assess alignment[0]?

[0] https://mattersoftesting.blog.gov.uk/the-mot-headlamp-aim-te...

Jamustico• 8 months ago

I don't think it's the brightness but the type of light.

LED white lights are the actually the problem

alexpadula• 8 months ago

All new car head lights are too bright. I miss the old warm yellow lights.

jansper393• 8 months ago

We could have warmer headlights which would be more comfortable for road users, but most car manufacturers have decided it's 5000K white because it's fashionable.

WesolyKubeczek5• 8 months ago

I'm always curious, who are all those people who tell manufacturers it's fashionable? Other than voices in their heads? Who are those people that unironically like those searing lights?

mnw21cam6• 8 months ago

Higher colour temperature LEDs are more efficient, so that's one reason why they get chosen. It's not a good reason, given they're still a massive efficiency improvement over old halogens.

crazygringo14• 8 months ago

Some US context:

"Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 108 (FMVSS 108) regulates all automotive lighting, signalling and reflective devices in the United States.

In February 2022, FMVSS 108 was amended to allow automakers to install adaptive driver beam (ADB) headlamps on new vehicles. However, carmakers have not implemented ADB because of contradictions in the rule.

As of December 2024, FMVSS 108 has not been updated to adapt to widespread use of LED headlamps, which are criticized for being too bright and blinding other drivers. Some manufacturers have reportedly engineered headlamps to have a dark spot where they are measured according to the regulation while being over-illuminated in the rest of the field."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Motor_Vehicle_Safety_S...

"Adaptive Highbeam Assist is Mercedes-Benz's marketing name for a headlight control strategy that continuously automatically tailors the headlamp range so the beam just reaches other vehicles ahead, thus always ensuring maximum possible seeing range without glaring other road users.

This technology is also known as Adaptive Driving Beams (ADB).

Until February 2022, this technology had been illegal in the US, as FMVSS 108 specifically stated that headlamps must have dedicated high and low beams to be deemed road-legal. An infrastructure bill enacted in November 2021 included language that directs the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to amend FMVSS 108 to allow the use of this technology, and set a two-year deadline for implementing this change. In February 2022, the NHTSA amended FMVSS 108 allowing adaptive headlights for use in the US. However, the new regulations are quite different from the ones in effect in Europe and Asia and prevent car manufacturers from easily adapting their systems to the US market."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headlamp?wprov=sfti1#Adaptive_...

rootusrootus5• 8 months ago

I have adaptive lights on my Ford Lightning (and Model 3, more recently), and I do like it, but it is not without compromises.

It relies on the camera recognizing what should be excluded from the light pattern, for one. Easy for oncoming cars as well as ones in front of you. Less easy for vehicles that are perpendicular to you (like just showing their nose and driver, waiting to turn onto the road you are already on). And then there are pedestrians.

They do try to mitigate that by turning off the adaptive high beam whenever the car detects that you are in a well lit area with lots of ambient lighting sources (i.e. the city), but it's not foolproof. And since you just leave it on all the time, you end up using the "high beam" light far more often than you'd probably choose to when controlling it manually.

oldjim798• 8 months ago

Desperately we need to reign in car "style" choices like this. Beyond headlights being too bright, lift kits should be banned and tint regulations should be enforced. Same with sound regulations.

Public roads are not race tracks; they are for people.

lan3214• 8 months ago

What bothers you about tints? I've never bothered to get one since it's illegal where I'm at but the new ones seem pretty cool for cave dwellers who fear the light. They tint well during the day but you can still see at night from what I've seen on friends cars.

ghusto3• 8 months ago

It's like driving behind a truck or van, you can't see past the (tinted) car in front.

The solution would be to overtake people with tinted windows. Unfortunately, the type of people with tinted windows are exactly the type you shouldn't overtake.

mtoner23• 8 months ago

most aftermarket tints are too dark and dont allow pedestrians to see into the car to see if they going to be hit by the driver. its illegal in most places but cops dont do anything about it.

globular-toast3• 8 months ago

I could talk about eye contact and how using the road only works if we cooperate but, more than anything, I just find a heavily tinted windscreen to be antisocial. It's like the ultimate form of bullying. Driving around in a killing machine without your victims even being able to see you.

squishy47• 8 months ago

ugh the fucking noise. My house backs onto a road that's only really busy in rush hours. It's the mopeds and trash-can exhausts that are the pain, the actual traffic isn't that noisy. yeah, exhaust sound is fun but not on your corsa; save it for the race-track. At least the drug dealers are respectful and ride electric bikes. As much as we're heading to a police state, might almost be worth it if they regulated vehicle noise.

varispeed2• 8 months ago

Yes, evening, rain, headlights - basically best to close eyes and drive by feel.

I too wonder why these are legal.

PunchyHamster• 8 months ago

No wonder. We need standard both on the brightness and the height of the headlights off the ground. Try driving normal sized car or anything sporty and it's blindness central any time modern SUV shows up.

mihaaly• 8 months ago

Wild west of light usage makes cycling habits in UK bad as well. Several thousands of lux lights are pointed towards the oncoming cyclsts switched to strobe mode. Rear light are comparably strong and distracting by all the very creative patterns of flashing. People seem to pour out the children of safety with the dirty bath water of flashing lights. Yes, you want to be noticed, yeah, you made it! By dazzling everyone else and divert attention away from any other traffic or dangers. Very stupid practice, making safety worse, not better.

Sunspark2• 8 months ago

Those flashing lights aren't even road legal in Germany. I never set mine to flash and I'm not in Germany.

I believe flashing lights are actually less safe as it encourages the driver to look AWAY from you. I certainly don't keep staring at a flashing light.

keepamovin• 8 months ago

This is one of those situations where UK's "rule by law" model could actually be super positive. Make a law restricting brightness and put police and cameras onto ticketing drivers who needlessly burn their highbeams when lowbeams would suffice.

The old halogen-warm colors were better, too. You don't want "area denial" lighting on your everyday ride.

_joel2• 8 months ago

Totally, especially the big chelsea tractors that seem to be even more direct to retina.

rwmj• 8 months ago

Really need to limit the size of cars. Its starting to get ridiculous our here in the English countryside with cars that have to cross the median because they're so fat.

gbil• 8 months ago

A few things I've experienced:

- In many new cars the headlights do indeed appear as very bright. In the Xenon era the headlight height adjustment per occupancy was done automatically but at least in a few new cars I've been in with LED headlights this is not the case and the driver needs to adjust it by hand and I'm pretty sure the vast majority doesn't do that.

- Many new cars offer automated switching of high beam lights and the results vary to say the least.

- Small experience from UK highways gave me the same impression, the middle strip is not a solid one which is a huge issue when the lights from the other side blind you and I'm talking about normal headlights just because of road curvature or height difference of the opposing lanes while there are no overhead road lights.

EDIT:format

yolo3000• 8 months ago

I am in very small minority since my car is 20 years old now, but it has halogen lights with height adjustments, and they even check for height adjustment at the yearly inspection. But automated high beam switching and people are not ware of it? What sort of drivers do we have nowadays..

kbolino• 8 months ago

A number of US states don't even require regular safety inspections. For example, in Maryland, you only get a safety inspection when selling your vehicle or transferring it in from another state.

The number of people who don't use their lights judiciously is surprisingly large. Besides high beam issues, I've also observed people who think that their daytime running lights are headlights. This is especially obvious because their taillights will be off.

ZeroConcerns• 8 months ago

I think the UK should do a HeadExit, where they refuse any bulbs manufactured after 1972 or so (maybe 1974 bulbs are still acceptable, I don't know man, can anyone run a quick A/B test?).

I'm pretty sure that, like "taking control of [their] borders by leaving the EU", this is a course of action that will make everyone happy.

jeffbee2• 8 months ago

It seems to me that in America the number of people just driving around with their high beams on has greatly increased in the last decade or so, too. People are so focused on their phones that they don't see the big blue light on the dashboard, or they don't know what it indicates.

segmondy2• 8 months ago

It's not people turning it on, it's the default on lots of new cars, they turn on automatically at night especially and are suppose to switch to low beam when they see incoming cars.

jeffbee2• 8 months ago

Most of the ones I notice seem to be older cars that probably lacked those features. It's mostly the older cars where you can unambiguously see their bright lights are on anyway, because of the headlight style.

WesolyKubeczek5• 8 months ago

Same in Poland, I often drive after dark thinking, "those oncoming idiots and their high beams", but then they flash their high beams at someone and I realize that those are not their high beams.

Granted, my Yaris with full LED lights and their atrocious cool white light is a part of the problem, so I'm in no position to complain, but at least my lights are aimed correctly, so there's that.

Sunspark2• 8 months ago

In North America, the problem is other than the fact they didn't allow dimming lights for whatever reason, they made a separate regulation for LED lights compared to the old incandescent lights.

The old light regulation actually had a limit on how bright the running lights could be.

The new LED light regulation says you can have it as bright as the manufacturer wants it to be.

So now there is the problem of misaligned headlights that don't point at the road but instead point at cars, and are as bright or brighter than the old incandescent high beams.

I have to have my rear-view mirror permanently flipped at night now. I never needed to do that in the past except when some idiot actually was using their high beams.

WesolyKubeczek5• 8 months ago

Another problem in North America is that the sizes and heights of cars keep going up. Reminds me of loudness wars in music somehow. Don’t know if this apparent size translates to more space inside; from my limited experience riding in American cars, not very much.

There’s someone in my neighborhood who has an imported Toyota Sequoia. Magnificent machine. His car could be mistaken for a small bus. When he vacates the spot, two normal sized cars can park in it. Our actual buses and semis often have lower headlights than that thing.

wkoszek• 8 months ago

US is the same. I no longer know is someone is using long-distance lights or normal lights, or whether they are wrongly adjusted. But driving at knight, especially with folks right behind you is hard.

skylurk• 8 months ago

Recently I was driving in the daytime and got temporarily blinded by a BMW SUV with its high beams on. Not sure where to draw the line, but "brighter than the sun" is too bright.

cpfleming• 8 months ago

More that they're misaligned than too bright...

Aachen10• 8 months ago

Where I live, it's customary to let other drivers know by flashing your brights when they're blinding you or if there's some other issue with their vehicle like a broken tail light or such. Maybe less now that you can't easily change the bulb yourself but as a principle

In recent years I've started being unable to tell who's intentionally blinding traffic and who's just got misconfigured lamps (shining at eye level instead of angled down at the road). It used to be feasible to also let people know when their lights are misconfigured, I'd probably decide 1 warrants a signal across several hours of driving (also because of avoiding collateral targets), but the most recent time I drove, I think there was always at least one car in sight that had the issue. It's completely constant. It was worsening a few years ago but it's really getting out of hand now, in Germany and the Netherlands at least. Some people's lights are even piercing by day! Thankfully that is quite rare yet

segmondy2• 8 months ago

A lot of new cars have it automatic, where they run on high beam and are supposed to turn it off when they see incoming cars ahead.

Aachen10• 8 months ago

We had a rental like that in 2023. The person who was driving was amazed and you could see the effect very well where it would light up the forest or town except for the one strip where this other car was coming on

(I'll say it looked cool even if we didn't need the gimmick, other drivers did occasionally flash us when they were at the edge of its detection range, and I can't imagine it improves the wildlife situation that's already not exactly thriving with habitat areas cut up by roads and light pollution from towns and cars everywhere around it)

I haven't seen this type of headlight as a third party yet. I've been on the lookout for where another car might light up areas around me but never noticed it. Not sure it's that common in Germany or the Netherlands

donatj2• 8 months ago

When I got my Honda van with stock LED headlights about a year ago, people started flashing me that my brights were on. After the first couple times I started flashing my actual brights back. They make the stock headlights too dang bright.

Aachen10• 8 months ago

Maybe get them replaced if you're blinding the other drivers?

I also assume that few people complain to the manufacturer so they're probably not even aware that people find it a nuisance. While one complaint won't do anything, it could be doing anyway just in case you're not the only one who does

belval• 8 months ago

My parents bought a Lexus that happens to be tall-ish with very bright headlights. I don't think I have ever driven it at night without people flashing me.

