I've just got back from the Lake District in the UK where I've been driving a 2019 Range Rover Sport. I hired this vehicle just in case the weather conditions demanded it and for driving roads like this: https://www.visitcumbria.com/amb/wrynose-pass/
What I discovered though, was "Intelligent High Beam"... which was an automatic head light mode that looked (from the driver perspective) like it used an LCD matrix over the high beam. It would fade up from the normal beam, flood the road, and then if a car was in front or approaching it would block out the parts of the scene in which those vehicles were present.
It's something else to have full visibility of the sides of the road (where sheep wandered freely) and still not be blinding anyone in front or oncoming, and to not have to think about it at all. More than that, road signs were singled out and side obstacles made visible... whilst not blinding anyone.
Within a couple of days I took this fully for granted, and not a single vehicle we passed flashed their lights at us (which I'd expect if we'd blinded anyone).
Growing up in rural England I learned to Drive at night with dipped lights. Most of the roads are single track and the thing I damned well want to know is if something is coming the other direction.
I actively control the high beams, raising and lowering in order to allow me to see what's coming and maintaining visibility on the road as appropriate. Automatics just assume you want all the light all the time bar when someone elses lights are already there.
Perhaps it's just my eyes getting older, or changes to headlight tech and/or car design is a contributing factor, but modern headlights at night seem more blinding than I ever remember them being in the past.
I'm with you, and the worst part is the color temperature.
Between brightness and this ridiculous fad of high Kelvin blue headlights, driving at night on the highways of major traffic areas is awful. It's the luminous equivalent of people who utterly ignore decibel limits of their vehicles to the detriment of pedestrian ears.
I wonder about the high Kelvin headlights causing retinal damage, there is some research I recall reading about related to blue light filters.
To think we'll all be blinder and deafer for this is quite agitating.
What's frustrating is there's actually a very elegant solution to this problem, but it requires buy-in from all manufacturers. If you use polarized glass at 45 degrees for both headlights and windshields, you effectively cancel out the lights when sitting inside a car (it's not perfect, but they'll be incredibly dim). You could easily adjust it to be brighter (assuming everyone agrees on the standard) if people object to not being able to see oncoming headlights.
But it's meaningless unless everyone does it, and it won't work for cars already on the road.
I specifically avoid driving at night due to this. The past 2 or 3 years it has gotten especially awful. I even got new glasses because of this. Nope, just new cars having the most annoying headlights imaginable.
My own brights are lower than most of the low beams/automatic adjustment lights that I encounter.
it's the absolute worst. car companies are marketing all this tech like highbeams that stay on and move away from oncoming traffic like it all just works and it doesnt... and very bright leds... and more suvs than ever so if you drive a car most other vehicles headlights are higher relative to yours (hence more in your face)
The best thing to do is to stop driving. The whole idea is bad. We should be living in urban environments where we don't need to drive at all; driving is dangerous (30,000 people killed in the US every year, not to mention maimings), and an ecological disaster due to pollution and sprawl.
I agree, it's infuriating. I don't have a car and don't drive too often, but when I do it's mostly reasonably long distances (4-6 hours) and almost always at night because it's the only time I have. I try to drive as late (or early in the morning, if you will) as possible, to avoid as much traffic as possible, not because I'll get stuck in queues but because of the damn headlights of other cars. They're blinding!
I'm actually about to buy a truck because of how bright everyone's lights are and how low my car is (Honda Fit).
My car was in the shop the other day, and they loaned me a truck, it was amazing, I could drive at night with NO ISSUES.
My commute is pretty much a single twisty, turny back road that has no street lamps, so everyone thinks they need their brights on... So I'm constantly blinded by high-beams, then they switch to what has to be illegally bright or misaligned low-beams. In the truck though, I wasn't blinded once but people still had their high beams and way too bright low beams.
I haven't driven a truck in 8 years, but maybe its time.
(As someone who drives a truck in an area much like yours)
This works, until you realize that because you're higher than everyone else, they all think YOU have your high beams on. And then you get flashed and honked at on a regular basis (at least I do). Then I actually turn on my high beams to show people what it could be like and they take theirs off.
