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!
I have become an aggressive counter-flasher. This has yielded in some cases new knowledge - that the low beams of a lot of cars these days look like high beams (indicated when they flash back, and it's the brightness of a thousand suns).
For those behind me, I've discovered that my side mirror has an angle where it reliably bounces the beams back. I've gotten more than a couple of drivers to turn their beams down with this method (but they have to be tailgating for it to work, which usually means we're already in an adversarial situation).
Haha I've also angled my side mirror out of my eyes, which incidentally is back towards the car behind me. I of course angle it back if I need to change lanes, but it's such an annoying thing I have to do just to see the road ahead of me.
At this point I put full blame on car manufacturers and lack of government regulation and enforcement. Lights will keep getting brighter because lights are getting brighter. It's a death spiral.
My rear view mirror does this, I wish my side mirrors did too. Although recently I've noticed some cars headlights can even pierce my rear view mirror's polarized dimming. It never used to be a problem in the past. I've seen the difference when drivers turn their high beams on and off. It always did a great job against driver's brights including large trucks. But occasionally there's now a vehicle with the light of a thousand suns that is too bright for the auto-dimming.
Maybe this ought to indicate to you that your low beams are blinding other drivers dangerously.
If you have OEM headlights, I can understand your frustration - neither you nor the other driver has control over that. I think this is what OP posted this whole thread about.
If, however, you've installed third-party LED headlights, then you're sort of on the hook for this.
I'd add that whoever it was that 'incorrectly' flashed you is long gone by the time you're leaving the highs on and blinding everyone in your path. That's aggressive and uncalled for.
… or a steerable corner-cube array or retroreflector prism. Steerable in that it needs to slightly redirect its reflection to above the light source—to the windshield area of the offending vehicle—rather than exactly back to the light source.
I might just be getting old, but more and more I see people not using indicators and not understanding the rules of junctions. Tail gating also really annoying.
I was in a mates car recently and it scared the hell out of me, he was tail gating for most of a 3 hour journey. Eventually we got to a bit with chevrons and he wasn't obeying the rule staying N chevrons away from the car in front. I told him and he replied "nonsense, my car beeps if I'm too close to the car in front" I didn't have the energy to point out that is a collision warning not a safe distance measurer type device.
The recommended 3 second gap is a much bigger distance than most people recognise, especially at high speed.
On another note- I feel sad that you could tell your mate "the way you're driving is making me uncomfortable" and be met with basically "your discomfort isn't valid because [technology] so I won't change my behaviour".
As someone who continues to mask in public shared-air settings for my own health, I am entirely unsurprised by that response and get it all the time.
Recently heard from a friend that also continues to mask when sharing air, they had arranged car pooling for one of their children. And just this morning the other parent texted saying "your child wearing a mask makes me uncomfortable so we can no longer car pool".
So … yeah. Entirely unsurprised by that attitude. "Every person for themselves but also not if it's something I personally dislike."
Not in a way meaningful to assessing infectious risk, no.
I consider outdoor air to be unshared, except in cases of large dense crowds (such as say outdoor festivals or sporting events).
I consider risky shared air to be indoor air with one or more other individuals that are not known to be taking infection-prevention precautions.
One can measure CO₂ as a proxy to rebreathed air fraction.
For example, a CO₂ reading of 2300ppm (common in a small or medium room with a few others, or larger rooms with a crowd or conference room, or in a car) means 5% of your air is rebreathed (5% of your intake is output from another person's lungs).
A way to think about this is we take ~20 breaths a minute on average. So in that scenario, it would be equivalent to one breath every minute coming directly from someone else's lungs. If they happen to be contagious with an airborne contagion (such as Covid, or influenza, or RSV), there's a high likelihood that you will catch it if you're spending more than a short time in that environment.
There are nuances, such as maybe the air is being scrubbed (eg by a HEPA filter) which won't affect the CO₂ levels but will drastically lower the infectious risk of that environment.