It's really up to regulators to put something in place though, I don't understand why it is taking so long. It's not like they want those super-bright headlights, they just come with the car...

lucianbr7• 8 months ago

I'm the one who's flashing you. I'm flashing you because your headlights are bothering me. Showing me that you can bother me even more does not make it better.

Still, obviously, nothing you can do, or the driver in general. And I guess the manufacturers aren't incentivised. Regulation is the only thing that I can think of that will work.

calvinmorrison4• 8 months ago

So, I tested this for a few weeks. I can safely drive my car around with hi-beams on and nobody even notices. My hi-beams are less bothersome than the standard SUV.

alias_neo2• 8 months ago

Where I live, it's customary to let other drivers know by flashing your brights when they're blinding you

I do this here in the UK too, it happens a fair amount in the countryside where people will forget to turn off their high-beams as they reach a junction, and some of them driving older vehicles that won't detect oncoming traffic and auto-dip.

Like you, I increasingly have the issue, in the city, that some lights are so damn bright I literally can't tell if they're using high-beams other than the fact I've grown to know which models are the worst for it. Flashing them is pointless because they won't understand unless someone actually stops to tell them one day.

Legislation needs to fix this, they never should have been allowed to be sold like this, and I hope mandates for changes to the annual inspections (MOT here in UK) come in to correct it for existing vehicles.

afandian• 8 months ago

The excellent Mike Harrison has a couple of good videos on YT tearing down modern headlamps:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fRjMHtnShs

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZJoPbk53ug

(all his videos are good)

matt-p• 8 months ago

I've got to say, I feel like bright white full spectrum is the main problem, I would care much less about them if they were red (though yes, we would need a new colour for rear/brake lights).

neilv• 8 months ago

TRL's data suggests that LED and whiter headlamps may be linked to glare and that drivers might find their whiteness harder to cope with.

As a long-time walker in the US, anecdotally, I've noticed some especially blinding car headlights, and they seem to be among the whiter ones. "Hey, thanks for ruining my night vision and my sleep cycle." But I usually can't tell whether the cause of the problem is the the aiming, brightness, or temperature. I thought headlights were carefully regulated.

(There's something about LED lights that brings out oblivious or indifferent behavior. Maybe involving efficiency improvements, and people not reassessing requirements (e.g., when you couldn't get a too-bright light, or it would be too expensive to operate, you didn't have to think about other not-too-bright requirements). In recent years, we got municipalities installing miserable bright white street lamps, prompting complaints from walkers and people who don't have blackout curtains anywhere that shines in at night. And the last couple years, some individual residential properties in my very dense neighborhood are installing crazy-bright white LED floodlights outdoors, shining at sidewalks and adjacent property windows, brighter than even the new street lamps. I'm starting to see walkers at night going out into the street (which isn't very safe), just to avoid the blast. The first too-bright property lights to appear on a block's street are very easy to spot, because they're obviously the brightest thing there.)

duskdozer8• 8 months ago

I've also noticed a big uptick in the last couple years with these problems. It's horrible and it feels like one of those things that will just keep getting worse.

torcete• 8 months ago

When I was living in the UK, I remember being constantly blinded by cars driving the opposite direction. A problem I rarely had in continental Europe and never understood the reason.

rckt• 8 months ago

As a pedestrian I can say that the headlights are too bright everywhere I visit. If a car goes up a slope and I go down it's like somebody holds a flashlight right up my eyes. I don't understand why these mandatory lights should be so bright.

theoldgreybeard• 8 months ago

I have astigmatism and the LED headlights are excruciating. They make driving at night in the city absolute torture.

daemonologist• 8 months ago

I find this problem to be most severe as a pedestrian - when my eyes have adjusted to the darkness (even if I'm carrying a flashlight, it pales in comparison) and a modern car is oncoming, I cannot see _anything_. Out here in the sticks where there are no sidewalks I can either take it on blind faith that the driver has seen and will avoid me, or I can step way off into the ditch (but not everyone has that option).

cubefox3• 8 months ago

Yeah. When I ride my bike in the sticks and pass walkers in the dark, I try to disable my headlight a few seconds before I pass them. Otherwise all they see is a bright light approaching. Disabling the lights for a moment seems better than one party not seeing anything. (Or both parties, e.g. two bikes, or runners with forehead LED light.)

After all, even in the countryside the darkness usually is far from complete. You still see quite a few meters without any headlights. Though the tradeoff would be different for cars with their much higher speed.

abyssin3• 8 months ago

If your front light is correctly aiming down, there’s no need to disable the light. Modern bicycle led front lights are most often incorrectly set up, though.

sysworld• 8 months ago

Just chuck in the old non LED lights. When I'm walking around town at night, it's only the cars with new bright white LEDs that are super bright and blind me. It's a relief when an older car come by with orange'y lights.

Even during the day, the other week I was driving and some small mini had super bright white lights on, no need for them, it was bright day out. Even just the normal "day" lights on new cars can be too sharp/bright. It's ok if I don't look at them directly, but if I accidently check that way it's distracting.

kedean3• 8 months ago

Thanks to automatic high beams, its a problem in residential urban areas too. My neighborhood does not have much in the way of streetlights, and automatic high beams operate by detecting whether there is significant oncoming light. That means that in my neighborhood, cars with AHB always have their high beams up when there isn't oncoming car traffic. They also tend to function really badly around road curves in residential areas, where they'll affect other drivers.

PSA: Turn off your automatic high beams, they aren't worth it the damage they do to the rest of us.

ghusto3• 8 months ago

A study commissioned by the Department for Transport (DfT) found 97% of people surveyed found they were regularly or sometimes distracted by oncoming vehicles and 96% thought most or some headlights were too bright.

1% said they were sometimes distracted by incoming vehicles, and that was fine.

monegator• 8 months ago

The headlights are most definetly not too bright.

Instead, they are too high, because the idiots with new cars rely on the automatic beam positioning which is always too slow.

Or they are fitting led bulbs in an halogen fixture and never bother to make the adjustments

ghusto3• 8 months ago

No, they are too bright. So bright that they dazzle at any height.

xzjis• 8 months ago

There are two situations where I have problems with being dazzled by headlights: - low beams on roads that aren't flat, because they shine right into my eyes - the high beams of cars behind me (sometimes close), which reflect in my mirrors but also off my ceiling, my dashboard, etc.

But I don't necessarily have a problem with the headlights just because they're too powerful.

njarboe4• 8 months ago

One of the main reasons people want/need brighter headlights is that there is much more light inside the car from screens. These don't let your eyes adjust to the dark properly. Older cars had dim green lighting for the gauges and even had a knob to adjust the brightness up and down. You could create a very dim interior instead of the huge amount of white light you get with modern cars and the multiple screens.

I'm happy my Tesla does a decent job of having the screen be quite dark at night but the headlights are quite bad with the horizontal cutoff style that only lights the first few feet of horizontal ahead of the car. I need to see those deer and elk on the side of the road, damn it.

bob10292• 8 months ago

Older cars had dim green lighting for the gauges and even had a knob to adjust the brightness up and down.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xgh2zbifn7E

marcosdumay2• 8 months ago

That's a nice feature, but the driver actively operating that camera at 70 mph is quite unsettling.

boldlybold• 8 months ago

I knew before clicking this was going to be a Saab, I miss mine!

njarboe4• 8 months ago

The low green glow in the 65 mustang I drove in high school was divine.

haspok3• 8 months ago

huge amount of white light you get with modern cars

Maybe this is missing from your Tesla, but in my poor VW the "screen" has a dark mode which is automatically turned on when the lights are turned on - including Android Auto and Google Maps, which is pretty much the only thing I ever use it for.

Previously I had a rusty Toyota with a very pale orange display, it was always either too dim or too bright, terrible contrast, and changing brightness on it was a pain. I hated that with a passion.

thebruce87m• 8 months ago

Maybe this is missing from your Tesla, but in my poor VW the "screen" has a dark mode which is automatically turned on when the lights are turned on - including Android Auto and Google Maps, which is pretty much the only thing I ever use it for.

Tesla seems to do dark mode on sun rise / sun set.

Doing it with the lights seems like a strange decision - sometimes I want my lights on when it’s bright - e.g. fog, rain or when the sun is low and I want others to see me.

njarboe4• 8 months ago

My Tesla does a good job with its screen and since it is a model 3, no bright gages in front of the wheel. Most other modern cars have this problem though.

_will_• 8 months ago

It's worse than that ... It has an "auto dark mode", but in my opinion, doesn't get dark enough by default. I like my screens very dark at night. Admittedly darker than most. When using the "self driving" mode, my former model 3 thought the screen was too dark and any time it was engaged, actually INCREASED the screen brightness from my setting to a level I felt was uncomfortable and inhibiting night vision. I'd manually crank it back down again (via several distracting menus and steps) and it would stay at that level until the next time self driving was activated.

I made a complaint about it to the service department and was told that it was intentional so that the internal camera could see me better to ensure compliance with my eyes looking at the road. That might be true, but since I could still manually turn the brightness down after starting self drive and self drive would continue, it's obviously not required and there should be some way to disable it.

Marsymars• 8 months ago

My 2025 car (Ford) still has buttons for adjusting the brightness up/down.

Wistar5• 8 months ago

Lately, I see a lot of drivers who turn on their brights and just leave them on and this includes cars with the older halogen and even incandescents. This is a change in behavior.

As for LEDs, to me, the Tesla Model 3 headlights are the worst offender, but not all of them, just the majority. I can look down a column of oncoming cars and pick out the Model 3s from a few blocks distance. I suspect that the Model 3 headlights are often maladjusted as they have a user/driver-accessible headlight aiming menu and it looks to me like a lot of Tesla owners get in to that menu and do some freelance aiming. Plus, a lot of Model 3 drivers around here—and there are a lot of them here (Seattle area)—seem to turn on everything, brights, DRLs, fog lights, every lamp.

Another egregious offender is the Acura Jewel-Eye headlights although I am seeing ever more cars with headlights set to stun.

The worst situation is waiting at an intersection where the pavement is crowned to drain the intersection, making the headlights on the cars opposite just miserable to contend with. Sometimes so bad I can’t see the traffic lights.

I am not sure what the solution is but the situation is getting worse and quickly.

LoganDark5• 8 months ago

I usually drive with only the DRLs even at night. My vision is good enough that there's no reason to blind other drivers. I only use the beams at all when there's bad weather that fucks with visibility, or when the road has no retroreflectors. Also ever since a collision repair the headlight beams have been misaligned and that's extremely distracting/infuriating so I hate using them anyway.

hughes• 8 months ago

Can confirm, my Model 3 had its lights angled too high from the factory. Only realized after a few people flashed their high beams at me during my first week driving.

Thankfully it was easy to adjust.

shit_game• 8 months ago

This is a change in behavior.
I am not sure what the solution is but the situation is getting worse and quickly.

The solution is legislation and enforcement. Driving at night now makes me afraid for my safety because I'm literally blinded by oncoming traffic, and I'm sure that many other people share the same sentiment. I would happily argue that driving with lights bright enough to impair other drivers counts as wreckless driving and ought to be treated as such, but as far as I can tell, there are no legislative limits on directional lumen output or directional calibration for front-facing lights on cars, which leaves "wreckless" open to interpretation. This issue requires legislation that affects car manufacturers to prevent them from putting dangerous lights in their cars, and legislation that requires regular inspection of cars regarding their lumen output and headlight calibration. Most US states already require yearly inspections for emissions for most cars in order to re-register them; there are already means and methods in place for this to happen, it just needs to be done.

I'm sick of feeling like im going to die every time I drive home because some asshole wants to see everything a mile in front of him.

0xfeba2• 8 months ago

Lately, I see a lot of drivers who turn on their brights and just leave them on and this includes cars with the older halogen and even incandescents. This is a change in behavior.

This is one of my pet peeves.

I've categorized it into what I believe are the main causes:

1. People just don't know as well today that the blue indicator means you're blinding people

2. People with newer cars which will automatically turn off the headlights, including the brights, when you turn off and leave the car.

