Post-Corona cars are all much brighter. Its gotten so bad that I'm frequently left wondering if people are driving with high beams or just regular new-age lights. Got to wait to see if the person on the other side drops the lights to be sure. SUVs in particular are bad especially during acceleration which points the lights higher and on inclined road. I also regularly "switch" rear-view mirror to dim mode otherwise I'm literally 3-way blinded also from side mirrors. I didn't do any of these things regularly 5y ago. I'm still wondering if this is just automotive industry incompetence of making safe vehicles or an "incentive" to buy a SUV yourself so you don't get blinded all the time.
There are definitely people who don't care to switch between high and low beams when oncoming traffic appears. I was riding in the passenger seat with an ex-coworker the other night, and I noticed he just kept the high beams on the entire time. After a while I asked him, "Why don't you turn the headlights down when there's oncoming traffic?" He looked at me like I just asked the most ridiculous question and said "What do you mean? The high beams are brighter and make it easier for me to see." I reminded him that high beams blind other drivers and he basically said "Fuck them, I don't care and that's their problem if they don't like it." --that seems to be pretty much America's slogan right now. Fuck everyone else, I'm doing what I want.
Maybe mention that head on accidents sometimes happen because a driver target fixates on oncoming headlights. I can't imagine that high beams help with that.
On the way to work today, I made a joke about a full-size truck by mockingly saying "hurr, I drive a big truck to my white collar job to have more mass in an accident because I suck at driving."
My friend (and conveniently coworker) says "by Game Theory he's technically winning."
Then I got more upset because damn it, he's right.
I have a 2021 model vehicle and it has an “auto” setting for headlights, where it turns them on or off automatically depending on if it detects a car in front of them. It’s better latency then I have as a human remembering I have them on and turning them off so I use the feature but it’s definitely not instant and I’ve noticed it fail to detect a few times when there’s obstructions over the sensor like snow or rain.
I assume this wasn’t unique to my $30k model of car and is a common feature now, so might be the cause of the extra brightness
I drove a car with this feature and retroreflective road signs or markers would set it off at night. In the dark of night on a country road, approaching a tight curve and your lights go dim. I've been turning it off ever since.
I like the concept but it's one of those things I struggle to see working practically.
> SUVs in particular are bad especially during acceleration which points the lights higher
Aren't self-leveling headlights standard by now? I think in the EU it was mandatory for Xenon lights, but I don't know whether LED lights are considered differently. My dad's almost 20 yo Citroën had such headlights, even though, thanks to the funky suspension, the car never had dramatic changes in level.
> Aren't self-leveling headlights standard by now?
I don't know, but as a pedestrian & cyclist in the EU, not a day goes by where I don't get blinded by headlights. SUVs are by far the worst offenders, but it's not just SUVs. Most newer cars seem to have the same problem.
Heck, many newer bicycles have a headlight that's offensively bright and often seems aimed directly at my face. It's a sad state of affairs.
Self-leveling usually "one time", or "slowly", as in changes based on the weight on the rear axle. It doesn't work on the timescale of acceleration, braking, cornering, etc.
They might be, but that does not help much, as roads are neither level nor pitched at a constant grade. The attribution of the effect to acceleration might (at least in some cases) be a misdiagnosis of a problem actually caused by a slight longitudinal convexity of the road.
Here in the UK I can't say that we have the same issue - BUT we have far fewer SUVs and lights are regulated far more. You'll fail your yearly MOT (car roadworthiness test) if you have lights that are too bright or misaligned, and I have seen people pulled over in London for having non-standard/too bright lights.
We have a wattage maximum for headlights too. I am under the impression that roadworthiness test and regulations are very different in the states - is that the case?
Yes. The US has excellent national standards (low beams can be 15,000 to 20,000 candela per side), however nearly everything is administered by the states, and only 14 of 50 states have annual safety inspections. It used to be most states, but it was hijacked and used as a racket to steal from customers. Accessory LED lighting (off road) is illegal, but only required to be covered on road in California and Pennsylvania. Additionally, the US also bumper height restrictions that are mostly ignored (except California). Many lifted SUVs and trucks are illegal. That means if your car is t-boned by a lifted SUV you could be struck in the head by the bumper.
It certainly seems like headlights are far brighter in the UK right now, given that they're all LEDs.
Of course it could just be confirmation bias, as I'm getting older and I suppose my eyes gradually deteriorate. I do a lot of night time driving and oncoming traffic is definitely brighter, for me at least, than 20 years ago.