But even then, you're still right. The worst case scenario in a truck is still nothing compared to the blinding light of a lifted F250 with upgraded HIDs when I'm in my fiesta.
I was thinking about some carefully-sculpted "chrome mudflaps" or something on the back of my small car, up near the window. Obviously they wouldn't do much for mud, but if they're purely passive, I think they'd still be legal. If someone's following at an appropriate distance, no issue, but if they get close enough for their lights to point at my window, they'll be eating their own glare.
The other thing I've noticed is emergency vehicles flashing lights are getting much brighter. Sometimes flashing police lights are so intense I feel blinded.
Yeah, they definitely have with the newer LED light bars compared to the old ones with bulbs. Police in my area usually turn half of them off (to where only the very edges of the light bar are flashing, the middle lights are off) once they pull someone over or stop at an accident scene. I feel like otherwise they'd just cause more wrecks due to blindness.
I have the same issue. My suspicion is that this is going to be analyzed as a serious safety concern at some point.
It seems that headlights got much brighter to benefit the driver behind them, without any consideration that they blind everyone else -- and also reduce the ability for peoples' eyes to adjust to dim conditions. That can't be a good trade-off.
The color temperature was much lower in the past with tungsten lamps, and even lower with selective yellow[0]. With xenon and LED lights there's a much bigger blue component.
While building my vision-based following robot, I encountered a quite funny phenomenon with its headlights.
The robot uses led strips to highlight its path when it detects that the luminosity from the camera is not enough using simple PID control loop. In normal situation, it is working as intended making the robot more robust to illuminations change.
But every time the robot crashes into an object or wall, it flashes its headlights like if it is trying to call for attention. What is happening is when it crashes the objects are usually really close to both the leds and the camera so suddenly it hide exterior light and it's very dark for the camera so the robot turns the leds on, but because the objects are so close a lot of light is reflected back and suddenly it's too bright so it turns the leds off and the cycle repeat : My "auto-exposure" control loop couldn't keep up and is no longer stable.
The robot had inadvertently acquired a very crude active-light obstacle avoidance / distance sensing system. To add to the complexity of modern headlights, you can now envision that to efficiently exploit this sensor you can plug in a neural network to actively control the headlights to give itself a sense of depth perception. Add multiple robots into the mix and let them evolve a headlight communication strategy/protocol... Here was a little fun dose of complexity to tingle your light-bulb...
>...which effectively rules out dynamic-matrix light systems like Porsche uses.
Good! I'm constantly getting flashed by smart headlights and auto-leveling systems that simply don't work well. I wish we could go back to simple lights that work and don't constantly flash me every time another driver hits a bump or their smart algorithms screw up.
It probably isn't "smart" headlights that are flashing you on bumps, those are normal and perfectly "dumb" lights. The problem is that modern headlights are designed to direct much more light downwards, so that you can see the road, and less light upwards, so you don't blind oncoming drivers or waste light directing it into empty space (you need some to see vehicles and obstacles straight ahead of course, but you need more pointed downwards).
When the car hits a bump, or crests a hill, then "downwards" becomes pointed directly at oncoming traffic. If anything, quick-reacting "smart" lights would be more helpful here.
Generally, when people like you complain about this stuff, what you're really asking for is for everyone to go back to extremely low-output headlights where you couldn't see almost anything at night. I don't see how that's an improvement.
My daily driver has extremely low-output headlights (old school sealed beam headlights). They work great, my eyes adjust to them just fine, except when I'm around other drivers with modern headlights.
Implying that someone doesn't understand the what they are talking about is a little unfair. Headlight brightness is becoming a problem.
Those "smart" headlights definitely do not react correctly/fast enough to prevent blinding someone when they drive over a bump or crest a hill- which are things that are almost guaranteed to happen multiple times whenever someone goes driving. Adding the current level of smarts to a headlight does not fix the issue with brightness.
I think we've reached (or are very near) the point where a brighter headlight won't give you as much additional safety as they degrade the safety of oncoming traffic. It's cool for me to have lights that are brighter than the sun, but if oncoming traffic is blinded and hits something- maybe not me, they could be blind for several seconds after I've passed them and they hit a deer or something- then the overall effect is that my brighter headlights made the roads less safe. I have no personal incentive to get dimmer lights, but society as a whole has an incentive to find the sweet spot where lights are bright enough to drive at night and not endanger other people.