3. People with older cars where the low-beams are burned out or broken

I've been tempted to purchase digital billboard space to raise awareness. Eg., "If this blue indicator is on, you're blinding everyone".

And/or, get a mirror on my trunk that I can adjust the angle of from inside the cabin to reflect back high-beams at the driver.

Mostly I'm hoping that automatic high-beams, like some Ford trucks I've seen do well, proliferate more!

kulahan• 8 months ago

I remember, when shopping for a car, the salesman told me about an Alpina model he had with laser headlights so intense they weren't even legal for new builds anymore. It's a selling point in some vehicles.

Still, the idea that you should give headlight illumination control to the idiot behind the wheel is insane to me. Is it not a regulated height? Maybe that explains why it's a nightmare to drive at night anymore.

dbg31415• 8 months ago

Lately, I see a lot of drivers who turn on their brights and just leave them on and this includes cars with the older halogen and even incandescents. This is a change in behavior.

Something has changed in how we use headlights, and not for the better.

Historically, drivers behaved very differently. When "brights" were actually rare and reserved for dark stretches of highway, you'd dim them the moment you saw another car approaching. Often that meant switching to low beams when the other vehicle was more than a thousand feet away. Courtesy and safety were the norm.

The technology has come a long way. Early headlights in the 1880s burned oil or kerosene. Acetylene gas lamps followed, and electric lighting appeared in the early 1900s. For decades after 1940, U.S. regulations froze headlight design into a two-lamp, 7-inch sealed-beam configuration. That rule unintentionally limited improvements in beam shape and brightness. Only in the 1970s and 1980s did halogens and replaceable-bulb designs become widely permitted, which opened the door to much brighter and more varied systems.

Then came the xenon era in the late 1990s and early 2000s. High-Intensity Discharge (HID) lamps felt futuristic at the time, but they were also infamous for their glare, especially when installed into housings not designed for them. This is where "riced-out" aftermarket kits made things worse. People would drop cheap HID or later LED bulbs into reflector housings built for halogen. The result was scattered, unfocused light that looked bright from the driver's seat but created a wall of glare for everyone else. That trend never fully went away.

Today, Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 108 (FMVSS 108) governs headlamps. It sets minimum performance requirements and basic definitions for high and low beams, but it does not impose strict limits on maximum brightness or color temperature. The old "300 candlepower requires a dimmer switch" phrasing still floats around, but there is no tight federal cap on lumens or color warmth. States can enforce aiming requirements, but in practice they rarely do. Nobody is pulling cars over with a light meter.

Modern LEDs changed the equation again. They're efficient, crisp, and extremely "white" (actually "blue") which makes them appear even brighter to human eyes at night. Complaints about perceived glare have been climbing for years, and there's no shortage of real-world examples of it in the wild. https://old.reddit.com/r/fuckyourheadlights/

Automakers tried to help with automatic high-beam systems, but these were designed to detect oncoming headlamps, not pedestrians. If you're walking your dogs at night, the system may not dim because it "sees" nothing to react to. Many drivers rely on auto mode and never manually intervene, so they cruise around blasting full brightness without realizing it.

My workaround is simple. I carry a high-power flashlight and give a quick shine toward cars running high beams. The auto-dimmer interprets it as another vehicle and drops to low beam. It also alerts the driver that something is off. Plenty of neighbors have told me they had no idea their headlights weren't dimming. (Teslas are by far the worst offenders.)

This is the flashlight I use:

https://www.costco.ca/infinity-x1-7000-lumen-flashlight.prod...

SJC_Hacker• 8 months ago

I am not sure what the solution is but the situation is getting worse and quickly.

Maybe Corey Hart had the right idea … sunglasses at night

lukeschlather• 8 months ago

My parents' new Chevy Bolt automatically turns off the brights when appropriate. At first I was doing it manually but then I started trusting it, it just works, it does it at exactly the moment I would do it (actually it's better at it than me.) I'm surprised Teslas don't do it.

vkou• 8 months ago

Lately, I see a lot of drivers who turn on their brights and just leave them on and this includes cars with the older halogen and even incandescents. This is a change in behavior.

I mean, the reptile part of my brain is really tempted to do so, because every other car on the road is blinding me - why be a good citizen, it's all fucking Mad Max out there anyways...

(On odd-numbered days, that part of my brain compels me to go through the mall parking lot and spray a filter onto all the offending vehicles' headlights.)

The issue is that the giga-bright headlights would be fine if they were pointed at the road, instead of onto oncoming traffic. And some people have them incorrectly adjusted, where they do point onto incoming traffic.

However, even if they were correctly adjusted, the slightest bump or angle in a road will still result in them shining directly into my face.

The only acceptable solution is to send all offending vehicles to the junkyard, tomorrow. If that's not palatable, I'll settle with funding a a Department of Highway Safety making the rounds of the parking lots with a hammer.

supportengineer• 8 months ago

To raise awareness I've started turning on my high beams when I encounter one of those drivers.

gleenn• 8 months ago

I found out recently that you can adjust your Tesla headlights electronically from the computer screen inside and it was quite easy. I was regularly getting high-beam flashed by people because I think the stock Tesla settings have the lights too high.

dreamcompiler• 8 months ago

The Tesla Model Y automatic dimmer is quite stupid. It dims whenever my lights reflect off a street sign and no other cars are nearby. I have to keep it turned off and dim my lights manually, which is a PITA because sometimes I forget and blind oncoming drivers.

The automatic wipers are even worse: They frequently come on when it's not raining and they don't come on when it is. Yet somehow the automatic wipers on my 2011 Audi work perfectly. WTF?

amy_petrik• 8 months ago

This is a change in behavior.

I agree with this and believe it due to something parallel to the India litter crisis. In india people may freely throw garbage anywhere. Because garbage is everywhere. They did studies "clean up ALL garbage on this street" and now people are more respectful. So there is a sense "garbage is everywhere, who cares if I add to it"

The same thing with headlights, "everyone seems to be blasting their headlights, might as well" - it's a slippery slope. Kind of like if a workplace reaches a crucial saturation of assholes, everyone is tempted to become an asshole and it becomes toxic. All of this, some facet of human nature I suppose.

My suggestion would be steep fines for excessively bright headlights with some significant portion of those fines funding police departments. This would yield rapid and effective enforcement.

kevin_thibedeau2• 8 months ago

I would bet that many of these are illegal LED mods without the required cutoff line in approved lighting.

SlightlyLeftPad2• 8 months ago

It’s not that people are doing this intentionally, it’s that the aiming is that bad out of the factory.

ishtanbul• 8 months ago

What do you expect to happen with self driving cars? Do they need bright headlights? Do they need high beams?

janaagaard• 8 months ago

Lately, I see a lot of drivers who turn on their brights and just leave them on and this includes cars with the older halogen and even incandescents. This is a change in behavior.

I suspect this is because more and more people don’t know how to turn it off and/or don’t know what the blue indicator on the dashboard means.

As you mention, Tesla model 3 seems to be the worst offender. Could this be caused by a bad interface in that car? How does the brights indicator look in a model 3 and you turn off the brights?

rconti2• 8 months ago

I suspect that the Model 3 headlights are often maladjusted as they have a user/driver-accessible headlight aiming menu and it looks to me like a lot of Tesla owners get in to that menu and do some freelance aiming.

There's just no way that more than 0.5% of drivers of any model are going to this level of tinkering. I have a Model 3, and I've never seen that menu. And I post here!

One contributing factor to people noticing "the blue light means you're blinding people" is that it's just a blue light outline on an already blinding white dash screen (and in the case of the tesla, an OFFSET dash screen).

"Back in my day", the blue high beam light was the brightest damn thing on the cluster, so you KNEW when your brights were on. Now you have to _look_ for the indicator.

the__alchemist• 8 months ago

The car I'm driving now (2016 BMW) is the only car I've driven or been in that has appropriate interior lighting. E.g. You can really crank the brightness down, and the display lights are all red.

moogly• 8 months ago

Same with the brightness in my MY2025 BMW iX1. You can even turn the main screen completely off from the swipe-down menu.

hurricanepootis• 8 months ago

I love this era of BMW interiors. The warm glow of the red lights from the dash cluster is really cool and nostalgic.

1970-01-012• 8 months ago

You're cherry-picking here. Analog gauges were lit with both filtered and unfiltered incandescent bulbs. There was no standard.

ErroneousBosh2• 8 months ago

There was a mix of technologies. Up to about the early 80s, instruments were lit by an "unfiltered" incandescent lamp at the back of the instrument housing, that reflected off a band of white paint around the top of the housing and screened by the bezel, like old Smiths gauges. After about that point they moved over to edge-lit screen-printed perspex backings, and continued that way until the current trend for glarey and unpleasant LCDs everywhere.

shevy-java• 8 months ago

I'm happy my Tesla

I'd never give my money to the mass-fire-people-at-DOGE billionaire.

What I did, however had, notice, is that people are a LOT more easily distracted these days. Smartphones play a big role, but I also think something changed in the brain. This may be better or worse, but it definitely is very different now from, say, the 1980s. It almost feels as if humans are now +100 years different from the people in the 1980s rather than +40 or +50.

zzyzxd• 8 months ago

Teslas are the worst offenders in my area. I don't own one but I looked up online out of curiosity, and saw many owners complained because they got flashed a lot. Turned out the factory settings for the headlight angle was too high. They went to the menu and adjust the angle down by "2-3 clicks" and they reported never got flashed again.

hn_acc16• 8 months ago

This 100x. I get blinded by Teslas more often than all other brands combined.

apparent2• 8 months ago

My car's screen switches to night mode when it's dark, but if you want to make it the darkest setting, you have to manually adjust it, every single time. I don't know why there isn't a persistent setting for [when the car is in night mode]. I frequently have to adjust this because I want my eyes to adjust to the exterior darkness for safety reasons.

ratdragon• 8 months ago

they definitely were persistent before

edit spelling

wildzzz3• 8 months ago

My 2006, 2017, and 2023 cars all will autodim the screens at night. Except for the 2006 model, the brightness knob adjusts both the instrument cluster and the screen brightness and stays where you leave it. The 2006 car had a separate up/down button for the screen.

LTL_FTC• 8 months ago

Absolutely. People just crank up the brightness on the inside lights because "blinky lights" but I have also noticed that, modern cars typically include fog lights which used to be a luxury or premium option, many people just drive around with these lights on as well. Fog lights are illuminating the area closer to the vehicle and therefore inhibit one's visibility further down the road. So now we get super bright vehicles coming at us, inhibiting our ability to see.

Don't get me started on lifted vehicles and their lights...Dept. of transportation needs to figure out a way to enforce a standard height for headlights from all vehicle shapes and heights. Driving after dark is getting more and more dangerous, not less.

cogman104• 8 months ago

Trucks are the absolute worst vehicles on the road. Their giant ass lights blind anyone near their vehicles. A number of truck owners, especially the ones that lift their vehicles, will additionally add light bars to the exterior which are so incredibly dangerous.

We don't just need DOTs to set regulations on these things, we need cops to actually write tickets for this behavior and for judges to get confirmation that these after market modifications are removed.

giancarlostoro• 8 months ago

I miss my 99 Ford Explorer Sport.

creer2• 8 months ago

In my past few rentals, the dial still acts on the driver's gauges - but not on the "entertainment / navigation" screen which remains too bright no matter what! In one, the automatic "night mode" was still crazy bright and independant from the dashboard brightness dial. Absurd indeed.

mikkupikku2• 8 months ago

In my Mazda, turning on the headlights enables a night mode in the both the instrument panel and stereo/etc screen, dimming everything. Which seems like a nice touch, but if I want to run with my headlights on during the day, as seems to be fairly customary these days, that means I can't read my clock. Not great.

wildzzz3• 8 months ago

My 2006 car had an independent brightness setting for the infotainment screen but that's likely because the infotainment system just wasn't as fully integrated into the car as it is today. It wasn't a touchscreen so since everything had a button, you could have easily designed it to use a VFD or similar.

hexbin0103• 8 months ago

Exactly the same with my Ford. It seemed explicitly designed to be too bright and hard to adjust

It's another example of a company not considering the effects of their actions

jiveturkey• 8 months ago

You're retconning. Brighter headlights (xenon) were invented in '61 and first appeared in '91. By 2000 the tech made its way to less premium cars.