Then there's the fact that old headlights were one bulb, and the mirrored surface behind them was simpler.
Another problem is white light is harsh, and the old incandescent bulbs had a yellow/off white tinge which is easier (the redder the light, the less likely it is to destroy your night vision).
I live in a rural area of Scotland and I don't really have a problem with headlights - 99.9% of drivers dip their full beams when they are aware of you. Now if we could only get people to indicate correctly on roundabouts.... - that's a far bigger peeve of mine than headlights!
While this check exists on paper it is not enforced in any meaningful way and hasn't caught up to modern headlights which to me are simply too bright even when original from the factory.
If I look directly at any headlight they burn into my vision. It makes driving difficult.
Really? I think we have exactly the same problem in the UK. Granted, my eyes are more susceptible post laser surgery, but headlights are definitely getting brighter and higher as the years go by.
- brighter headlights are falsely perceived to be of better quality, or,
- they are but more prevalent because of COVID economic downturn necessitating upsells, or,
- 2019 is simply 5 years ago, or,
- undocumented neurological long-COVID effect is affecting engineers?
- isolation and political polarization concomitant with covid shutdowns accelerated the demise of the social fabric, and generally weakened a prior sense of obligation to others
The majority (>80%) of drivers in my area are permanently on high beam, it wasn't always like this, but has become normalized.
Sure some of it is subjective. I'm a big fan of dark UIs. But the fact is that when I say 3-way blinded my entire car is objectively brightly lit so its definitely not just an eye thing. Happy to hear I'm not the only sensitive person around.
One reason for driving with high beams is one of your headlights is out. Then you turn on your high beams, problem fixed! You'll see it in places with less money, esp where I live in Philly. I would never do it, but that's the reason I've seen and heard from people.
Its not your eyes getting old, it's just that are just more inconsiderate assholes out there now, enabled by newer car models that have a uncomfortably bright high-beams with the worst color temperature for night vision (for both the drivers and their victims).
I wonder if Teslas should be recalled too: all of them are seem too bright, particularly Model Ys.
I have often wondered if my eyes have become more sensitive to car headlights since covid, but it seems I'm not alone in this feeling. I frequently wear glasses with a blue light protective coating while driving on busy roads at night. Interestingly, I find that I don’t need them when the road is empty or when it’s a bright night.
It's bad with cars but even worse with bikes that have flashing or even strobing lights. Busy cycle lanes in London can be horrible on dark winter evenings with all the LED lights that can be incredibly bright and are very often not installed/adjusted/aimed correctly.
I appreciate that cyclists want to make sure they're seen by car drivers, but beaming ultra-bright flashing lights straight into the eyes of oncoming cyclists on a cycle lane surely creates a hazard that outweighs any benefits?!
Yes, American bike lights are totally out of control. They almost all have circular flashlight beams, totally inappropriate for use on the road. If you try to show someone a proper cutoff optic light they will say it's dim because it doesn't blind them with useless near field light.
The only ones I've been able to find are imports from Europe like B+M or Supernova, and a few expensive domestic ones like Outbound Lighting. If you walk into almost any bike shop in America they will have only circular optics that blind everyone.
Blinking lights makes the bicycle driver more visible. When sharing the dark road with cars, this compensates slightly against not being inside a steel cocoon with airbags.
If cities actually invested in safe infrastructure the need for such lights would go away.
Yes, this is a huge problem as well. The lights are so bright, randomly mounted, and as you say, the user can just strobe them if they like. Imagine if car lights were as unregulated.
strobing bike lights are also a horrific health/pain hazard for people who get migraines or have light-triggerable epilepsy. I really wish they'd be banned from sale :(
This irritates me as well. Every vehicle on the road is supposed to have solid white front light and solid red back light, no reason why bicycles should be different. Strobing bright white light directed at the eye sight level is just aggressive and extremely selfish. The manuals usually state that in blinking or strobing mode the lights work longer on one battery charge.
It's really hard to find non-blinding lights for bikes here in the States.
The Germans seem to have a standard (with TUV certification) for it, as of course they do. But we don't get much of that kit here.
(And because search engines are absolutely ruined: Searching for less, like "dim bike light" or "non-blinding" or whatever always winds up with finding more, instead.
"Oh, you're searching for a nice pleasant light that just illuminates the path in front of you at a warm color temperature without blinding anyone? Let me show you the MEGAFUCKER 9000! Powered by 48VDC and over 9000K, this light is guaranteed appear brighter than the sun and to ABSOLUTELY FUCK anyone within a kilometer! /r/fuckcars approved! You always knew you were an asshole, and with the MEGAFUCKER 9000 everyone else will know it too!"
