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.
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.
> 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
>
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.
>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.
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?
> 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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
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!
Thankfully it was easy to adjust.
Maybe Corey Hart had the right idea … sunglasses at night
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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?
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...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xgh2zbifn7E
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.
It's another example of a company not considering the effects of their actions
https://www.reddit.com/r/Tiguan/comments/1hq2hae/changed_ove...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
edit spelling
Turn on your fog lights? At least in my 2018 M3, they illuminate the sides as well.
I believe this is intentional to avoid blinding oncoming traffic and pedestrians
I can drive all night long with no strain or issue, unless I have a flashlight glaring in my eyes.
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.
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.
You were in a normal car, and the SUV manufacturer has mounted the lights higher just for aesthetic reasons.
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?
https://www.bmw.com/en/innovation/dr-hanafi-and-the-bmw-lase...
I assume regulation prevents the dynamic lighting from including the low beam section.
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casua...
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.
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.
You're all driving on the wrong side of the road, what are you even talking about? /s
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.
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.
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.
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.
I feel awful about essentially high-beaming everyone unless the road is flat.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
[1] https://www.theringer.com/2024/12/03/tech/headlight-brightne...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42443406
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.
[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
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.
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.
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.
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
You really don't need the bright lights. You never have. Slow down, look for movement, and use your brights intelligently.
It’s the car drivers responsibility to not mow pedestrians down wherever or whenever they are walking.
Then we have pedestrians walking with no sidewalks or crosswalks, because city planning actively hostile to people walking.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I still also agree headlights are too bright, by the way, but I'm just providing an example for your question
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.
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
I'm quite thankful for bright headlights.
You're not wrong, but it's a minor contribution at most.
I don't think it happened through any plan, if anyone was looking at the specs, they probably just thought "bigger number better".
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.
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.
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.
So I can see a powerful motivation to fit bright headlights in the cars, regardless of the other's comfort.
I have never bought a car with extreme bright headlights, and I never will.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Usually bright headlights / highbeams are useful in there.
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.
Animals and pedestrians (along with pot holes) are the prime reason.
(I'll give you other animals though.)
Marketing.
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.
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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.
Public roads are not race tracks; they are for people.
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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.