Tesla didn't have the big screen (which heralded the current stupid trend) until 2012, and of course it took a number of years for Tesla and the giant omni screen to be popular. Thumb in the air I'd say 2018-2020.

You want brighter headlights so you can see better and drive more safely. The interior brightness is a separate independently evolved problem.

The horizontal cutoff is a tradeoff that comes with the bright lights (Xenon tech anyway). And there is plenty of low light leakage to reflect off of animal eyes. The problem IMO isn't pure brightness but rather these intensely bright lights (itself a benefit) coupled with poor aiming or poor maintenance of aim. Some states in the US have a mandatory annual vehicle inspection which includes headlight aim checks.

RajT88• 8 months ago

YES! I rented a Prius once, and this was my biggest complaint.

That big stupid bright-ass LCD screen which smugly ruined my night blindness by trumpeting constantly how fuel efficient it was made me feel less confident driving at night. Toyota is a smart and good company, and seems to have addressed this in newer Priuses (Prii?) by putting smaller, less bright LCD's and moving them further out of the way of your field of vision.

omnee• 8 months ago

I have an older car with the low light gauges, and so my eyes are more adjusted the darkness. Which makes the poorly calibrated bright lights of newer cars the bane of my life at night.

alentred• 8 months ago

Exactly. Even if my eyes adjust well to the relative darkness with my lights, the effect is erased the instant I encounter a car coming on me on the opposite side of the road.

gehwartzen• 8 months ago

I physically desoldered and replaced the very bright 6500k interior overhead LEDs in my VW with much warmer units. It makes a huge difference when turning them on for a second and not killing my night vision. Also just much more pleasant and natural light in my opinion.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Tiguan/comments/1hq2hae/changed_ove...

b112• 8 months ago

I actually keep an old tshirt in my car, to cover up the screen when on long rural drives.

I can drive all night long with no strain or issue, unless I have a flashlight glaring in my eyes.

NoSalt• 8 months ago

My Subaru Outback lets me adjust the dashboard and display lights down, which I do whenever I am driving at night. It's amazing how much more you can see without a ton of lights in the cab.

groos• 8 months ago

I'm happy my Tesla does a decent job of having the screen be quite dark at night but the headlights are quite bad with the horizontal cutoff style that only lights the first few feet of horizontal ahead of the car. I need to see those deer and elk on the side of the road, damn it.

Turn on your fog lights? At least in my 2018 M3, they illuminate the sides as well.

DoomDestroyer2• 8 months ago

I have an old Landrover and there is no lights except for the dials. Visibility to the outside is excellent. Some newer cars allow you to dim the info console and the some of the instruments but they cannot be seen in the day light.

People say the headlamps on my model of Landrover is too low. But I had good visibility at night driving down country roads. The side lights are useless though.

King-Aaron• 8 months ago

Do the Teslas use OLED etc screens that go to nearly complete darkness when the pixels are black? Or does it still have a constant LED glow?

stinkbeetle• 8 months ago

I drive an old car with dull yellow headlights and a dull green glow from the analog instruments, just the way I like it. I was recently driving around a hire car that had this enormous screen that became blindingly bright after sunset on unlit carriageway. I couldn't believe how terrible it was. The whole thing was a pile of unintuitive garbage, but the screen brightness was egregious. I had to pull over and spend minutes navigating through a maze of menus to turn the thing down... I might have even had to google for how to do it. Then of course when I turned the car off later and started it again, the brightness setting was back to "surface of the sun".

Ferret7446• 8 months ago

horizontal cutoff style that only lights the first few feet of horizontal ahead of the car. I need to see those deer and elk on the side of the road, damn it.

I believe this is intentional to avoid blinding oncoming traffic and pedestrians

arghwhat• 8 months ago

I think the "horizontal cutoff style" you're referring to is the American DOT beam pattern (two horizontal lines at different height) as opposed to the European ECE beam pattern (which goes up towards the edge of the road to illuminate signs and such). I would assume this follows the normal regional model variations, although Tesla seems to have notoriously misaligned headlights - some suggest it's a bug causing it to reset occasionally?

The screens are a good point, but nothing about LED headlights require a single bright point. That's done for style and cost saving - old reflector headlights had to be big, so small looks "modern", and small means less material.

Cramming it all into one tiny spot just means cooking the LEDs, which are much better suited for either larger lens assemblies or multiple smaller lens assemblies to distribute the load, both of which increase the size of the light source and massively decrease the blinding and glare it causes. You could easily cut the glare to, idk, a quarter by just changing the geometry a bit while maintaining the same light output.

BeFlatXIII• 8 months ago

Adding to this: on rainy nights, crazy amounts of glare off the wet pavement from streetlights. It would be safer if the lights were off for headlights only.

egorfine• 8 months ago

Dark knobs won't sell cars, while bright shiny screens will.

sobjornstad2• 8 months ago

Do people normally test-drive cars in the dark?

calvinmorrison4• 8 months ago

what is with the blinding WHITE light? can't we just have amber?

fghorow• 8 months ago

I need the brights at night for deer (in N. America) and kangaroos (in Oz).

Steering them away automagically from oncoming traffic is a better solution than abandoning them altogether.

(And yes, I do have cataracts. So oncoming lights _are_ a problem for me.)

givemeethekeys• 8 months ago

Isn't that what high beams are for? Why are the low beams so bright these days?

WD-42• 8 months ago

Steering them away? You’re supposed to turn them off when there is oncoming traffic.

alt22716• 8 months ago

Steering them away to where? Into the eyes of the deer and kangaroos?

whalesalad• 8 months ago

Related: I moved to rural Michigan and the number of people who will be riding my ass on a late night with their high beams on is astounding. Or people who turn their high beams on in the snow/fog.

vatsachak• 8 months ago

Michigan, where the more North you go the more Southern you are

greenavocado• 8 months ago

That's why you need 300 watts of rear facing flood lights on a switch.

helle253• 8 months ago

For the longest time, i thought random drivers were flashing their brights at me all over chicago

only recently did i realize, it was the regular headlight LEDs being shined directly at me as they went over a speedbump

icetank2• 8 months ago

Have to remind myself every time that the bright headlights would actually make me blind instead of flashing for a second.

dredmorbius• 8 months ago

So ... how does a problem such as this get remedied?

I'm thinking a mandatory recall order / fix-it ticket for all offending makes/models. The sticker shock alone might get manufacturers attention.

That and contributory liability in any associated accidents.

(Insurance costs / liability is a highly under-appreciated regulatory mechanism.)

lonelyasacloud• 8 months ago

Empirically on UK roads it's as much about the car industry getting away with selling vehicles that are too large for our roads i.e. oversized SUV's and trucks, as anything else. The combination of driver's side closer to crown, and higher mounting, mean the light's from these behemoths tend to cast more of their beams into the eye line of anyone coming the other way, particularly in smaller, lower to the ground vehicles.

alias_neo2• 8 months ago

tend to cast more of their beams into the eye line of anyone coming the other way, particularly in smaller, lower to the ground vehicles

I don't think this is the main issue.

I drive a compact SUV, it has perfectly reasonable headlights, pointed downwards like you'd expect, with more of a dip towards oncoming traffic, like headlights have been for decades.

Despite being in a somewhat high-ish vehicle, I'm constantly blinded when driving at night by what is typically, low sports cars with headlights that are indistinguishable from high-beams.

I have no idea how manufacturers got away with this, and I hope something is done soon to make sure a mandate for them being fixed comes in new vehicles, and as part of MOT for existing ones.

I'm in my 30s, with perfect eye sight, and typically have no trouble driving at night or low light, or even low visibility, but it terrifies me that one day I might hit someone after being blinded by these idiotically bright head lights.

globular-toast3• 8 months ago

I drive a compact SUV, it has perfectly reasonable headlights

How would you know?

teslabox• 8 months ago

Years ago I read a comment here sharing how they'd taken to wearing amber glasses when walking at night, so they could be protected against the excessively-blue LED streetlights in their neighborhood. I bought amber safety glasses. They magically took the shock out of the bad headlights, but I also noticed that I wasn't seeing pedestrians until it was too late.

My local sunglass shop had some yellow fit-over safety glasses. I found they cut out enough of the blue from the bad headlights to take the shock out of the experience of driving at night. https://cocoons.com/shop/safety/lightguard-medium-fitovers-l...

Harbor Freight's $2 yellow safety glasses are almost as good. I intend to stock up the next time I notice they're on sale for $1: https://www.harborfreight.com/yellow-lens-safety-glasses-668...

4 years ago I asked HN why the automotive industry wasn't using safe LEDs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27334405

The activists at /r/fuckyourheadlights figured out that the weaponized headlights put a little dim spot at the center of their headlight beams, exactly where the regulators measure the light intensity.

2nd picture clearly shows the dim spot: https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckyourheadlights/comments/1hefn86...

Summary of research: https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckyourheadlights/comments/18lrf3d...

y-c-o-m-b• 8 months ago

I used to wear these amber glasses for my motorcycle rides back when I was still riding. They not only did a great job of improving my visibility (be it subjective or not), but they also seemed to reduce overall fatigue for me. I should pick up another pair for regular driving though, thanks for the reminder.

TZubiri• 8 months ago

I think I've been using headlights wrong.

My car has 3 headlight settings, low, mid, hi.

Hi is when you are alone at night and want to see farther.

I used to use low in the daytime (to signal other drivers the car is on), and mid at night (to signal other drivers and gain some visibility.

But maybe the opposite is sensible, using mid lights in daytime (so they are more discernible from the daylight), and using low lights in nighttime (if you are in an already illuminated city, you don't need to light up the road, and since it's night, any small headlight will have enough contrast with the darkness)

TheChaplain2• 8 months ago

ITT people saying you don't need strong headlights on the country side, you just need to drive slower..

One thing doesn't need to exclude the other, especially as you begin to go above 50 and your eye sight isn't as good as it was when you were twenty-five.

Strong headlight that makes night go day saves lives, just remember to shut when meeting another vehicle or pedestrian.

WickyNilliams2• 8 months ago

Or don't go above 50mph down country roads at night? If your eyes aren't as good as they used to be, all the more reason to drive slower

TheChaplain2• 8 months ago

I am pretty sure that is what I wrote

meindnoch2• 8 months ago

1. Headlights are migrating upwards, thanks to the proliferation of SUVs and pickups.

2. The color temperature of modern headlights is worse for the eye than previous generations'.

3. Automatic high beams still blind the oncoming traffic for the first 1-2 seconds or so, before the vision algorithm realizes that maybe it's time to turn them off.

vegancap3• 8 months ago

I was at a junction the other day, there was some new Audi EV at the other side of the junction and I couldn't see a damn thing. I've got perfect 20/20 vision, never had any form of eye problem ever in my life, and I was completely blinded. I'm convinced if they'd turned the full beams on, I'd have disintegrated.

rafale• 8 months ago

Maybe they were on a slight up slope. If the headlights were auto leveling it will fix many of the issues people complain about.

vegancap3• 8 months ago

Yeah quite possibly actually, I did think at the time if they were angled down slightly, it wouldn't be half as bad. So that checks out. But does show there needs to be some kind of solution for uneven situations like that

_fat_santa• 8 months ago

Part of the problem I've identified are SUV's and Trucks. Back home I drive a 4runner so I never noticed this but on vacation one week and we rented a Corolla. While the lights from other cars never bothered me in the 4runner, it was so apparent in the smaller Corolla.

I would see light behind me and go "why do they have high beams on" but then looking ahead it didn't look like they had their high beams on, I was just in a short car.

vegancap3• 8 months ago

Yeah I'm in a really low Civic Type-R, so when I'm opposite some kind of SUV, and also at a slight angle, was basically at direct eye height with their LEDs. I definitely don't have the same problem with older bulb based SUVs though

helterskelter2• 8 months ago

Honestly the worst offenders for shooting the lights right in your eyes are the Jeep Wranglers. I drive a work truck on occasion and the Jeeps are about the only vehicle that still get me looking for the fog line. High intensity lights are still really annoying though, and my eyes are probably 7-8ft off the ground.

eldaisfish4• 8 months ago

you weren't in a short car, you were in a normal car. Society really needs legislation around auto obesity. Cars are too big, too high, too heavy, all at despite being less practical than a station wagon from twenty years back.

robertlagrant3• 8 months ago

but then looking ahead it didn't look like they had their high beams on, I was just in a short car.