Every single time.
(It's the same with anything else. Want a small, diminutive spatula so a small egg pan can actually be used for cooking instead of wall art? The more specific the search terms are, the bigger the fucking spatulas in the search results become.
Or even industrial or craft materials. Want rigid, open-cell, large-pore foam that doesn't sponge up water for a project? Good luck. Unless you already know exactly what product you need down to the SKU (which one can only glean via telepathy), the search results will consist entirely of opposite-world SUPER-SOFT EXTRA ABSORBENT foam.)
When I grew up we had a heap of rules for bicycle lighting drilled into us (ok not that badly but I remember them for the most part), one of them was the angle of your headlight should be at xyz to not blind other traffic. And that was in the time of bulb lights and dynamos so the lights would've been a lot more gentle anyway. Since then they've slacked the rules by a lot due to the sheer amount of decrepit and new/modern bikes on the road that didn't conform, so now instead of a red rear light and a white section on your rear fender, a shitty 1 euro LED light strapped to the back of your backpack or package carrier is apparently enough. And LED front lights are a thing, often aimed straight ahead for visibility / being able to see further than three meters ahead of you.
I mean I'm guilty myself, got myself a new bike a few years back that has a headlight built into the frame etc.
Bike LED lights tend to strobe when pushing the bike manually, which is very annoying. This is due to technical reasons with the dynamo and LED rather that programmed behavior afaik. But do LED bike lights that attempt to fix this issue (either be off or dim rather that flicker at low speed) exist? It's not a feature typically listed on their product descriptions...
Another option, if the headlights are at eye level, is to move the rear-view mirror so that you see the passenger seat headrest. That makes it the perfect angle to make their headlights reflect right back at them.
If there was one invention that made its way into every car - I wish it would be some kind of oncoming active light dimming / compensation system. Maybe in the glass, or glasses / goggles a driver wears.
What I do now on the highways is point my side mirrors all the way out and flip the rearview mirror. I already have deeply tinted windows.
Of course this doesn't help with oncoming traffic.
Some cars have matrix LED headlights, where the car can turn off the LEDs pointing at oncoming cars, as well as turn the lights when driving around corners.
Here [1] is the VW ID.3. It's subtle, but notice how the area around the other cars is much darker. In real life it's kind of amazing to watch, as you see the LEDs follow the other cars on the road and "erase" them from the light.
> ... I wish it would be some kind of oncoming active light dimming / compensation system.
I think fancy Mercedes models have very advanced stuff like that. IIRC it's even crazier: in addition to compensate in the mirrors/rear-view mirror, they can also detect where another car or pedestrian is and adapt, constantly, precisely how their own beams are projected as to not blind anyone.
EDIT: other manufacturer do it too, it is called "Matrix headlights".
I agree. I've got a Porsche Panamera and the headlights are too bright. At times people flash their headlights at me, thinking I've got my high-beams on: I then cannot do much else then quickly flash back the real high-beams to mean "sorry mate, no, these were the regular beams, THAT is the high-beams so stop flashing at me".
Now even the regular beams they sure do work fine (the car even does fancy stuff as lighting the interior of a turn when you take a sharp turn at night) but honestly I find many cars, including mine, have headlights to bright.
Worse: on these new cars with super fancy headlights if I'm not mistaken you cannot even configure where they aim at anymore. It's all automated. It used to be the case on older cars where it was easy to configure and you could aim the regular beam moderately low as to be sure to not annoy anyone.
I don't bother flashing at people anymore because I figured out they may simply have a car where the regular beams are simply too bright too.
Just in case - have you tried directing the beams down a bit? Not sure what the situation is on that model but there is a dial to the right of my wheel (right hand drive) which controls for this. Maybe worth investigating if you have something similar
We don't need automatic adjustment. The lights never needed to be this bright. Ultra-bright lights are not solving a real problem. People think brighter == better, but it really doesn't help whatsoever. It's an emotional salve.
> Due to a software data set error, the affected vehicles were programmed from the factory after the Economic Commission for Europe (ECE) specs, whereas U.S.-spec vehicles need to conform to the requirements of the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS).
Presumably, if there were a way for the headlights to comply with both US and EU regulations, they'd just have them be that way everywhere, rather than having to deal with multiple configurations at all. So are the US and EU both saying that each other's way is wrong and too dangerous?