You get the same problem with old headlights as well when cresting a hill or headlights that aren't properly adjusted. Believe it or not but the difference between high and low beams is a bit more literal than it might seem. High beams are aimed a bit higher up whereas low beams aren't. On my car they're the exact same wattage, color temperature, and beam pattern. The only difference is that they're aimed higher up for longer range. If my low beams were adjusted up as far as the adjuster allows for they would be functionally identical to properly adjusted high beams.
I got an airport transfer in a car with smart headlights a few weeks ago.
It was pretty neat - when the road was quiet it lit the road quite broadly, but when there was oncoming traffic it would deactivate the 'pixels' that could have dazzled the oncoming driver. I also got the impression it cast extra light at road signs (although maybe the route I was driven just had very well lit signs)
My country gets dark at 4pm at this time of year, so driving in rural areas involves a lot of switching between main beam and dip beam - and getting mad at oncoming drivers who don't switch early enough. So these smart headlights seem like a good thing!
While I bet they work brilliantly for the driver of the car, for the oncoming traffic it's really annoying. It leaves light spots in my eyes every time I drive in the night and encounter cars with such headlights, as it doesn't deactivate those 'pixels' quick enough for me not to notice. Overall it might be an improvement, but it depends on your situation.
As for extra light at road signs, I believe I've read somewhere that newish signs have ability to reflect near ultraviolet as visible light, and this makes them extra reflective for headlights with ultraviolet range, more so then what you would expect for the given visible light that you see. Although I'm no expert in this and not sure if that actually the reason for why some signs popout so much.
Signs 'pop' because they are very effectively retro-reflective (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retroreflector). The brighter headlights with a wider beam would be casting a moderate amount of light on the sign, which causes it to light up brightly in contrast with the surroundings.
The ones in the UK can be so effective that sometimes I have to switch off my full beams so I don't get blinded by the signs (and I'm not driving a new car with fancy headlights).
I did know someone who didn't know that that you are supposed to dip your headlights when other people could see them. They thought all the people flashing their headlights at them were just being friendly!
Some of this stuff isn't available in the US yet, I caught this...
"Again, it’s worth mentioning that here in America, a land comprehensively crisscrossed with thousands of miles of dark back roads and a whole nation’s worth of wandering deer, this technology is bafflingly illegal."
Apparently they're working on it, here's something from last year that says "coming soon"...
"One one hand, this proposed change should help lousy drivers from burning out your retinas on a lonesome country road. But, by the same token, you may no longer have the delicious opportunity to blast them with the brights once they’re within a few feet of your car to let them know to lower those damned high beams."
Despite all the innovation in the headlights themselves, it seems that a significant portion of drivers these days can’t seem to remember to turn them on. I am constantly trying to get cars in front of me on the highways near NYC to realize their lights are off at night. It’s an interesting study in UX, I think: https://www.autotrader.com/car-news/heres-why-so-many-cars-d...
I assign some blame to always-on modern gauge clusters. You couldn’t see the old-style front lit ones at night unless you turned on your headlights, so there was a sort of natural reminder.
I think between always-on/lcd gauge clusters and DRLs that's a large part of the cause, but I think there are also a lot of really simple solutions that could be explored.
Right now the only way to realize you don't have your lights on when you have DRLs is to realize that your gauge cluster is missing the notification that the headlights are on.
I'd wager simply adding an icon in the gauge cluster like an orange icon with a cross through it would solve a large portion of the issue as it would only rely on people noticing the active notification rather than the absence of another.
I think it’s more a function of the street lamps that allow you to see the road without having to turn on the headlights. If people can’t see where they’re going, it’s obvious very quickly.
Because it’s illegal to drive with the lights off even during daytime. Which in winter might not be that light anyway.
We have a ’03 VW Golf that turns the lights on when the engine starts, but requires you to turn the knob from Off via Parking lights to On to use the high beams. But then it doesn’t warn you that the lights are on when you shut the engine off. So whenever you use the high beams you’ll probably end up running the battery down afterwards because you’re not used to having to turn the lights off manually.