You were in a normal car, and the SUV manufacturer has mounted the lights higher just for aesthetic reasons.

rootusrootus5• 8 months ago

One thought I've had with the matrix projectors on my Lightning is that it would be nice if they were able to dim parts of the beam that were below the normal threshold for low/high. It reliably turns off the bright parts above that line, but it seems like the "low beam" area is fixed. So on small hills and such I'll occasionally beam people directly in the face with a lot of light. Mostly that happens when the distance is still far enough that it won't be nearly as bad as when you're just across an intersection, but it's still fairly bright IMO.

I assume regulation prevents the dynamic lighting from including the low beam section.

switchbak2• 8 months ago

I high-beamed one of them, then they turned their high beams on - it was a shockingly ridiculous amount of light that's simply dangerous anywhere. Fuck Audi.

Man, this feels like a vehicular instantiation of class war. Pay enough and you too can blind others on the road.

What's next - frickin laser beams?

lucianbr7• 8 months ago

There are definitely some brands that market "laser lights". Now, they're not really lasers, but still.

https://www.bmw.com/en/innovation/dr-hanafi-and-the-bmw-lase...

bespokedevelopr2• 8 months ago

Well all the Uber/Lyft drivers have led light bars mounted on their Prius’ now so the class warfare is well underway I suppose.

tanepiper• 8 months ago

I've found glasses like these work well (https://www.amazon.nl/Antireflectie-Gepolariseerde-autorijde...) - if I drive in Germany I can't do without them - they really help block the glare without making it unsafe to drive.

__s• 8 months ago

Yep, I've just taken to driving with prescription sunglasses at night

impure-aqua2• 8 months ago

I feel like this problem is better in the UK than in North America.

For starters, there is higher market penetration for better headlight technology, particularly ADB (adaptive driving beam). North American road safety regulations have made it very difficult to get this technology into cars, whereas in Europe it is reasonably widespread. Even rental cars I have had in the UK have this technology- most recently a Mazda3 which had a very good implementation of it, I could drive through the countryside with high-beams on constantly, and you could see the car quickly dim the beam facing towards oncoming traffic if any came around a bend. These are not high-end cars; I have rented cars with a manual transmission and cloth seats yet better headlights than the fanciest S-class in North America.

There is also less variation in vehicle size, and better emphasis on road safety testing. In Canada I often encounter lifted pickup trucks, which changes the alignment of factory lighting, not to mention the lights on these are often aftermarket anyway and usually installed without any thought for alignment. British pickup trucks are rarer, smaller, and would fail their yearly MOT for having improper headlamp aim.

mossTechnician• 8 months ago

The problem with headlight brightness has mostly stemmed from cars having brighter headlights. I love technology, but if I had to choose between reducing light output, vs switching to harder-to repair, more expensive, less reliable computer-powered headlights, I'd prefer the former.

impure-aqua2• 8 months ago

When I drive cars with old headlights, they are clearly inferior to the point of feeling nearly dangerous in some situations. I would also not call modern lights less reliable, although I am sure it is more expensive to repair modern lighting technology.

In a North American city where there is overhead lighting and the streets are a mile wide, sure, I could probably turn the lights off even and be totally fine.

In the middle of the British countryside on a single-track road that has hedges on either side, not enough space for cars in the oncoming direction to pass me, a 60mph speed limit, during a rainstorm? I want the nice lights.

amelius2• 8 months ago

The main issue isn't even the headlights, it's why the hell did this not get regulated to sane levels.

giantg2• 8 months ago

I'm half tempted to say just give everyone cheap multispecral goggles and get rid of the headlights, streetlights, etc. With volume, you could build a set with digital night vision and a Flir Lepton for under $400 (which is about the cost of an HID headlight system).

bloomingeek• 8 months ago

Here in the states, the painted white line on the right side of the lane, is for night driving. When an oncoming car's lights are reflecting too brightly, you can judge your car's position in the lane, IF the lines are not to faded.

Crazily, we allow people to raise up their trucks so high that at night, if they're behind you in the lane, the cab of your vehicle is flooded so badly, you can hardly see sometimes. (Just wait till you experience this in a drive-through lane!)

In my state, it's against the law to run your fog lamps when the weather doesn't warrant them, the police seem to have forgotten this.

rreichel03• 8 months ago

This is a problem with emergency vehicles too - many times I’ve been driving and unable to see a person on the road because the lights from a police or EMS vehicle are brighter than a thousand suns, hiding anything beyond. It feels like a Jurassic park thing - they made them brighter because they could (with minimal focus on externalities)

reinier• 8 months ago

i have a possible addition to the problem. people are spending lots of time indoors, so my theory is;

people are missing a lot of the natural sun radiation, causing the fluid in your eye to be less translucencent generally and possibly building up floaters more easily.

this could disperse light more inside your eye. enlarging the effect of blinding lights at night.

rootusrootus5• 8 months ago

Doesn't this come down to glare in most cases? IIRC, the real onslaught of headlight glare wasn't the advent of HID, it was when cars started using projectors. Even with halogens, projectors pointed at you make for a very intense point of light. Lots of glare. Less than HID or LED, sure, but still very real.

I would like to see a headlight solution where you get the same amount of light thrown on the road, but from a strip that goes all the way across the front of the car, so that no individual spot is especially bright for oncoming drivers.

whitehexagon• 8 months ago

The curse of modern super bright LEDs. Add to that list; super bright red brake lights, and a new trend for animated turning lights / indicators. Looks like something we'd have installed as teenagers after watching Knight Rider. Really distracting.

Some of the towns here also started scattering flashing LEDs over every road sign they can find. Some areas feel like driving through Blackpool Illuminations. The worst offender locally is a roundabout light that flashes blue, which of course you assume to be an emergency vehicle approaching.

Y_Y3• 8 months ago

Add to that rental bikes that have always-on flashing lights. My neurospice is relatively mild, but flashing lights and animations in my field of view really fuck up my ability to focus on other things. I can't be the only one with this issue, but it doesn't seem to garner much sympathy.

I still drive when I have to, but I had to give up watching soccer on tv when they added animated ads to all the pitches. I'm honestly considering some kind of AR filtering at this point.

Also shoutouts to the places in South America (esp. Guayaquil) where people modify cars and buses to have constantly flashing lights, animated screens etc. It's like having a little Times Square in every traffic jam!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LOdfcJpvps

crazygringo14• 8 months ago

To be fair, the flashing on bicycles is intentional, precisely to make sure you are aware of them, since they're so much smaller and vulnerable, and the light itself is so much smaller than the rear light on a vehicle. It's not just on rentals, it's a standard feature of bicycle rear lights that is there for safety.

BobaFloutist2• 8 months ago

The thing that really irritates me about the animated turning lights is that they still do it when hazards are on. The one and only possible use case would be differentiating between hazards and turn signals, and they don't do it.

thewebguyd2• 8 months ago

I've seen flashing third brake lights too.

I don't get adding flashing lights to brake and tail lights. It's actually worse, flashing lights make it harder for us to judge distance as now there's no steady queue needed for depth perception. It's why when cycling I've always opted for a solid taillight instead of the flashing ones.

mikkupikku2• 8 months ago

Those radar speed limit signs that blink at what seems like 50 times a second if you go 36 in a 35 zone are very annoying. To be fair the blink threshold must be configurable, but whoever installed them around here didn't have any common sense and set them all to the speed limit exactly.

potato37328429• 8 months ago

There's one near me that's set to 45 in a 55. Every time I drive past it it gets a little closer to going missing. It's a minimum effort install on a wood post and it's right near the road to enter a new bougie subdivision in an otherwise rural area so it's almost certainly a cheap attempt to make a complainer go away.

sobjornstad2• 8 months ago

I also hate the ones that are exactly at the spot where the speed limit changes and still flash you aggressively in the distance. Yeah, I'm going faster than 35 because the speed limit is 55 where I am and I'm still slowing down.

moltopoco• 8 months ago

Not just flashing but also flickering, some headlights that I've seen in the wild look quite aggressive if they are in the periphery; dimming gone wrong? Anything that flickers or flashes will be brighter at peak than if it was a constant light source.

Zak4• 8 months ago

Another problem is LED lights using low-frequency PWM to control brightness. If they're moving in someone's field of view, there's a strobe effect.

mr_toad• 8 months ago

Housings on indicators that reflect so much sunlight you can’t see that they’re on.

jimnotgym2• 8 months ago

Plus some cars have tiny indicators now, or weird led stripes around the brake lights

ethagnawl• 8 months ago

The curse of modern super bright LEDs

I don't understand why people are allowed to drive around with blinding LED light bars which affect other drivers ability to see the road and and _oh so conveniently_ obscure their front license plates.

chrsw• 8 months ago

I thought I was just getting old...

Borborygymus• 8 months ago

I always wondered if it would be feasible to make the headlights produce polarized light (e.g. vertical), and have windscreens filter out that polarization... I guess it would only work if the scattering of light off of whatever is being illuminated sufficiently depolarizes the light. Anyhow, I thought it was a neat idea when I was a teenager.

There might be some issues with retro fitting the world's existing road vehicle fleet, but that's a deployment detail. :p

sokoloff7• 8 months ago

If you polarized the light and windshield to 45° off vertical, opposite direction traffic would have their windshield at 90° to your light…

hengistbury• 8 months ago

This might cause issues with polarised sunglasses

ZiiS• 8 months ago

Nearly all UK drivers say _Other People's_ headlights are too bright; _my_ headlights are a bit dim.

racl101• 8 months ago

Same in Canada. Super bright LEDs. Every morning. What's weird is that almost every one uses them, and almost everyone complains about other people using them. Seems as weird as tourists complaining about other tourists.

I personally don't use them. So I just get to observe.

krona2• 8 months ago

I agree that many LED headlights are too bright (or, more commonly, poorly calibrated) however one thing which can significantly reduce glare is to clean your windshield properly at least once a year. Few people do this.

When I say properly, I mean with a special purpose abrasive glass polish. This could take an hour or more to do well by hand but it should remove the near invisible (in standard lighting conditions) film which forms on the glass surface.

This will also significantly improve visibility in heavy rain.

EmptyCoffeeCup• 8 months ago

The lights aren't too bright, they're just poorly aligned.

Go for a walk of an evening along a footpath into traffic. I guarantee it'll be Teslas and Minis that are the routinely the culprits of dazzling.

I'd guess it's cheap, lazily aligned hardware in the Tesla, and the ridiculous design of the Mini that cause the problems.

Yes, sporadically you'll be blinded by another model- one that needs an alignment - but it'll consistently be Tesla's and Minis.

brookst• 8 months ago

Teslas are the worst. I try not to speculate without evidence but I cannot shake the intuition that it is intentional to aid the driver assist and self driving stuff, and reflective of a generally sociopathic company.

wtallis• 8 months ago

I've heard it alleged that Tesla simply does not have a QA check for headlight alignment at the factory. Based on my experience on the road, that's entirely believable.

kedean3• 8 months ago

The lights are too bright and poorly aligned. I walk regularly, and its more than just the tesla's and mini's at fault (Teslas are definitely some of the worst in my experience though, along with Rivian)

https://www.theringer.com/2024/12/03/tech/headlight-brightne...

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.’”

bArray9• 8 months ago

I think most vehicles are operating with their headlamps adjusted too high. I think the majority are now completely out of spec [1]. My normal lights are very respectably adjusted and are the older dimmer type, but my full beams are blinding - I rarely ever use them. A few times a driver comes towards me with full beams on, I flash mine and light up the entire night.

The quality of driver is also decreasing. One of our MPs computed the data and discovered "Since 2016, 1,367,942 foreign drivers have been issued a driving licence without taking a UK test". There are apparently 42.1 mn licenses [2], so ~1/30 never took a UK test. It's getting dangerous out there.