There are some notable value judgements that are different between US and EU regulations.
I remember reading that the US car safety rules generally assume that the people in the car do not follow the rules, whereas EU regulations assume they follow the law and use seatbelts.
US crash safety tests don’t care about the damage the car does to pedestrians, but EU regulations do factor that in.
> US car safety rules generally assume that the people in the car do not follow the rules
> US crash safety tests don’t care about the damage the car does to pedestrians
As a EU citizen living in the US, this makes perfect sense.
The quality of driving here is far lower, I often see vehicles without plates or temp tags and it's not unusual to hear about uninsured drivers hitting people.
It's ironic that such a car centric country naturally ends up with terrible drivers because of the low barrier to entry.
Pedestrian safety is one of the reasons it will be hard to ever sell the Cybertruck in Europe without significant modification. People who have imported them themselves have had to fit rubber strips on all the sharp edges, and I'd imagine that if they were to sell them locally the rules would be even more strict. The shape is inherently dangerous to pedestrians, particularly children.
>> whereas EU regulations assume they follow the law
That isn't generally true as the EU favors driver assist technologies such as automatic emergency braking, lane departure warning, and speed limiter features.
Since the brightness seems to be the issue, the only way I his makes sense to me is:
The US limits the brightness to X, the EU limits the brightness to Y, and Y > X.
Porsche could just make every car globally use X, but they’re a luxury brand so they probably try to use Y where they can, even if it is a bit of work to differentiate between markets.
It's a significant difference. I doubt any manufacturer would want to limit their European vehicles to the American maximum:
> European lighting standards (UNECE) allow over two times the light output from high beam headlight systems as compared to the U.S. (Broertjes, 2018). U.S. compliant systems allow a vehicle maximum of 150,000 candela while European compliant systems allow a vehicle maximum of 430,000 candela (Official Journal of the European Union, 2018). This provides for gains in sight distance, but also increases the potential for glare to affect oncoming and preceding traffic when high beams are not dimmed.
And
> 3. European specification systems consistently provided more roadway lighting when an oncoming vehicle was approaching, or a preceding vehicle was close.
> a. Based on static target illumination data, the increase in roadway lighting could be as much as 86 percent (comparison of average European specification high beam to U.S. specification low
beam).
Brightness of two headlights is not a single floating point number.
There are regulations governing the spread/angle, the minimum brightness, the maximum brightness, how much an object at X distance is illuminated, whether the angle of the beams is too bright in the vision of oncoming drivers, etc.
This recall is for the high-beams. And yes, the EU allows brighter high-beams than the US.
This seems to be the extent of the recall. But there are other differences between the EU and US. For example, on what the headlights are illuminating. US headlights shine more light off to the right of the vehicle than EU and I think it is due to the assumption that roadside signs are more often lit via headlights/refection in the US vs sign-mounted lighting in the EU.
I think most people agree that EU regulations allow for significantly better headlights than US regulations allow. But those better headlights must be paired with an expensive adaptive system or they become terribly dangerous. If you compare "cheap car" headlights in the US vs EU they are probably very similar in performance.
Porsche is also based in the EU so starting with a design that meets EU specs and then adjusting export models as needed is probably their procedure anyway
Bear in mind that matrix lights are the norm in EU on high end cars while in US they are prohibited. I bet that explains the brightness: you can have overly bright lights if they are matrix while obviously that would be detrimental in regular headlights.
But also, since it's a software-addressable issue, and because this process is likely such a headache, I wonder if in a couple of years they'll have a version that picks its headlight configuration based on your location. You'll drive over a border at night and do a slight double-take as your lights change their beam width or something.
Presumably, if there were a way for the headlights to comply with both US and EU regulations, they'd just have them be that way everywhere...
Unless someone in the marketing department has determined that headlight brightness is a selling point for 0.001% of customers, in which case they'd configure them to the maximum allowed in the region.
>So are the US and EU both saying that each other's way is wrong and too dangerous?
Real life disagreements on minor technicalities between competing bureaucracies are not zero sum or conducted in breathless hand wringing internet rhetoric. It's more like a disagreement on a FOSS mailing list.
I believe EU allows directionally controllable projector headlights (my description, I don't know the official name). These can be brighter because they can be directed away from oncoming traffic. The US, in contrast, is lagging in approving this technology and puts an absolute limit on the brightness.
I'm not surprised there's a disagreement. I'm surprised the disagreement is both sides saying "our way is safer", rather than it being one side saying "this safety benefit isn't worth it" and the other saying "yes it is".