Bad UX was a thing before computerized dashboards.
This seems like one of those things where the industry (and/or regulation) has stagnated and is missing really easy, obvious wins in UX.
Why not beep at me or otherwise alert me if it's night and I'm driving with my lights off? You know there's already a light sensor in the car, and there's already a way to beep at people or show them messages (oil is low, parking brake engaged, etc.)
There's a thing that beeps at me when my gas tank gets low. And there's a thing that beeps at me when my seat belt isn't fastened. So obviously it's OK to beep at me while driving. There's even a thing that beeps at me if I accidentally leave my headlights on and might drain the battery. Which is a fine thing to warn about, but surely not as important as a safety issue like driving with headlights off.
One could say that beeping at people whose headlights are off at night is not necessary because many cars (maybe most?) already have an automatic headlight mode, so the driver can just use that and the problem is solved. But that ignores one simple fact: people aren't doing it. Watch cars drive down a road at night, and it won't take long until you see someone whose headlights are off. I'd wager a lot of the time their car has an automatic headlight mode but they don't have the switch in the right position.
As computer people know from fighting server downtime, if something is important, you monitor whether it's behaving as required, and if it isn't, you alert.
This is one of those things you didn't realize could be better until someone did it.
My Model 3 has everything set on auto. If the car can't see, it'll turn the lights on. If it doesn't see an incoming car, it'll turn on the high beams.
After a year of driving it as my only car, I needed a second car and got a cheap ICE clunker. Having to manage lights is a PITA and basically a failure of design.
I had a similar experience when I got a 2018 Honda Accord. I used to rarely ever take advantage of my brights, but now they're on regularly because my car automatically determines when they can be used.
I’m borderline thinking the secret agenda behind daytime running lamps is actually not related to daytime at all.
Many (all?) modern cars have an auto mode for night lights but it seems to endlessly baffle people as to how they work. At some point it seems you can throw all the UX you want, some are hell bent to skip on being attentive to basic driving safety anyway.
Fortunately (at least where I'm living) automatic headlights are already more widespread than the fancy "matrix-lighting" headlights, for the simple reason that a light sensor on the windshield is cheaper than two state-of-the-art headlights. But, I confess, if anybody would move the switch from "Auto" to "Off" on my car, I might join the people driving without lights for some time before I would notice it...
I'm like that too. Furthermore I have a story about that: A couple months ago I found myself driving a car that didn't have automatic windshield wipers. I drove in the rain for a couple of minutes without turning them on and only realized what was happening by the time I asked myself "why can't I see anything?".
Happened to me after taking my car to inspection a couple years back. I keep lights in auto position always, but I guess they test the parking lights and other positions and afterwards left them turned off. Took me quite a while before I realized I'm driving without lights.
This is my pet peeve. I have seen several police cars with their lights off as they leave a station near my workplace! Unbelievable.
I also see a lot of cars with brights on but no lights. I annoy the people around me by asking them the difference between brights and lights and the answers are very depressing. It seems that many people fiddle with a few buttons until they see light in front of them and then consider everything good.
I hope the bright rectangle and other dynamic features will not blind me when having this insanely complex headlights behing my back, or heading me from the left side, or... actually the stricter road regulations regarding headlights in US are not a bad thing at all.
Readit News
What I discovered though, was "Intelligent High Beam"... which was an automatic head light mode that looked (from the driver perspective) like it used an LCD matrix over the high beam. It would fade up from the normal beam, flood the road, and then if a car was in front or approaching it would block out the parts of the scene in which those vehicles were present.
It turns out it is this: https://www.osram-continental.com/en/products/smartrix.html
It's something else to have full visibility of the sides of the road (where sheep wandered freely) and still not be blinding anyone in front or oncoming, and to not have to think about it at all. More than that, road signs were singled out and side obstacles made visible... whilst not blinding anyone.
Within a couple of days I took this fully for granted, and not a single vehicle we passed flashed their lights at us (which I'd expect if we'd blinded anyone).
Now if I buy a car I'd like lights like this.
I actively control the high beams, raising and lowering in order to allow me to see what's coming and maintaining visibility on the road as appropriate. Automatics just assume you want all the light all the time bar when someone elses lights are already there.