> One can measure CO₂ as a proxy to rebreathed air fraction.
On this topic, I got a CO₂ meter fairly recently and was shocked how quickly it spikes with a couple of people in a car with the windows up and on recirculate. Easily over 2000 after a few minutes. I have to remind myself regularly when it's really hot or cold outside to keep the vent setting on fresh air.
I had a Jaguar that had an air quality sensor that would switch to recirc based on particulates and then back to fresh air when the threshold indicated.
Not sure why you'd ask me that vs. use Google, feels like cornering a random driver to defend "Why do you use seatbelts?".
But I'll offer one reply at your word that it's genuine and not passive-aggressive.
1. I am currently dealing with the after-effects of a previous Covid infection that requires expensive, ongoing medical treatment. I'm not anxious to test what additional infections may cause.
2. Wearing an N95 respirator is a cheap and easy preventative measure that is highly effective.
3. I adjust my habits based on measured risk. In my part of the world (Alberta), the current risk forecast for November 8-21 is that approximately 1 in every 81 people are currently infected with Covid. I relax my masking when it's 1 in 10,000 or less (which is not an unreasonable number; it's been there in the past).
4. Recent medical studies suggest that repeated Covid exposure is particularly harmful for children. Long Covid is now the #1 chronic condition in children in the US (displacing asthma as the top chronic childhood condition). As a parent, I see it as my responsibility to give my children the best chance at a long, healthy, medical-intervention-free life.
Thanks for sharing. I tend to think people wearing masks these days are a little loony, but these are solid reasons for specific cases and environments. I wouldn't shun someone because they're wearing a mask, though. It seems like a significant discomfort so I don't partake (and I get sick extremely rarely and stay home those few times).
I genuinely didn't think to use Google for this. I had no idea about the list of reasons. It wasn't passive aggressive, I was curious. Thanks for sharing this.
It's nice to see that my family is not alone in taking these precautions.
However as with the bright headlamps, there's no real solution coming anytime soon. I mean there are solutions - nasal vaccines and proper NHTSA regulation, but I have no hope in any of those to materialize.
I'm not here to debate the scientific evidence; labelling well-researched peer-reviewed studies as "paranoia" (your words, before editing your reply) because you don't like the outcome is absolutely your choice, and tells me there's little chance any reasoned reply will be meaningful as you've made up your mind.
For others that might be curious:
Your anecdote around acute infection recovery makes the common mistake of confusing acute infection (the period where you "feel sick") with long-term systemic (post-acute) symptoms.
The typical influenza (flu) only has an acute phase; once you're done "feeling sick", the virus has been eradicated from your body. And unfortunately, many talking heads keep repeating "Covid is now just like the flu" which ignores long-term consequences of repeated Covid infection, which does not behave like the flu (it is not an acute-phase only illness).
And this isn't unique to Covid, viruses with post-acute phases are well known and well studied:
- HIV is the acute phase that (years later) leads to AIDS;
- Epstein-Barr virus (EBV, or "mono") is a herpes-family virus that goes dormant after the acute phase and often later triggers ME/CFS
- Herpes virus in the form of chickenpox goes dormant after the acute phase and frequently later leads to shingles;
- and many others; Google is your friend.
Distinguishing between viruses that have acute-only vs. post-acute phases is a key input to my personal risk assessment stance. I value having as long and healthy a life as I can.
And just as I have, you're free to decide what risk tolerance you're comfortable with for your lifestyle and longevity goals. If you require the extra adrenaline kick of feeling morally superior by publicly passing judgement upon others' choices, have at it — genuinely! — and I hope you find all the missing joy you need.
> I'm not here to debate the scientific evidence; labelling well-researched peer-reviewed studies as "paranoia" (your words, before editing your reply) because you don't like the outcome is absolutely your choice, and tells me there's little chance any reasoned reply will be meaningful as you've made up your mind.