The default 'height' of the Tesla Model Y headlights make it appear to be bright lights by default. I live in the DC metro area, and buses (who are typically folks that drive a lot) would constantly flash me to let me know they thought my brights were on.
You can go into the car's settings and lower the headlights, but because of where it is by default, it presents a dangerous situation for other cars. How many non-tech folks would know to even search for this option?
I had to do the same with my 3 when I got it years back. Now people also get confused when I have my fog lights on (but that’s rare given how annoying difficult it is to find the setting on a touchscreen while driving). Actually calibrating the lights angle should be done at the factory (or prior to delivery), but mine were definitely too high.
But I think in general (and with other cars too), the problem isn’t the brightness of lights, but their angle. Bit even with my lights lowered, if I’m at a stop light that is on a slight hill, that still can cause the angle of my lights to appear to someone on the other side as too bright.
Was buying a new car headlight last year and the sales associate pointed me to replace my halogen bulbs with new (more expensive) LED "fog lights", but they were clearly labelled "not legal for use on public roads". I wonder how many people get upsold on headlights which are actually illegally bright and never notice.
OSRAM has now made an LED retrofit kit for halogen reflectors that is approved and road legal everywhere in the EU - it's just very expensive for the time being, I'd have a hard time justifying it.
That's not correct. Projector headlights can still be used with LEDs and pattern will be correct. Reflector units aren't compatible. Halogen->LED like Halogen->Xenon isn't allowed in Europe if a car doesn't have automatic levelling and headlight washers.
The most annoying thing for me is the "blue fringe" on a lot of modern headlights that use lenses to refract and focus the light. These lenses aren't the best and have chromatic aberration, resulting in a fringe of blue light at the top of the beam.
Result: people see flashing blue(-ish) light in their rear view mirror. Not a good thing, very distracting!
I had this the worst the other day. A car was following me and I kept thinking there was an emergency vehicle behind because I could see the blue fringe.
The worst thing about all these lights is they aren't static. For a start I can see the LEDs flickering, presumably due to PWM. Why a fully DC circuit that doesn't even dim the bulbs needs to use PWM is beyond me. But the worst is their "clever" auto levelling and dipping etc. It just looks like the light is constantly in flux which is really distracting and annoying.
Always interesting about how people get angry about headlights in the USA.
Being from Europe, the European ones are superior. They go further and they are brighter, and have a different cut-off: ECE vs DOT: https://i.ibb.co/ryf8W0w/dotece.jpg
When I lived in Europe (Belgium) every year the beam height was checked on my car. That way I wouldn't blind people when driving behind them.
Here in there US there are no such things, yet cars often enough get headlights replaced which aren't adjusted afterwards. Or people install a lift-kit which hasn't been taken into account when designing the vehicle.
Now I wonder if the Macan has different lights in the US vs ROW, as the cut-off isn't something that is easily changeable, and it would massively increase the cost for something that is never activated.
But having the same bulbs makes sense.
That said, I looked into replacing the headlights on mine, but then you end up with a Frankenstein's monster car, as parts of it are US coded, and parts EU. I did get EU mirrors.
> Being from Europe, the European ones are superior. They go further and they are brighter
Driving in Europe, I get constantly blinded by french cars and their headlights.
Those headlights are just way too bright, combined with shitty engineering. The automatic ones don't turn off fast enough. Then you have people blinking at approaching cars to trigger that sensor. Many drivers don't bother manually turning them off, on some cars the headlights are still controlled by a rotary switch that requires you to take your hands off the steering wheel, while on others the auto-headlights aren't easy to re-enable if you had to manually turn them off once so people don't bother turning them off at all.
No they aren't. Driving on the roads in continental Europe I see it all. LED lights with blue glare, road beams with strength of high beams, adaptive strobing LED/laser headlights, adaptive LED/laser headlights scanning surroundings with top-down bright horizontal line, badly adjusted headlights directed and the eyesight level. Includes brand new unmodified cars.
High beams are becoming some kind of weapon here in the EU. You have red spots and lines for some time when you happen to encounter a Porsche SUV heading your way angrily flashing at the one in front of them. What‘s next? Lasers? They are just too powerful.
1) indicators ( eu flashing yellow ones) are getting smaller: ok at night, but during the day...very hard to see. I prefer the US red brake/ blinker to these tiny mf's.
*2 Animated (EU only?) yellow indicators. The transition between each segment (usually five?) is always too slow, and very distracting. I prefer the US, and very terrible, blinky-brake lights to these disco-on-xanax horrors.