Between brightness and this ridiculous fad of high Kelvin blue headlights, driving at night on the highways of major traffic areas is awful. It's the luminous equivalent of people who utterly ignore decibel limits of their vehicles to the detriment of pedestrian ears.
I wonder about the high Kelvin headlights causing retinal damage, there is some research I recall reading about related to blue light filters.
To think we'll all be blinder and deafer for this is quite agitating.
But it's meaningless unless everyone does it, and it won't work for cars already on the road.
It doesn't help that all pedestrians wear black Northface or Canada Goose jackets.
My own brights are lower than most of the low beams/automatic adjustment lights that I encounter.
I could take the bus but the schedule is so sparse where I’m going it would be quicker to walk (almost an hour). There’s no great options.
My car was in the shop the other day, and they loaned me a truck, it was amazing, I could drive at night with NO ISSUES.
My commute is pretty much a single twisty, turny back road that has no street lamps, so everyone thinks they need their brights on... So I'm constantly blinded by high-beams, then they switch to what has to be illegally bright or misaligned low-beams. In the truck though, I wasn't blinded once but people still had their high beams and way too bright low beams.
I haven't driven a truck in 8 years, but maybe its time.
This works, until you realize that because you're higher than everyone else, they all think YOU have your high beams on. And then you get flashed and honked at on a regular basis (at least I do). Then I actually turn on my high beams to show people what it could be like and they take theirs off.
But even then, you're still right. The worst case scenario in a truck is still nothing compared to the blinding light of a lifted F250 with upgraded HIDs when I'm in my fiesta.
It seems that headlights got much brighter to benefit the driver behind them, without any consideration that they blind everyone else -- and also reduce the ability for peoples' eyes to adjust to dim conditions. That can't be a good trade-off.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_yellow
The robot uses led strips to highlight its path when it detects that the luminosity from the camera is not enough using simple PID control loop. In normal situation, it is working as intended making the robot more robust to illuminations change.
But every time the robot crashes into an object or wall, it flashes its headlights like if it is trying to call for attention. What is happening is when it crashes the objects are usually really close to both the leds and the camera so suddenly it hide exterior light and it's very dark for the camera so the robot turns the leds on, but because the objects are so close a lot of light is reflected back and suddenly it's too bright so it turns the leds off and the cycle repeat : My "auto-exposure" control loop couldn't keep up and is no longer stable.
The robot had inadvertently acquired a very crude active-light obstacle avoidance / distance sensing system. To add to the complexity of modern headlights, you can now envision that to efficiently exploit this sensor you can plug in a neural network to actively control the headlights to give itself a sense of depth perception. Add multiple robots into the mix and let them evolve a headlight communication strategy/protocol... Here was a little fun dose of complexity to tingle your light-bulb...
Boring sedan, MSRP $25,000, Boring sedan (with AI headlight option), MSRP $1,750,000
>...which effectively rules out dynamic-matrix light systems like Porsche uses.
Good! I'm constantly getting flashed by smart headlights and auto-leveling systems that simply don't work well. I wish we could go back to simple lights that work and don't constantly flash me every time another driver hits a bump or their smart algorithms screw up.
When the car hits a bump, or crests a hill, then "downwards" becomes pointed directly at oncoming traffic. If anything, quick-reacting "smart" lights would be more helpful here.
Generally, when people like you complain about this stuff, what you're really asking for is for everyone to go back to extremely low-output headlights where you couldn't see almost anything at night. I don't see how that's an improvement.
Those "smart" headlights definitely do not react correctly/fast enough to prevent blinding someone when they drive over a bump or crest a hill- which are things that are almost guaranteed to happen multiple times whenever someone goes driving. Adding the current level of smarts to a headlight does not fix the issue with brightness.
I think we've reached (or are very near) the point where a brighter headlight won't give you as much additional safety as they degrade the safety of oncoming traffic. It's cool for me to have lights that are brighter than the sun, but if oncoming traffic is blinded and hits something- maybe not me, they could be blind for several seconds after I've passed them and they hit a deer or something- then the overall effect is that my brighter headlights made the roads less safe. I have no personal incentive to get dimmer lights, but society as a whole has an incentive to find the sweet spot where lights are bright enough to drive at night and not endanger other people.