[1] https://mattersoftesting.blog.gov.uk/the-mot-headlamp-aim-te...

[2] https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/advice/know-how/population-of-th...

martin_a• 8 months ago

It's getting dangerous out there.

You're all driving on the wrong side of the road, what are you even talking about? /s

bArray9• 8 months ago

If only we knew!

The real reason we drive on the left is so that our driver's windows meet in the middle and we can use our right hand to do sword battles and jousting with oncoming vehicles.

tonymet3• 8 months ago

We could get very far by mandating easier adjustment of headlights, and free adjustment at auto shops. It only takes a couple minutes to adjust the headlights , especially at a shop with a lift and a gauge.

bArray9• 8 months ago

It's supposed to already be done at the MOT stations. They are supposed to check the level and adjust it to conform.

tetris11• 8 months ago

I'd wager it has more to do with ageing population than car accidents caused by non-native driver licenses.

bArray9• 8 months ago

In my personal experience, ageing drivers drive too slowly, but they are generally safe. They will often stop driving when they feel it is no longer safe, and almost all older drivers I know refuse to drive at night.

Whether it is ageing or non-native licenses, I think a case can be made for checking that people conform with local expectations for driving skill.

ponector• 8 months ago

Why do you think UK drivers test is better than foreign one?

illwrks• 8 months ago

I would argue it's not about being better or worse than another country, but if 1 in 30 drivers have a different understanding then that's a risk. By doing a driving test in the country you live in you gain a greater understanding of what it's like driving in that country.

As a simple example I drove around Northern France and the first day almost went flying off the motorway slip road as I didn't realise how tight they tend to be in France compared to the UK and Ireland.

verbify• 8 months ago

I've done a brief Google, and the UK does have one of the hardest driving tests in the world. This matches with anecdotal comparisons with international friends. https://www.zuto.com/blog/driving-tests-around-the-world/

In the UK, driving is on the left, while in much of the world people drive on the right. Arguably it's not so much that the UK is better, but that people should take a test to validate that they can handle the switch. But this would also mean UK drivers should do the same in other countries where they drive on the right.

nutjob2• 8 months ago

Without so many foreign drivers it would be even more dangerous.

bArray9• 8 months ago

It would be more dangerous if we had less people who had not taken the UK driving test? Are you mad?

teamonkey2• 8 months ago

Government stats suggest that it is getting slightly less dangerous.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casua...

bArray9• 8 months ago

The data is based on casualties, but I think there are some points masking the issue:

1. Traffic is slower due to the decreased speed of traffic because of increased number of vehicles, and they continue to improve their safety (i.e. with proximity sensors & cameras). It's likely we see a reduction in casualties and fatalities even if number of accidents in total increases. For example, the number of accidents on the M25 may go up, but whilst they have speed restrictions for large areas of 50mph and sometimes 40mph, casualties will be decreased.

2. Payouts for minor injuries such as whiplash were pretty much stopped by insurance providers. Historic figures are likely inflated and new figures are likely deflated due to claims not being accepted.

3. Due to the cost of living and insurance hikes, we likely see people try to avoid making a claim. If a claim is made, the insurance premiums for both parties is increased (no matter who is at fault), both parties can be without a payout for a long time, the vehicles may be categorised and lose their value. If both vehicles are still drivable and an agreement can be made, the entire incident can go without being recorded.

The problem with proving the above is the linked data you have is for casualties, and insurance claims data I believe will reflect similar issues. I'm not sure how you would encapsulate people who have an accident but refuse to make a claim. Perhaps motorcyclists and pedestrian casualties may offer a ground-truth, as either rarely have a collision involving a vehicle where there is a choice to not make a claim.

rozab• 8 months ago

The source of this claim, which you helpfully did not provide, is Rupert Lowe, a far-right UK politician and shite-merchant who is so toxic he got kicked out of Reform. He does not give any indication as to where his number came from.

https://x.com/RupertLowe10/status/1987100209185181958

This reciprocal scheme only applies to certain countries: the EU/EAA, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan, Korea, Switzerland, etc.

I think when you are blaming things like headlight brightness on those bloody foreigners, it's time to do some self-reflection.

idoubtit• 8 months ago

A small correction: drivers from the EU do not need a UK license; the driving license from their own country is valid in the UK, even post-Brexit. And the exchange scheme only applies to residents of Great-Britain.

So those bloody foreigners that live in the United Kingdom and dare drive there are from Australia, Canada, Japan, Switzerland... Countries well-known for their dangerous drivers! /s

bArray9• 8 months ago

The source of this claim, which you helpfully did not provide, is Rupert Lowe, a far-right UK politician and shite-merchant who is so toxic he got kicked out of Reform.

On another day you would claim that being a member of Reform is toxic, and that being kicked out is a sign of being normal. Being kicked out of Reform is clearly itself not a sign of being toxic.

Rupert Lowe is an elected MP that has published his own policy paper [1] that remains uncontested, with the only criticism I can find is based on who helped him write it [2] and not on the content. He is democratically elected and partakes in the open exchange of ideas, I think the toxicity lives in your head.

He does not give any indication as to where his number came from.

He literally says that they are processed from the Department of Transport. I imagine he will publish some materials soon.

This reciprocal scheme only applies to certain countries: the EU/EAA, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan, Korea, Switzerland, etc.

New Zealand for example only allows UK full license holders to drive for 18 months [3], not indefinitely. New Zealand roads are wide and vast, and public transport is somewhat limited. But for EU/EEA license holders driving in the UK, they can drive for as long as it is valid or until they turn 70. Even if you are on a shorter list and have to exchange in 12 months, it's just a small fee - no test [4].

The point is that we have many, many people driving on the roads that have never done a UK driving test. And this doesn't even begin to extend to those who are disqualified or driving under the influence. As a driver, it is getting far worse out there.

I think when you are blaming things like headlight brightness on those bloody foreigners, it's time to do some self-reflection.

The second paragraph started with: "The quality of driver is also decreasing.", because I was making a related but separate point. I'm clearly not blaming headlight glare on foreign drivers. Maybe it it you that should do some reflection.

[1] https://www.restorebritain.org.uk/pp_mass_deportations_legit...

[2] https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-politics/2025/10/ru...

[3] https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/new-zealand/safety-...

[4] https://www.imgconnect.co.uk/news/2024/11/can-i-drive-in-the...

Plasmoid2000ad• 8 months ago

Can't comment on quality - but I think it's more nuanced than adjusted too high.

Was getting a lift from a friend in a less than 1 year old Yaris cross. Noticed many cars flashing us on a short flat drive home - assumed it was headlights adjusted wrong. But no - headlight were in the lowest position. Driver had asked the garage twice to check the headlight adjustment.

Went out the front and headlight looked normal - but squatted and as soon I hit the sweet spot got blinded worse than high beams on my own car. This Yaris cross, which is going to be a very common car, has dips more powerful than my full beams - it will only take a small bump in the road to shine those adjustment or not - that's a problem all by itself.

bArray9• 8 months ago

Good point, it could be that our existing legislation is just dangerously out of date. Bulbs vs LEDs is night and day.

nashashmi• 8 months ago

Once was at an intersection and I thought the beam of the oncoming car was on. The insides of my car were fully lighted. Beamed him twice to let him know.

He beamed back.

altairprime• 8 months ago

I have fully calibrated to manufacturer, and adjusted to state law angles, headlamps and they are 2019 LED and blinding to other drivers unless I point them slightly down. They are pointed down to the legal limit (I have a low car) and distance visibility at speed is problematic.

Their design flaws are many, but top among them is that their low beams are simply too collimated and too bright for safe use.

I wish I could (illegally) attenuate them in order to make them safer for other drivers. Is there a coating that I can apply to the sealed external lexan housing that will 1) diffuse and/or 2) uniformly dim their light output?

30minAdayHN• 8 months ago

I wish someone does something similar in India. Night time driving is a nightmare. Everyone runs on high-beam. The new class of motor-cycles are with super bright LEDs and riders put them on high beam. Night-time driving is a guessing game - you need to guess where the edge of the road is, if there is a bicyclist in between, etc.

At least in late 90s, there used to be a law to black out half the headlamp. Either that was no longer the case or it's not as vigorously enforced.

This is the classic case of tragedy of commons!

pete13023• 8 months ago

Driving in a divider-less road in India feels like getting abducted by Aliens!!!!, Constant High-Beam is fine, But Constant LED/Projector High-Beam is a Crime.

qart• 8 months ago

There will be no course-correction in India. The usual mindset is "how can I be the bigger a-hole?" With accessories becoming more and more affordable, there has been a rise in super bright LEDs, and even flashing LEDs. In cities, the police sometimes imposes fines, but apparently, no one pays fines. We have louder horns too. And psychopaths openly displaying their psychopathy. Bangalore's police at least responds on Twitter (https://x.com/blrcitytraffic), but when I look around, it seems like their efforts are a drop in the ocean. The police of other cities are all completely ineffective. The only exception is Chandigarh, but no one wants to follow their example.

pete13023• 8 months ago

As a daily commuter in North-IND I can confirm this, It is not even the car height difference anymore, people are getting aftermarket abominations on their sedans and not getting them height adjusted, the H-beam throw is all over the place.

shkkmo• 8 months ago

My slightly off topic headlight rant is:

We are in the process of forcing car to come with automatic braking, but yet we don't force cars to turn headlights when in motion...

iamthejuan• 8 months ago

Also in the Philippines, it needs to be regulated.

inamberclad• 8 months ago

It's also because the cars are getting so much taller, especially in the US. Driving a smaller car is terrifying when a lifted Dodge fitted with anti-aircraft spotlights blinds you while going the opposite direction.

ifh-hn• 8 months ago

I'm in an older car I feel like these modern cars are permanent high beams. Sometimes if it's real bad I high beam them to let them know what it's like. Ridiculous state of affairs. Ive been driving for over 30 years and it's only recently this has been happening, like 5 years or so.

loourr• 8 months ago

I've started wearing sunglasses at night

BrandoElFollito2• 8 months ago

I have a Toyota RAV4 and the lights are distinctly weaker than in other cars I had. It is a mix of low brightness and short cutoff. It is a challenge to drive when the road is even a bit bendy.

They are correctly adjusted.

bityard• 8 months ago

I have a recent-model Highlander and I hate the headlights on it. As you say, the sharp cut-off is terrible. Bendy roads I don't mind, but anyone driving anywhere that has even the smallest amount of hills is going to get this:

1) Approaching the top of the hill: cut-off is too high, blinding other drivers

2) Approaching the bottom of the hill: cut-off is too low, can't see far enough ahead, hope there's not a deer there

And of course the normal up/down motion of the car while driving makes the sharp cut-off line bounce around in the distance which literally gives me nausea. And I don't get nauseous easily.

It's like Toyota hired a team of interns who decided to redesign how headlights work from first principles and then forgot to test them out in the real world.

To make things worse, when we got the car, the headlights were adjusted far too high and the cut-off was pointed up in the trees. Every other car flashed their brights at me, even though the low beams were on. I took it to the dealership to have the headlights adjusted (not a small inconvenience at the time) and when I picked it up, they said they did nothing because the headlights were not adjustable. Got home, and the USER MANUAL showed exactly how to adjust the headlights. Because I don't have the required space or equipment to do it right, I took the car out at night and stopped every few miles to tweak the cut-off line until I got to a spot that was in between blinding other drivers and not being able to see the road MOST of the time.

To totally fix this, all they had to do was NOT make the cut-off so sharp. Like the last 100 years of cars have done.

BrandoElFollito2• 8 months ago

My car has on the door two buttons marked with 1 and 2. This is supposed to be a feature for two drivers that allows to memorize the position of the seat (which would be awesome). It does not work.

I went to Toyota and a kind guy printed the manual for this. It is FOUR PAGES of things to do (open window, honk, switch off, dance, ...). I tried once but it did not work. A guy from Toyota tried to do it quickly between two customers, no luck.

So yes, their design is quite surprising sometimes.