3. Why can’t there be a sign for 'zippering' where traffic merges?
Because people still think they're somehow going to arrive 30min faster by not merging one-by-one, ignoring the fact that by not letting others in they're actively slowing all other traffic down. Then have all other nervous drivers looking for the first opportunity to cut someone off because they're not going to be able to merge otherwise and you end up with all those crashes near the ends of merge lanes. It's a driving culture issue, varies by country.
Not quite. Despite the branding they’re using SLDs (Super Luminescent Diode). Sits between diode lasers and LEDs in terms of power, coherence, and bandwidth.
Readit News
> Peggy: I don't know why everyone doesn't drive with their high beams on. You see so much better.
[1] http://tviv.org/King_of_the_Hill/The_Peggy_Horror_Picture_Sh...
Since moving to the US and driving here, I've suspected people have this attitude, but this is the first time I've encountered confirmation.
My friend (and conveniently coworker) says "by Game Theory he's technically winning."
Then I got more upset because damn it, he's right.
I have a 2021 model vehicle and it has an “auto” setting for headlights, where it turns them on or off automatically depending on if it detects a car in front of them. It’s better latency then I have as a human remembering I have them on and turning them off so I use the feature but it’s definitely not instant and I’ve noticed it fail to detect a few times when there’s obstructions over the sensor like snow or rain.
I assume this wasn’t unique to my $30k model of car and is a common feature now, so might be the cause of the extra brightness
I like the concept but it's one of those things I struggle to see working practically.
Aren't self-leveling headlights standard by now? I think in the EU it was mandatory for Xenon lights, but I don't know whether LED lights are considered differently. My dad's almost 20 yo Citroën had such headlights, even though, thanks to the funky suspension, the car never had dramatic changes in level.
I don't know, but as a pedestrian & cyclist in the EU, not a day goes by where I don't get blinded by headlights. SUVs are by far the worst offenders, but it's not just SUVs. Most newer cars seem to have the same problem.
Heck, many newer bicycles have a headlight that's offensively bright and often seems aimed directly at my face. It's a sad state of affairs.
We have a wattage maximum for headlights too. I am under the impression that roadworthiness test and regulations are very different in the states - is that the case?
Of course it could just be confirmation bias, as I'm getting older and I suppose my eyes gradually deteriorate. I do a lot of night time driving and oncoming traffic is definitely brighter, for me at least, than 20 years ago.
Then there's the fact that old headlights were one bulb, and the mirrored surface behind them was simpler.
Another problem is white light is harsh, and the old incandescent bulbs had a yellow/off white tinge which is easier (the redder the light, the less likely it is to destroy your night vision).
If I look directly at any headlight they burn into my vision. It makes driving difficult.
Are you sure it’s not a luminance maximum?
LED lights can be much brighter at the same wattage vs. incandescent lights.
I wonder if Teslas should be recalled too: all of them are seem too bright, particularly Model Ys.
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When I learned how to drive, my mom showed me how the headlights turned on and off. If you didn’t turn them off, the car died.
The automation has made light management a very second thought.
My friend didn’t know what the blue high beam icon on the dash was. I blame the automatic light feature.
I appreciate that cyclists want to make sure they're seen by car drivers, but beaming ultra-bright flashing lights straight into the eyes of oncoming cyclists on a cycle lane surely creates a hazard that outweighs any benefits?!
The only ones I've been able to find are imports from Europe like B+M or Supernova, and a few expensive domestic ones like Outbound Lighting. If you walk into almost any bike shop in America they will have only circular optics that blind everyone.
If cities actually invested in safe infrastructure the need for such lights would go away.
https://www.bikeradar.com/advice/buyers-guides/stvzo-bike-li...
I’ve got a slightly dimmer light on my helmet that is great for getting people’s attention when they’re just not looking for bikes.
The Germans seem to have a standard (with TUV certification) for it, as of course they do. But we don't get much of that kit here.
(And because search engines are absolutely ruined: Searching for less, like "dim bike light" or "non-blinding" or whatever always winds up with finding more, instead.
"Oh, you're searching for a nice pleasant light that just illuminates the path in front of you at a warm color temperature without blinding anyone? Let me show you the MEGAFUCKER 9000! Powered by 48VDC and over 9000K, this light is guaranteed appear brighter than the sun and to ABSOLUTELY FUCK anyone within a kilometer! /r/fuckcars approved! You always knew you were an asshole, and with the MEGAFUCKER 9000 everyone else will know it too!"