"Well, it's not supposed to do that..."
You don't say!
These systems are most prevalent on expensive European brands that have terrible reliability ratings.
Totally obvious when you see which cars are blinding you too usually.
It was pretty neat - when the road was quiet it lit the road quite broadly, but when there was oncoming traffic it would deactivate the 'pixels' that could have dazzled the oncoming driver. I also got the impression it cast extra light at road signs (although maybe the route I was driven just had very well lit signs)
My country gets dark at 4pm at this time of year, so driving in rural areas involves a lot of switching between main beam and dip beam - and getting mad at oncoming drivers who don't switch early enough. So these smart headlights seem like a good thing!
As for extra light at road signs, I believe I've read somewhere that newish signs have ability to reflect near ultraviolet as visible light, and this makes them extra reflective for headlights with ultraviolet range, more so then what you would expect for the given visible light that you see. Although I'm no expert in this and not sure if that actually the reason for why some signs popout so much.
[1] https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/road-safety-us/resources/road-tr...
The ones in the UK can be so effective that sometimes I have to switch off my full beams so I don't get blinded by the signs (and I'm not driving a new car with fancy headlights).
And the drivers long since forgot how to actually do it manually
"Again, it’s worth mentioning that here in America, a land comprehensively crisscrossed with thousands of miles of dark back roads and a whole nation’s worth of wandering deer, this technology is bafflingly illegal."
Apparently they're working on it, here's something from last year that says "coming soon"...
https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2018/10/nhtsa-proposes-new...
"One one hand, this proposed change should help lousy drivers from burning out your retinas on a lonesome country road. But, by the same token, you may no longer have the delicious opportunity to blast them with the brights once they’re within a few feet of your car to let them know to lower those damned high beams."
Right now the only way to realize you don't have your lights on when you have DRLs is to realize that your gauge cluster is missing the notification that the headlights are on.
I'd wager simply adding an icon in the gauge cluster like an orange icon with a cross through it would solve a large portion of the issue as it would only rely on people noticing the active notification rather than the absence of another.
We have a ’03 VW Golf that turns the lights on when the engine starts, but requires you to turn the knob from Off via Parking lights to On to use the high beams. But then it doesn’t warn you that the lights are on when you shut the engine off. So whenever you use the high beams you’ll probably end up running the battery down afterwards because you’re not used to having to turn the lights off manually.
Bad UX was a thing before computerized dashboards.
Why not beep at me or otherwise alert me if it's night and I'm driving with my lights off? You know there's already a light sensor in the car, and there's already a way to beep at people or show them messages (oil is low, parking brake engaged, etc.)
There's a thing that beeps at me when my gas tank gets low. And there's a thing that beeps at me when my seat belt isn't fastened. So obviously it's OK to beep at me while driving. There's even a thing that beeps at me if I accidentally leave my headlights on and might drain the battery. Which is a fine thing to warn about, but surely not as important as a safety issue like driving with headlights off.
One could say that beeping at people whose headlights are off at night is not necessary because many cars (maybe most?) already have an automatic headlight mode, so the driver can just use that and the problem is solved. But that ignores one simple fact: people aren't doing it. Watch cars drive down a road at night, and it won't take long until you see someone whose headlights are off. I'd wager a lot of the time their car has an automatic headlight mode but they don't have the switch in the right position.
As computer people know from fighting server downtime, if something is important, you monitor whether it's behaving as required, and if it isn't, you alert.
My Model 3 has everything set on auto. If the car can't see, it'll turn the lights on. If it doesn't see an incoming car, it'll turn on the high beams.
After a year of driving it as my only car, I needed a second car and got a cheap ICE clunker. Having to manage lights is a PITA and basically a failure of design.
Dead Comment
Many (all?) modern cars have an auto mode for night lights but it seems to endlessly baffle people as to how they work. At some point it seems you can throw all the UX you want, some are hell bent to skip on being attentive to basic driving safety anyway.
I also see a lot of cars with brights on but no lights. I annoy the people around me by asking them the difference between brights and lights and the answers are very depressing. It seems that many people fiddle with a few buttons until they see light in front of them and then consider everything good.
This seems pretty relevant.