What happens when you don’t have regulated standards? That. The color of the light is also important. Brightest doesn’t mean best.
Yep. Higher frequency lights actually inhibit your ability to see details, making driving less safe.
TIL!
i am seeing green headlights nowadays and it makes me irrationally anger
driving in a car and meeting the foul lifted truck headlights
Or the asshole truck with undercarriage lights AND mounted lights on a bar over the cab.
This has nothing to do with it, but I started reading “driving in” and my mind automatically filled it up with “my truck, right after a beer, hey that bump.is shaped like a beer”.
Thanks for reviving me the earworm. :3
What a great song, for sure.
its so frustrating that now that electric cars are getting really good everything else about cars is getting really bad. i dont want a big suv with bright cold white headlights and built in driver monitoring and screens everywhere. please just sell me a 90s family sedan but electric
also can we PLEASE find a better place for curtain airbags than in the pillars??? i would like to be able to see oncoming traffic when going around curves
Thats what moving your head is for :)
Alternatively: Ants in your pants.
The airbags go in the pillars because the pillars were mandated to be thicker, not the other way around.
Fun fact, this is why we have touchscreens in cars. Basically everything shitty about cars today can be traced back to the chicken tax.
The problem has nothing to do with the light technology. It has to do with the cutoffs and properly aiming the headlights. Also tall vehicles have higher headlights even if aimed properly.
even if they’re properly aimed stupidly bright headlights still blind people on hills or around corners
also automatic high beams can fuck off
Back in the 80s this was never an issue no matter how large the truck. It’s definitely related to light technology.
Interesting because old cars without a light cutoff seem to blind me more than modern cars and those people would usually be getting closer to you with high beams beause their low beams don’t show shit, meaning even more blinding light.
Yea, sure. And back in the 80s I was younger, so technology must be why I’m older now.
Look at the height of an 80s truck compared to today.
Also, do the LED bulbs in your house blind you, too?
Lumens produced by headlights in the 80s was significantly less than the lumens produced today. Less than 1000 back then and typically 2000 or so today. The light was a warmer yellow then and white/blue today which eyes are more sensitive to.
About 80% of cars on the road still use halogen bulbs, the same ones from the 80s. Lumens isn’t the problem, it’s lux, I.E. how much light hits the road (and other drivers eyes), which is influenced as much by the housing as the light source.
The actual problem is the terribly lax enforcement of glare and cutoff standards, along woth pretty much no standards on anything else related to the housing.
As often as not, you’re getting blinded by a halogen with a housing that shouldn’t be legal.
But wait, there’s more! You and I both want those housings banned, but I read a study recently showing they’re saving lives more, even if they’re annoying. So, oh well.
IMO regarding LED headlights, it mostly has to do with manufacturers putting LEDs in reflector housing.
Because of the way LED boards are, you can’t get a centric light. Standard LED boards are a cob, the best being those thin blades, but none of them are suitable for a pure reflector set up without pissing light everywhere.
LED head lights belong strictly in projector housings in order to have good cut off and spread. I drove an IONIQ 5 ultimate last year, and the head lights were shockingly bad. Not only did light piss everywhere, but it was downright dangerous in an urban setting as it would not illuminate the side walks nor the side of the road, so I could not see pedestrians waiting to cross at night.
I retrofitted the projector beam headlights in my 2020 Elantra with Diode Dynamics SL2 Pros, and after a height adjustment, they don’t blind anyone, nor bleed everywhere, have a great sharp-but-not-too-sharp cut off due to the mechanical shutter, and I can see the sides of the road clearly. They’re also not overly bright. I now have a 2026 K4 Hatchback, and the LED projectors are also great.
tall vehicles could have low beams but they make the front of the car look ridiculous therefore unmarketable.
Meh, modern split headlight designs allow you to have a marketable front-end with headlights at the correct height.
Look at the Kona for example. The DRLs are way at the top yet the head lights are at the fender line. I think it looks good.
Kona is doing headlights pretty good imo
People who describe this as a problem with headlight technology are idiots. The problem is over-bright headlights shining in people’s eyes, regardless of the technology.
Those are all high beams.
If they are pointed at a person that is against the law & a dick move by a person (regardless if it’s a mechanical failure).
Brightness isn’t bad, it’s a safety feature.
(And countries do have a min/max brightness laws, measured a bit differently tho.)There is also a failure of the greedy car industry - we have adaptive headlights (where you have your high
beansbeams dynamically shaded or separated to not shine on other cars specifically) for 30 years now but they remain optional extras (except on Chinese cars). And memes of cars shining in your face exist.
(USA only allowed this a few years back, that’s why in the USA movies even cars promoted by that movie always used the base model ugly headlights.)
(This last low beam adaptive bit is from the 70s actually.)The second failure is also legislative - all the places that don’t have legislature setting the max height (positioning from the ground) of headlights have SUVs shining lights in ppls faces even when just using low beams.
As said, ppl are just dicks with high beams, low beams set too high, and using fog lamps all the time bcs it’s ‘sporty’.
Adaptive headlights suck balls. They don’t recognize another car’s headlights approaching a corner, so they blind other drivers for a second anyway every time. I hate that people are too lazy to move a single finger at the expense of other drivers.
Counter point: I would much rather be blinded for a half second before the automatic headlights dip than be continued to be blinded by the asshole they doesn’t manually dip their headlights at all.
Yes, this!
It’s exactly what I do too (finger that button).Ppl are angry at a tech bcs it works 90% of the time instead of 100.00% … and rather use the alternative that they themselves bitch about how it doesn’t work either.
Think I got flashed at two times in two years of having adaptive LEDs. Many more times for forgetting my high beams on with halogens or HIDs (it takes a bit to get used to using high beams properly again after not needing them between about april-may and august). That despite the fact that some of those halogen and HID lights were so burnt out that I couldn’t see with low beams.
Personally I can easily tell when a car has adaptive lights and 99% of the time they recognize me from farther away than the average driver switches off high beams.
I don’t flash people with automatic headlights, that’s just pointless. Doesn’t mean I wasn’t briefly blinded by them a dozen times an hour.
Also enforcement issues. Cops don’t like headlight regulations and thus don’t enforce them
LEDs don’t have ro be that bright and can and should have regulated lumen and color temperature outputs. I shouldn’t feel like looking at my mirror at night is like looking at the sun
lets not threaten individual inventors working for a company that improperly used the invention, didnt care to do testing, and doesnt care about its customers or anyone on the road
Legislate this crap now
Just move the contrast and shadow sliders back down when you approach another car.
Fake. Make the LEDs dimmer AND avoid the regular headlight out issues.
Those are the long lights that you use when no one is driving in front of you. The issue with short lights is that people don’t adjust them correctly, no the color or brightness.
Fuck Your Headlights!
This should be a thing on lemmy too.
Until his cataract surgery, the “mental illness” types kept my dad from driving at night