Every single time.
(It's the same with anything else. Want a small, diminutive spatula so a small egg pan can actually be used for cooking instead of wall art? The more specific the search terms are, the bigger the fucking spatulas in the search results become.
Or even industrial or craft materials. Want rigid, open-cell, large-pore foam that doesn't sponge up water for a project? Good luck. Unless you already know exactly what product you need down to the SKU (which one can only glean via telepathy), the search results will consist entirely of opposite-world SUPER-SOFT EXTRA ABSORBENT foam.)
I get having bright lights, but try and angle them slightly downwards at least.
I mean I'm guilty myself, got myself a new bike a few years back that has a headlight built into the frame etc.
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What I do now on the highways is point my side mirrors all the way out and flip the rearview mirror. I already have deeply tinted windows.
Of course this doesn't help with oncoming traffic.
Here [1] is the VW ID.3. It's subtle, but notice how the area around the other cars is much darker. In real life it's kind of amazing to watch, as you see the LEDs follow the other cars on the road and "erase" them from the light.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFH0URtbX1s
I think fancy Mercedes models have very advanced stuff like that. IIRC it's even crazier: in addition to compensate in the mirrors/rear-view mirror, they can also detect where another car or pedestrian is and adapt, constantly, precisely how their own beams are projected as to not blind anyone.
EDIT: other manufacturer do it too, it is called "Matrix headlights".
[1] https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_sg/GUID-1C20964...
Now even the regular beams they sure do work fine (the car even does fancy stuff as lighting the interior of a turn when you take a sharp turn at night) but honestly I find many cars, including mine, have headlights to bright.
Worse: on these new cars with super fancy headlights if I'm not mistaken you cannot even configure where they aim at anymore. It's all automated. It used to be the case on older cars where it was easy to configure and you could aim the regular beam moderately low as to be sure to not annoy anyone.
I don't bother flashing at people anymore because I figured out they may simply have a car where the regular beams are simply too bright too.
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Heads should have rolled years ago when the problem became glaringly obvious.
> Due to a software data set error, the affected vehicles were programmed from the factory after the Economic Commission for Europe (ECE) specs, whereas U.S.-spec vehicles need to conform to the requirements of the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS).
Presumably, if there were a way for the headlights to comply with both US and EU regulations, they'd just have them be that way everywhere, rather than having to deal with multiple configurations at all. So are the US and EU both saying that each other's way is wrong and too dangerous?
I remember reading that the US car safety rules generally assume that the people in the car do not follow the rules, whereas EU regulations assume they follow the law and use seatbelts.
US crash safety tests don’t care about the damage the car does to pedestrians, but EU regulations do factor that in.
https://www.npr.org/2015/10/16/449090584/why-arent-auto-safe...
As a EU citizen living in the US, this makes perfect sense.
The quality of driving here is far lower, I often see vehicles without plates or temp tags and it's not unusual to hear about uninsured drivers hitting people.
It's ironic that such a car centric country naturally ends up with terrible drivers because of the low barrier to entry.
That isn't generally true as the EU favors driver assist technologies such as automatic emergency braking, lane departure warning, and speed limiter features.
The US limits the brightness to X, the EU limits the brightness to Y, and Y > X.
Porsche could just make every car globally use X, but they’re a luxury brand so they probably try to use Y where they can, even if it is a bit of work to differentiate between markets.
> European lighting standards (UNECE) allow over two times the light output from high beam headlight systems as compared to the U.S. (Broertjes, 2018). U.S. compliant systems allow a vehicle maximum of 150,000 candela while European compliant systems allow a vehicle maximum of 430,000 candela (Official Journal of the European Union, 2018). This provides for gains in sight distance, but also increases the potential for glare to affect oncoming and preceding traffic when high beams are not dimmed.
And
> 3. European specification systems consistently provided more roadway lighting when an oncoming vehicle was approaching, or a preceding vehicle was close.
> a. Based on static target illumination data, the increase in roadway lighting could be as much as 86 percent (comparison of average European specification high beam to U.S. specification low beam).
https://www.aaa.com/AAA/common/AAR/files/ResearchReportEuroS... (scroll to at least page 19-20 for illuminating illustrations).
There are regulations governing the spread/angle, the minimum brightness, the maximum brightness, how much an object at X distance is illuminated, whether the angle of the beams is too bright in the vision of oncoming drivers, etc.