A web page about why people are still wearing masks when the risks to most people is extremely low is paranoia and is not "well research peer-reviewed studies". It is people cherry picking things because to justify their own neurosis.
As I said I've had to deal with someone that behaves exactly like you do for my entire life. I hope your children don't resent you for it, because I still have a hard time dealing with my mother as a result.
You are doing exactly the same thing as she does. Whenever anyone points out that she is being paranoid (which is everyone because she is), she will just get angry and demand you do it. Which is pretty much what you did here.
> Your anecdote around acute infection recovery makes the common mistake of confusing acute infection (the period where you "feel sick") with long-term systemic (post-acute) symptoms.
The vast majority of people do not suffer this with COVID.
> The typical influenza (flu) only has an acute phase; once you're done "feeling sick", the virus has been eradicated from your body. And unfortunately, many talking heads keep repeating "Covid is now just like the flu" which ignores long-term consequences of repeated Covid infection, which does not behave like the flu (it is not an acute-phase only illness).
For the vast majority of people they get it, they recover from it and they get on with life.
> Google is your friend.
It is actually better to talk to a medical professional. As they actually know what they are talking about.
> And just as I have, you're free to decide what risk tolerance you're comfortable with for your lifestyle and longevity goals. If you require the extra adrenaline kick of feeling morally superior by publicly passing judgement upon others' choices, have at it — genuinely! — and I hope you find all the missing joy you need.
That is what you did and are continuing to do. You are the one who likened it to seatbelts that have a tangible and demonstrable safety record to a virus that often most people catch and shake off after a week. It allows you to feel morally superior and every reply you've written so far is essentially nothing more than morally grandstanding.
> The vast majority of people do not suffer this with COVID.
How do you know? The vast majority of people don't check. (The plural of anecdote is not data.)
> As I said I've had to deal with someone that behaves exactly like you do for my entire life.
Baseless worry and justified concern are behaviourally quite similar, apart from the actual existence of the phenomenon that is the subject of concern. Identifying a behavioural similarity does not help you distinguish between legitimate risk and hypochondria.
> I skimmed read a bit of this (pretty sure I've read it before a few years ago). This is all Germaphobe logic.
Worse, that page is AI slop. There are good reasons for some people to wear masks. You won't find them on that page, at least not as believable arguments.
That page has existed in one form or another for quite some time. I don't believe there's any AI slop in the substance of the content or arguments, and the rationale is presented in a balanced way.
In fact, the section "Are you going to wear a mask forever?" speaks directly to the OP's asking why I wear masks, and their short answer, that "masks are a tool we can use when and where it makes sense—especially indoors, in poorly ventilated areas, or when community transmission is high." is, if anything, a more concise version of my longer reply at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45973239.
The WHN has a very distinguished set of experts that review and vouch for the content on the site (https://whn.global/meet-our-team/).
I'm sure there are even better sources out there, but as I was looking to answer an inquiry without taking on excessive personal research time, I felt this was a good summary article. If you have a better source from a similarly credentialed team, I look forward to reading it!
I don't know what to tell you, man. It's classic ChatGPT output, with its weird italics, sometimes-bolded bullet point headers, oddly placed and oddly frequent em dashes, and generally really distinct voice. I didn't recognize it until I started to use ChatGPT myself, and now I see it everywhere.
I also distrust it immediately, because I know how often ChatGPT bullshits me, so I can't help but assume it's bullshitting here too.
You keep attacking the layout and formatting of the article, and not the substance.
Maybe this article works better for you, and if not, I'm sure you're just as capable at using Google as I am. There are many other high-quality studies that cover this topic in exhaustive detail.
This is an FAQ where each entry has a TL;DR. For question 9 in particular, the list consists of items and explanation, where the author chose to use <ul> / <strong> instead of <dl> / <dt> / <dd>. This is one of the situations where the "sometimes-bolded bullet point headers" formatting is appropriate. (The most semantically-correct formatting would be paragraph headings, as seen in LaTeX; but HTML doesn't have these.)