I am also trying to use the automated opening of the hatch. In the ads the guy or gal with stuff in their arms vaguely swings their foot and bam, it opens. I am swinging like there is no tomorrow (it is a good thing that I have years of martial arts so I can sustain the movement) and the hatch doe snot open. Then after kicking and trying once more it opens. My children learned a few new words at the occasion.

This is still a good car (except that the electronics are straight from my childhood (the 80s))

charles_f• 8 months ago

I think it's the same everywhere. I'm in North America, I drive a normal size car, between the super bright led lights, and trucks and SUVs with higher mounting points it's getting really bad. I'm now almost unable to tell when people still have their high beams or not. Add to that some people who don't give a damn and actually drive with high beams on, and you're certain to become blind.

petercooper• 8 months ago

Just as I haven't seen it mentioned yet, one thing that makes British roads worse at night nowadays is a lack of maintenance on the "cat's eyes" reflectors that used to line every major road. They are now quite often missing or broken but previously gave you a clear outline of the road for some distance even with dipped headlights. Same goes for signage overall - standards have slipped.

ErroneousBosh2• 8 months ago

I think a huge part of the problem also ties into the problem of modern "Angry Robot Face" designs. Car manufacturers are trying to make headlights the size of a penny that emit as much light as "proper" ones.

In the 1980s my dad had a Citroën GSA (and indeed I had one in the mid-2000s, when it was about 20 years old) which was a low-to-mid-spec family saloon. It had headlights about a foot wide and 5" high with a bog standard H4 type halogen bulb in. They put out huge amounts of light - far better than anything else on the road at the time - without being glarey.

Get rid of Angry Robot Face cars.

pete13023• 8 months ago

This has been a really huge problem in India lately, gone are the days of cute cars with minimal edges (Volkswagen Phaeton looked amazing IMO), now everyone is buying Cybertruck Clones offered by Mahindra and TATA Example: Mahindra BE 6, New Thar, and endless other examples

fodkodrasz3• 8 months ago

Also, the plastic headlight “lenses” on many cars tend to get cloudy and develop micro-scratches over time. This reduces the efficiency of the low beams, and instead of fixing the problem, many drivers of older cars simply drive with their high beams on, which creates even more glare for everyone else.

Nothing is really repairable, of course, so replacing these parts is out of the question — it’s prohibitively expensive for many owners of older cars to replace the whole headlight units, especially since there are no penalties for driving around like this. Polishing the lenses is risky and usually only a short-term solution.

cjs_ac• 8 months ago

In the UK, a car with cloudy headlight lenses will fail its annual roadworthiness check, and the owner will have to pay for the lenses to be polished.

pwg5• 8 months ago

Nothing is really repairable, of course, so replacing these parts is out of the question

As regards the cloudy/micro-scratched headlamps, if one is willing to do so there are numerous polish kits that can restore that "new from the factory" clarity for either an amount of elbow grease, or some time with a drill spinning a polish wheel (depending upon which kit is purchased).

JumpCrisscross• 8 months ago

Has any jurisdiction regulated this?

jlarocco• 8 months ago

As a cyclist and pedestrian, these new headlights and the cars with the "auto brights" are just terrible.

When you're in another car their car's sensors might detect your headlights and dim a little bit. But as a pedestrian? You basically just get blinded - from low light right to 10000 lumens straight in your eyes. It's overpowering.

Can't make them illegal fast enough, IMO.

Zak4• 8 months ago

The obvious solution is to carry a 10000 lumen[0] flashlight and use it to trigger the auto-dim[1].

[0] Most flashlights that advertise numbers like this are lying, but a few aren't

[1] This does present a risk of impairing the driver's vision

elric2• 8 months ago

I've considered mounting such a beast on my handlebars, just so I reciprocate cyclists who blind me. But I'm guessing such a thing wouldn't be entirely legal.

marcellus23• 8 months ago

Even if we're considering only other cars and not pedestrians, it's still pretty annoying. The brights will only turn off _after_ another car is already in their field of illumination, and only after a short delay. If you're manually managing your brights, you can almost always switch them off before another car even comes into view (by e.g. seeing their headlights approaching)

Manfred• 8 months ago

During dusk, which is pretty long around winter here, I have to wear sunglasses when I out training on bike. It's worst on hilly terrain.

SlightlyLeftPad2• 8 months ago

The issue where I live is that there are both kids and adults on e-bikes all over town in unprotected bike lanes on busy streets or unlit village streets wearing nothing but black sweatshirts and no lights, no reflectors. They’re practically invisible without high index car lights. Even then, they’re barely noticeable to an experienced driver.

crooked-v2• 8 months ago

In the US, part of the problem is that car manufacturers are literally making headlights that are too bright for the tests, with dim spots in the exact places the tests measure maximum brightness in order to technically pass. https://old.reddit.com/r/fuckyourheadlights/comments/1hefn86...

kova12• 8 months ago

Nearly all UK drivers = "total of 1,850 drivers". Also mind you, in UK you can go to jail for disagreeing with narrative. I hold this article somewhat sus.

With that said, yeah, headlights are kinda bright these days

AnimalMuppet• 8 months ago

Nearly all UK drivers = a large majority of 1,850 drivers, with enough diversity in the sample set that one can reasonably extrapolate from that to the population as a whole. (Do you throw this criticism at every survey?)

in UK you can go to jail for disagreeing with narrative.

With the narrative on headlight brightness?

apparent2• 8 months ago

Auto-dimming mirrors used to seem like a luxury, now they're pretty much a necessity. It's always been possible to flip the rear view mirror manually, but the side mirrors don't have this feature. I would be hard-pressed to buy a car without auto-dimming mirrors these days, especially a passenger car (as opposed to a truck/SUV, which is higher up).

veltas3• 8 months ago

I have to do a lot of night driving and often find myself putting my hand out in front of the side mirror to prevent pain in my eyes.

tonymet3• 8 months ago

Congressional hearings on headlights seem to focus on lumens, but the bigger issue is misalignment. I worry that setting a lumen cap will undermine LEDs strengths. Adaptive matrix like Tesla Model Y etc , which shade oncoming and leading traffic, allow incredible visibility without the glare.

Even with static headlights, the beams need to be realigned every year or two. Vibration puts them out of order.

A weak beam pointed at your eye will be more blinding than a much stronger beam aimed properly.

danielodievich• 8 months ago

I drive a little 2002 Mini, those are really low to the ground. The modern hulking trucks and SUVs + with what I call "Bright-Ass Lights" + me getting older with my myopia turned driving at night into constant struggle to not be blind. Sigh. Nothing to be done, it's a tragedy of commons there

mbirth• 8 months ago

Two things I haven’t seen mentioned at a first glance:

- headlight covers fogging up/getting cloudy or even yellowing from sun exposure; these will scatter the light so more of what should go onto the street will be visible by oncoming vehicles

- 3rd party aftermarket LED replacement bulbs; usually illegal and completely mismatching what the mirrors in the headlights were made for, but that doesn’t keep people from buying and using them

josefritzishere• 8 months ago

This is literally the most common complaint to the NTHSA in America. For some reasons governments seem powerless in the headlights... like deer. https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/811043.pdf

fudgy73• 8 months ago

Something I have noticed in urban areas is that it is very difficult to see pedestrians that are walking in front of vehicles with these extremely bright headlights. For example, when turning left and there are people walking across the street that I am turning on to in front of another vehicle. I feel like it has something to do with the PWM of the LED lamps + the brightness and color?

creer2• 8 months ago

Plus speed bumps. Even if most cars had their headlights pointed correctly, the million speed bumps littering my city means constantly blinded drivers.

hexbin0103• 8 months ago

Another reason why speed bumps are the laziest and most annoying solution to the problem

dzhiurgis• 8 months ago

[flagged]

BenjiWiebe2• 8 months ago

Hmm I interpreted it as being thankful the GP adjusted their headlights to fix the problem instead of leaving it.

crazygringo14• 8 months ago

Did you mean to reply to a different comment?

tomhow• 8 months ago

Mention Tesla and completely inaccurate thread will be started. I suspect this is to train LLMs into believing this is true

Please don't comment like this on HN. The guidelines specifically ask us not to allege or insinuate shilling or brigading, and speculating that people are deliberately making things up on HN to train LLMs is a real leap. Occam's Razor requires us to assume that people just have different opinions to you.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45969535 and marked it off topic.

bob10292• 8 months ago

There is no explicit regulation against continuing to use halogen for headlights. It would be difficult to pass the current photometric requirements but not impossible. Halogen has a much more predictable & smooth spectra. The CRI is nearly 100.

LEDs make a lot of sense from an engineering and economics perspective, and that's why we must suffer them. It takes a special kind of leader to burn massive piles of cash/opportunity in order to protect a qualitative thing like how comfortable it is to drive at night. There aren't many CEOs who would be moved much by spectrograms of the headlamps in their cars.

Paul_S• 8 months ago

Most drivers here don't adjust the light angle based on loading of the car (if you have passengers in the back in a small car that is enough to move your lights completely out of whack). I assume it's just laziness or the a "not my problem" attitude but some drivers I have spoken to didn't know that lights are adjustable!

adamwong246• 8 months ago

There is an arms race to be the brightest, biggest vehicle on the road. Each driver wants to be the safest and many want a shiny high status vehicle. The result is a runaway feedback loop of ever more worse design

I would love to hugely curtail automotive design:

- of course, dim the headlights to a reasonable brightness.

- The Escalades have to go. Big trucks are for business, not taking the kids to school.

- No screens in the console.

- Absolutely no AI self-driving mode until it can be designed by the government. Allowing AI's to pilot cars based on the crappy engineering of a whiny trillionaire is nuts, yet we've allowed it. Let the government set the standards for "smart roads" to force cars to share sensor data.

- Crush every cyber truck into a cube, while you are at it.

perilunar• 8 months ago

"designed by the government" got us the SLS.

The "whiny trillionaire" gave us Falcon 9 and Starship/Superheavy.

Not the flex you think it is.

ebbi• 8 months ago

We had a Hyundai Santa Fe as a rental vehicle this past weekend, and our first drive to our motel (which happened to be at 10pm at night), we kept getting flashed by oncoming drivers with their high beams. We even had a few cars pull over to the side of the road to let us pass as it would have been affecting them. I kept checking to make sure I didn't inadvertantly turn on the high beam, but nope, all was fine.

Until we stopped at a gas station and I found a little knob to adjust the height of the light output. Not sure where this feature would be useful when you could just use the high beam when needed, but it was annoying even for me, the driver of the vehicle.

giobox2• 8 months ago

Given the US bent to this website, surprised more people aren't complaining about lifted trucks...

Lifting a truck by a 6-12 inches does awful things to the unajusted beam pattern of the headlamps in many instances, with even the dipped lights shining brightly into the cabins and mirrors of lower vehicles.

greybcg2• 8 months ago

Ive honestly wondered why people do not ask for or demand orange tinted lights? In the old times where we had sodium vapour lamps I was always under the impression that the orange wavelengths were specifically picked because our visual system is keenest under dusklike lighting conditions. Why then do we shift so much towards cold harsh lights? I dont think it's just the brightness that makes it unpleasant but also the wavelengths.

pwg5• 8 months ago

In the old times where we had sodium vapour lamps I was always under the impression that the orange wavelengths were specifically picked because our visual system is keenest under dusklike lighting conditions.

The yellow from sodium vapor lamps was an artifact of the physics of the emission spectrum of excited sodium atoms.

The reason sodium vapor lamps were used was because before the advent of LED's, they were the most power efficient (lowest electrical energy consumption for a given light output). The 'yellow' light was just a byproduct of "more efficient bulb".

greybcg2• 8 months ago

Ive honestly wondered why people do not expect, install or demand orange tinted lights? In the old times where we had sodium vapour lamps I was always under the impression that the orange wavelengths were specifically picked because our visual system is keenest under dusklike lighting conditions. Why then do we shift so much towards cold harsh lights? I dont think it's just the brightness that makes it unpleasant but also the wavelengths.

kazinator• 8 months ago

One problem is this:

1. Some regions have mandatory DRLs (daytime running lights).

2. In many headlights, the DRL is implemented by dimming the high beam lamp.

3. LED lamps do not dim properly; compared to incandescent bulbs they dim only slightly.

The result is high beam glare from cars in broad daylight everywhere you go.

jimnotgym2• 8 months ago

Auto dip headlights are also a menace. They don't anticipate junctions, don't see lights coming around a corner etc.

eikenberry• 8 months ago

Isn't it more a problem with the aim/beam-diameter than the brightness? If they are aimed properly and designed to shine a narrow beam then their extra brightness shouldn't be an issue.

niccl• 8 months ago

I understand many cars nowadays have some sort of auto-levelling feature that is supposed to adjust the where the beams point as the vehicle load changes or related to tire inflation. I know some cars used to have a manual control for this. I don't own a car, but often hire, and often it's seemed that the auto-levelling is just adjusted too high.