This seems to be the extent of the recall. But there are other differences between the EU and US. For example, on what the headlights are illuminating. US headlights shine more light off to the right of the vehicle than EU and I think it is due to the assumption that roadside signs are more often lit via headlights/refection in the US vs sign-mounted lighting in the EU.
I think most people agree that EU regulations allow for significantly better headlights than US regulations allow. But those better headlights must be paired with an expensive adaptive system or they become terribly dangerous. If you compare "cheap car" headlights in the US vs EU they are probably very similar in performance.
This has subsequently changed: https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/nhtsa-allow-adaptive-dr...
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Unless someone in the marketing department has determined that headlight brightness is a selling point for 0.001% of customers, in which case they'd configure them to the maximum allowed in the region.
Real life disagreements on minor technicalities between competing bureaucracies are not zero sum or conducted in breathless hand wringing internet rhetoric. It's more like a disagreement on a FOSS mailing list.
You can go into the car's settings and lower the headlights, but because of where it is by default, it presents a dangerous situation for other cars. How many non-tech folks would know to even search for this option?
https://service.tesla.com/docs/Model3/ServiceManual/en-us/GU...
But I think in general (and with other cars too), the problem isn’t the brightness of lights, but their angle. Bit even with my lights lowered, if I’m at a stop light that is on a slight hill, that still can cause the angle of my lights to appear to someone on the other side as too bright.
https://www.osram.com/ecat/NIGHT%20BREAKER%20H4-LED-LED%20hi...
Result: people see flashing blue(-ish) light in their rear view mirror. Not a good thing, very distracting!
The worst thing about all these lights is they aren't static. For a start I can see the LEDs flickering, presumably due to PWM. Why a fully DC circuit that doesn't even dim the bulbs needs to use PWM is beyond me. But the worst is their "clever" auto levelling and dipping etc. It just looks like the light is constantly in flux which is really distracting and annoying.
Being from Europe, the European ones are superior. They go further and they are brighter, and have a different cut-off: ECE vs DOT: https://i.ibb.co/ryf8W0w/dotece.jpg
When I lived in Europe (Belgium) every year the beam height was checked on my car. That way I wouldn't blind people when driving behind them.
Here in there US there are no such things, yet cars often enough get headlights replaced which aren't adjusted afterwards. Or people install a lift-kit which hasn't been taken into account when designing the vehicle.
Now I wonder if the Macan has different lights in the US vs ROW, as the cut-off isn't something that is easily changeable, and it would massively increase the cost for something that is never activated.
But having the same bulbs makes sense.
That said, I looked into replacing the headlights on mine, but then you end up with a Frankenstein's monster car, as parts of it are US coded, and parts EU. I did get EU mirrors.
Driving in Europe, I get constantly blinded by french cars and their headlights.
Those headlights are just way too bright, combined with shitty engineering. The automatic ones don't turn off fast enough. Then you have people blinking at approaching cars to trigger that sensor. Many drivers don't bother manually turning them off, on some cars the headlights are still controlled by a rotary switch that requires you to take your hands off the steering wheel, while on others the auto-headlights aren't easy to re-enable if you had to manually turn them off once so people don't bother turning them off at all.
No they aren't. Driving on the roads in continental Europe I see it all. LED lights with blue glare, road beams with strength of high beams, adaptive strobing LED/laser headlights, adaptive LED/laser headlights scanning surroundings with top-down bright horizontal line, badly adjusted headlights directed and the eyesight level. Includes brand new unmodified cars.
Related:
1) indicators ( eu flashing yellow ones) are getting smaller: ok at night, but during the day...very hard to see. I prefer the US red brake/ blinker to these tiny mf's.
*2 Animated (EU only?) yellow indicators. The transition between each segment (usually five?) is always too slow, and very distracting. I prefer the US, and very terrible, blinky-brake lights to these disco-on-xanax horrors.
3. Why can’t there be a sign for 'zippering' where traffic merges?
4 - Why can’t people just zipper-in anyway?
Completely agree. If I buy a new car, I will ask if it is possible to turn these off out of respect for other drivers!
Because people still think they're somehow going to arrive 30min faster by not merging one-by-one, ignoring the fact that by not letting others in they're actively slowing all other traffic down. Then have all other nervous drivers looking for the first opportunity to cut someone off because they're not going to be able to merge otherwise and you end up with all those crashes near the ends of merge lanes. It's a driving culture issue, varies by country.
Yes!
https://www.kyocera-sldlaser.com/bright-solutions/automotive
Still obnoxious to use on the road.
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