The <em> tag is used to indicate stress emphasis. This is the intended purpose for which the tag was added to HTML, not "weird italics". (I type by transcribing my speech, so I tend to overuse this: one of my editing passes is removing unnecessary <em>s.) This article only contains 9 <em>s in 10 questions: of these, I'd remove the emphasis from two of three "well-fitted masks", and reduce the other to just "well-fitted".
Unspaced em-dashes are often used to offset parentheticals – though I prefer spaced en-dashes myself – and these are both long-standing conventions (see https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E2%80%94). Parenthetical dashes are common in formal writing, and this is formal writing.
As someone who frequently wrote in more-or-less this style (where appropriate) before GPT-1 was even made, who's also fairly decent at spotting ChatGPT output, I don't think this is ChatGPT at all. Apart from superficial formatting considerations, it's not the distinctive ChatGPT voice; and the most distinctive part of ChatGPT output is its inappropriate use of voice and formatting, whereas all of these stylistic choices are easily-justified. Perhaps most importantly, it actually says something.
I was with a friend who was driving and he literally said that the car in front of him was driving fairly close to him. I have a funny bumper magnet that says "sorry for driving so close in front of you" that mocks this inversion of cause.
Yes on your last point, I feel exactly the same way. If anyone told me I was driving too fast and they were uncomfortable I'd immediately be apologetic and slow down, and I'd genuinely feel bad about it.
As I get older I've realised that most people in my life react negatively if I express emotion that what they are doing is upsetting. It is only recently that I've realised my sample size is small and this kind of gas lighting behaviour is not ok. I've actually reached a point where I'm thankful that the internet popularised the phrase because it had helped me diagnose shitty behaviour that I've tolerated my whole life.
> most people in my life react negatively if I express emotion that what they are doing is upsetting
Right. I guess they feel accused, as though you're attacking their behaviour rather than sharing how it makes you feel, and instinctively become defensive in response?
It's wonderful to meet people who don't think this way. My partner is incredible at this, I can tell her "when you X I feel Y" and know without a doubt her reaction will come from a place of trying to work together to understand whether the problem and solution exist in X, Y or both.
I'd say just in general people have become way more cavalier and oblivious as drivers. I frequently see people doing wild stuff like driving at night with no headlights, or driving for several blocks in a bike lane. Every single yellow light is pushed to the limit, with often at least one (and sometimes multiple) drivers running the red light as well. I feel like a lot of is connected to a more general post-COVID decline in awareness of how one's actions affect others. People are just fine with doing anything they can get away with. I suspect the trend won't be reversed without a major increase in enforcement.
I’ve noticed the same, and also people’s behaviour generally everywhere has bottomed out and not recovered. I was speaking to an ED nurse who said people have just forgotten how to relate and violence is through the roof every night in the hospital.
I have legitimately been wondering for quite some time if we are not in a leaded gas kind of situation where something is adversely affecting the global population as a whole and we are left in the dark. Plenty of contenders between industrially processed food, social media, mobile phones. It might just be me getting paranoid however.
I get it. Maybe you're not interested in it. You’re at A, you want to arrive at B, and driving is just your tool for getting there.
But to misquote Trotsky, you may not be interested in driving, but driving is interested in you. Driving is the most dangerous thing most drivers do on a regular basis. Probably by a significant margin. Even if you hate it, respect it. Put in the effort to do it well.
No, because once you to restore the distance, you have to go slower. The cars behind you then fill the restored space the moment they feel they can, because they perceive you as the slower car. If this happen with multiple cars and in practice it does, you are suddenly going very slow.
The fact is, you can have only so much space in front of you as other cars allow. I had to reduce the distance literally because of this. It then stopped happening.
My friend ended up in a hospital, when some jerk moved into the small space in front of him, and then had to jump on the brakes because the first car unexpectedly slowed down. My friend also jumped on the brakes but the distance was too small.