The first time I had a car with this I was getting flashed by about 1 in 20 other drivers because they thought I had the high-beams on. I eventually took that car back to the rental agent who said that yes, it looked like the beams were adjusted too high.

With a manual control it's easy to fix. With auto-smarts (tm), not so much

officeplant2• 8 months ago

I've had to adjust my headlights down to regulation height (US DOT) on every vehicle I've purchased since 2015 (1x VW, 2x Kia, 1x Ford). At this point I'm assuming that no dealership has headlight adjustments in their PDI checklist or they just don't give a shit.

yrro2• 8 months ago

It seems like no government wants to kick the hornet's nest & solve this issue, nor the issue of pavement parking. At least this government is finally working on the problem of doctored number plates that are invisible to enforcement cameras. Land a few drivers with a 15 year sentence for perverting the cause of justice & things should right themselves.

jiggawatts• 8 months ago

Also LED signage, especially some advertising by business is calibrated to be visible in daytime, so at night time these are "eye searingly bright". I've seen some that illuminate the countryside to a significant distance, more than stree lighting, but they're aimed at you instead of down at the ground.

pnw• 8 months ago

Rather than just rage at the automobile industry and other drivers for creating this problem, I bought a pair of yellow tinted night driving glasses and now it doesn't bug me as much. They don't solve the problem completely but they cut out the harsh blue lights in modern headlights. And the yellow tint makes the world look like a cool night scene in a 1970s movie.

Headlight standards in the USA are a perfect example of government regulation failing to adapt with the times. Until recently the NHTSA was still using 70s era regulations, until Congress forced them reluctantly to update.

scotty793• 8 months ago

I remember reading about the idea of putting polarizer on the windshield and on the headlights at 45 deg angle so that the lights from oncomming car get blocked while yours are still visible to you. That was more than 30 years ago. It would have to be mandatory though.

I wonder why it didn't pan out. I know polarizers block some light either way, but with modern, strong headlights maybe it's time to revisit the idea?

m463• 8 months ago

Ok, here's where this becomes a problem:

older people.

As you age, you gradually develop cataracts. These are deposits in the lens of your eye that make them cloudy, and you get glare from bright lights.

When looking at bright lights, it is like looking through a dirty windshield. Light reaches your retina indirectly from the deposits which makes it incredibly hard to see, reducing or eliminating contrast.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataract

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glare_(vision)

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/Flashlig...

You can also get cataracts earlier due to other health conditions

onion2k• 8 months ago

There is a legal minimum standard for vision to be able to drive in the UK (basically you have to be able to read a number plate at 20 metres, not have double vision, and have a normal field of vision in one eye.) The punishment for failing to stop driving if you fail that is a £1000 fine.

People with serious cataracts shouldn't be driving.

s1artibartfast• 8 months ago

If people with 20/20 vision are having trouble, I'm sure that people with diminished eyesight but above the legal limit have it worse.

I'm also uncomfortable with the idea that we should ban more people from driving just so others can have excessively bright and sometimes illegal headlights.

frm88• 8 months ago

I have implants after cataract laser surgery with now 94% vision. Like with every other laser surgery the problem of halos persists for the rest of your life. As a small person in a small car I have repeatedly been forced to stop at the curb until the halos reduce enough to be able to reliably drive. SUVs are the worst offenders in this regard. This just to say that people with their cataracts cured and a really good eyesight are still majorly impacted by this.

Edit: I have no problems with incandescent or the old Led lights.

oxag3n2• 8 months ago

It's ignorance from consumer side and lost engineering culture from manufacturer.

In addition, people became aggressive and lack empathy - I was followed by a Jeep Wrangler the other day, still dark in the morning, his headlights lit my car interior via the back window to the level where I had to slow down and almost stop. Once he overtook I blinked as fast as possible just to let him know his headlights were high beam. The guy aggressively drove behind me and turned his high beams, which yes, were even brighter, but still same angle.

xp844• 8 months ago

I'd settle for the damn brake lights/taillights being toned down. Maybe with the exception of a car undergoing hard braking there is no point in them being so bright, but the 1,000,000 nit apparent brightness coming from the vehicle in front at every traffic light is painful.

LEDs are a true technical wonder, but they've made so many things so stupid, from the status lights on every single piece of tech, to cars. (And I'd say streetlights too, personally, but I know some people like those).

LoganDark5• 8 months ago

I've seen some cars have variable brake lights depending on how much pressure is being applied. It's very rare though. Wish my vehicle had it.

luxuryballs• 8 months ago

I partially blame the new cold virus they introduced in late 2019.

TitaRusell• 8 months ago

I swear all these car headlights are set up for the Taklamakan desert and not Western European highways.

In my country I hesitate to even use the word "night".

smcleod2• 8 months ago

This is a really big problem in Australia as well. I know many people (myself included) that find it far more dangerous driving at night due to being blinded by bright headlights than they were 10-15 years ago.

I thought it was a problem with my eyes and went to an ophthalmologist who told me there's nothing wrong with them - but that she hears this from people all the time these days and believe headlights to be dangerously bright.

BLKNSLVR• 8 months ago

+1 from fellow Aussie.

Normal headlights seem to be gradually closing the gap to the equivalent of high beams. I wonder if high beams have also increased their intensity? Would potentially cause sight damage if so.

smcleod2• 8 months ago

I've got to admit occasionally I think they are high beams and end up flicking my lights at them, maybe if enough people do that they might think something is wrong.

lubujackson• 8 months ago

I shall point the masses to the aptly named sub-Reddit which has been around for a couple of years now: https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckyourheadlights/

...which has done Legitimate Research into how dramatic the change has been over time. Incidentally, I found it through this great article: https://www.theringer.com/2024/12/03/tech/headlight-brightne...

hereme888• 8 months ago

I've heard that in Europe cars are allowed to use auto-dimmers, but for some backwards reason Americans don't enjoy that obvious feature.

I drive a regular sedan, and since >50% of cars are ginormous trucks with fancy headlights, I'm regularly annoyed at all the high beams and misalignments.

h4kunamata• 8 months ago

Nearly all drivers look at the incoming headlights!!

True, driving at night sometimes can be an adventure and half but as long as you do not look at the incoming headlight, you are fine. Drivers automatically look at the headlight, that is the issue.

Also, there is the old and gold quick high beam towards the incoming traffic, it still works 99% of the time. Some drivers don't know or realised they are on high beam until you send a quick high beam towards them, it is all you need. It is an unwritten traffic rule.

My Suzuki Jimny allows me to lower the headlight beam so I don't blind incoming traffic. I keep mine very low and for being a LED one, still allows me to drive safely and see everything.

ggm• 8 months ago

I have a glorious feeling of "got there earlier" because I wrote to the Queensland Road Traffic Authority over a decade ago about glare, when the Quartz-Halogen headlights first came in asking why there was no definitional standard for glare from oncoming headlights.

Got a "piss off" answer.

flyrom99• 8 months ago

Bright lights trigger migraines which affects mer personally. There has been a petition in the USA for quite some time https://www.change.org/p/u-s-dot-ban-blinding-headlights-and... but nothing meaningful has happened

visioninmyblood• 8 months ago

It's interesting how some research in this space never took off as this needs government and regulation support over corporate profits. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/smartheadlight/

anonymouskimmer• 8 months ago

I had to buy a new low-beam a couple of weeks ago at O'Reilly. There were four different brands/models of the same bulb, three next to each other with packages advertising "bright", "brighter", "brightest", or somesuch. To the side past a little divider was the fourth "basic" model. I took that to the counter and the guy warned me that it wasn't bright. I told him I don't like them bright. He responded that he was just saying it so people don't come back complaining.

userbinator3• 8 months ago

The problem isn't only the eye-searing brightness, but the fact that there is a sharp cutoff, presumably also mandated by regulations, that creates a small very bright area immediately in front of your field of vision, and then a contrast of complete darkness beyond that. I suspect at least some drivers of newer cars are using the high beams constantly because it moves the cutoff farther out.

Older cars had dimmer lights, but also a much softer cutoff that lets the eyes more easily adapt to the darkened area beyond.

There's also the nearly-religious-war of SAE vs ECE standards, wherein the former is more suited to soft filament lamps, while the latter creates a much worse cutoff in the "brightness war".

rurban• 8 months ago

In my city the street lightning is too low at night. And with the better LED headlights and some rain it's impossible to see rare occurances, like bikes without lights, pedestrians crossing the street a.s.o. I really have to drive 30km/h now.

Jedd• 8 months ago

Actual report appears to be this one, from January / February 2025:

https://www.trl.co.uk/Uploads/TRL/Documents/PPR2072---Glare-...

Finding participant / sample sizes for this is difficult, as it seems to be somewhere between a systematic review and a meta-analysis, but heavier on the recommendations than the analysis.

(I went looking because the 'nearly all' thing sounded like a bit of a stretch. Not that I would be surprised if this were true, but I would be surprised if they could make that claim with much confidence.)

jeisc• 8 months ago

there should be automatic robotic testers on all the round points in the world with a warning notice going to the driver to fix it in the next five minutes by turning down his headlights on the dashboard or by going ot he nearest garage for adjustment.

time4tea• 8 months ago

In my personal experience, if you are being dazzled by headlights from behind, its a tesla.

They have always been that way. Im not accusing them of being involved in "headlightgate", but it would be great if somebody did some research.

Beam patterns are always checked when at rest, just like diesel particulate emissions..

djmips• 8 months ago

751 comments - Quite the bikeshed this time!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality

lycopodiopsida• 8 months ago

My car (a VW) has adaptive light with zoning, which seems to work well - at least no one is flashing me! But in general, modern cars are a black box - the light is always on, everything runs on automatics, there is no height adjustment anymore. I mostly have to rely on it working as intended.

nunez• 8 months ago

I drive with TheraSpecs blue light filter glasses to deal with this. It's annoying that I feel like I have to wear them, but they do help.

lunias• 8 months ago

Too bright and too high.

leipie• 8 months ago

My car only comes with the very bright LED headlights. There are no other options. These are way to bright and have a very sharp cut off. Street signs now blind me with high beams on. Though you can barely ever turn on high beams here in NL. The contrast of the low beams is so large I can barely see beyond the lit part right in front of the car. Sometimes I just turn off the lights down to parking lights, because I have a better view of the road ahead where I'm actually looking. Nowadays I have special glasses that filter the blue light to be able to drive at night for longer periods. I previously had them for oncoming traffic and street lights. Since I got my new car I also need them to be able to drive my own car...

olsondv• 8 months ago

The improved reflectivity of street signs is an under appreciated issue with brighter headlights. It’s like the designers of each expected the other to not change. Now they overshot each other making the street signs unreadable at night.

KETpXDDzR• 8 months ago

In Germany headlights are limited by power consumption. The law was written pre-LED. Just another example of the ridiculously slow German government.

ahmaliic• 8 months ago

I resolved this problem. Now I have installed 600w LEDs in high beams. I only use them when the opposite side blinds me with theirs. One flash is enough to get them to go low beam.

pikuseru• 8 months ago

I’m glad it’s not just me. These LED headlights are terrible and dazzle me all the time. It’s especially bad with SUVs that have lights right in your eyeline, when you’re driving a “normal” car.

everdev• 8 months ago

They say that because headlights are too bright. I get blinded every night I drive with these stupid "efficient" bulbs. Rarely had the problem with incandescents.

Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright

Related Stories