I leave plenty of distance and don't have that problem. Occasionally people do fill the space, perhaps because I'm providing a safer place than people tailgating. This reduced risk benefits me too. I just slow a little bit to re-establish my following distance.
About once a week I see someone cut in even though the person is literally tailgating. The driver at the back has to brake+swerve to not cause a high speed collision. There's actually nothing you can do to prevent these people from getting ahead of you. Don't worry about what they'll do, it's insane anyways. Just try not to die.
Wow this gives me anxiety just reading. My 2012 BMW has a warning everytime I turn it on. "DO NOT RELY ON BEEPS" (I'm paraphrasing of course.)
And yeah, I don't let tooling on my car replace common sense driving habits. I still turn my head when reversing, even if I can see what's behind me on the camera. I think it's crazy that people rely so much on unreliable tech on their cars.
> I might just be getting old, but more and more I see people not using indicators and not understanding the rules of junctions. Tail gating also really annoying.
Same. I've also noticed that people entering the interstate seem to _expect_ that cars already on the interstate move over, or change speed to let them merge. Usually at 10-15 MPH slower than the speed of traffic.
I've made a point to, when I cannot move over, remain in my lane at the same speed. And I've had people just absolutely wait until the last moment of a long on-ramp to speed up, or slow down to merge. It's bizarre.
My other pet peeve is the opposite - they've got LED daytime running lights, and use those instead of headlights. They're driving around at 11pm with no taillights and abysmal forward lighting, but there's enough of a glow from the DRLs that they assume their lights are on.
Or worse, they're accustomed to "automatic" lights and don't even know where the switch is, so they're driving around at dusk or in fog, rain, or snow in a white, gray, or black vehicle without their lights on.
I have also been tempted to purchase digital billboard space, but not on the side of the road. I want LED signs on my roof rack (one forward, one back) with column or two of buttons on the dash to call up a slate of messages:
1. TURN YOUR BRIGHTS OFF! BLUE MEANS BLINDING.
1b. OW! YOUR HEADLIGHTS ARE MISALIGNED.
2. TURN YOUR HEADLIGHTS ON! THOSE ARE DRLs.
3. TURN LIGHTS ON TO BE SEEN EVEN IF IT'S NOT DARK.
4. MY SAFE FOLLOWING DISTANCE IS NOT A SPOT FOR YOU.
5. YOU ARE TAILGATING. I WILL NOT SPEED FOR YOU.
6. YIELD DOES NOT MEAN STOP.
7. I AM ZIPPER MERGING, NOT CUTTING THE LINE.
8. DRIVE CAREFULLY! I JUST SAW A DEER.
9. GO AHEAD, I SEE YOU.
10. YOU HAVE A PROBLEM WITH YOUR VEHICLE, PULL OVER.
11. THANK YOU!
Plus a few spare slots to be implemented as needs arise.
I've been unimpressed with the automatic high-beams on my wife's newer Toyota and on other rentals I've driven, they usually depend on a direct line-of-sight to the other car's headlights, which means they stay on just long enough to hit the windshield of another car cresting a hill and blind them. Then they courteously turn off a few camera frames and vision analyses after the low beams become visible. If a __competent__ driver is controlling the high/low beams manually, they'll see the headlights of the other car illuminating the trees and such and turn off the high beams a couple critical seconds earlier. But I admit that the automatic systems are miles better at managing it than the __incompetent__ drivers who are all too common.
This hit on a peeve of mine, that automatic high beam systems really suck for pedestrians. Manual control is genuinely better in this regard. Try walking around at night in a wealthy neighborhood, and about 1/8 of the cars just blind every pedestrian.
I assume you're an American? As a Brit, your comment confuses me. Why would anyone ever have high beams on at all in anything reasonably described as a "neighbourhood"? Do built-up areas in the US not reliably have street lighting?
Here in the UK, it is pretty much universally the case that if there are buildings, there are street lights. (Maybe there are occasional exceptions where there's a single building in the middle of nowhere on a rural road; I'm not sure. And I suppose there must be occasional outages of street lighting even in e.g. dense city centres. But such things are rare.) Having high beams on in almost any context where there are buildings around is therefore unnecessary, against the Highway Code, and quite possibly criminal under RVLR reg 27.
I'm not the one you asked, but I think a lot of 'wealthy' neighborhoods in the US mean suburbia with larger single-family-home lots, and roads often feel a bit more rural. In my area in California, these are often unincorporated (county) lands just outside larger towns.
You sometimes see a very clear boundary. The more middle-class housing is subdivisions built all at once somewhere in the 1960s-2000s, with underground utilities and street lights. This infrastructure was mandated by the city, when the developers were looking to get their newly built neighborhood annexed into it. Around the next corner, darker streets with overhead utilities and more spread out lots with oversized "McMansion" houses. These are following the more relaxed county building codes and had the space available for such construction.
These roads are also more likely to have expensive new cars with all the computerized functions. Walking in this limbo world at the edge of our town, I've also noticed being blinded by cars as a pedestrian with more dynamic effects. I suspect are the car's system actively painting me with more light. It is a little bit like the "fringing" you see when the cutoff of older HID projection lamps sweeps over you due to road undulation. But it happens too quickly and both vertically and horizontally. It feels like being hit with a targeted spot light.
I wish the engineers spent the same care to put a dark halo on a pedestrian face as they do for oncoming drivers. Even when carrying my own flashlight, such encounters can be dazzling enough to basically go blind and not be able to see the dark paving in front of me for a minute. My light is more to make me visible to the cars than to really illuminate my path for myself. It doesn't stand a chance against the huge dynamic range of these car lighting systems.
if you ever visit Portland make one up reading YOU HAVE THE RIGHT OF WAY. drivers keep it weird here by ignoring the rules of the road for some kind of "no no i insist, after you" as if theyre giving some gift, but instead just confuse everyone
if im biking and waiting at a stop sign: without fail, the last car in a long line of cars will slam on the breaks and insist i go when they have no stop sign. it would have been faster for everyone if they just kept driving and i cross after they pass, like the rules of the road prescribe
Defending that particular kind of driver: He might not have known to be the last car. But one thing he knows for sure: a long line of cars in front of him. Speeding up or keeping distance is pointless, so he uses that moment to be friendly instead.
I actually made an LED sign for the rear of my van, with over a dozen messages, including some peaceful ones like yours (sorry, thanks). One was for headlights. I made it IR-controlled and used an older Android smartphone with IR blaster and an app that gave me labeled buttons to show the messages.
Or worse, they're accustomed to "automatic" lights and don't even know where the switch is, so they're driving around at dusk or in fog, rain, or snow in a white, gray, or black vehicle without their lights on.
The worst: automatic headlights required by regulations, but no corresponding automatic taillights. At least before those regulations one would notice the darkness in front and turn on (both) lights, but now you have drivers thinking their rear is also lit because the front is.
I've long wished we had a standardized communication channel between cars. It could even be fixed status codes.
I've always expected that in the future when all cars are fully self-driving, they would have some kind of communication channel to improve efficiency. Why can't we have this for humans too before that.
#3 sounds like you're either nitpicking or maybe having an eye issue?
#7 You're either doing something good or something very bad, so I hope it's the former. If you're trying to pace the lane next to you, then it sounds like it's at least an honest attempt to get things zipper merging. If you're telling yourself that cars need to be in both lanes to zipper merge, while zooming to the end and then hoping maybe a zipper merge will happen, you're getting a big benefit to yourself while still causing slowdown for everyone else.
#3 Plenty of drivers have difficulty spotting a gray/silver/black car under low or high-contrast lighting. Highly visible colors (yellow, orange, white) have a 7-12% lower chance of getting into an accident during the day and up to 47% lower at dusk.[0] Keeping your headlights on at all times reduces this risk.
#7 In many states (e.g. [1]) if two lanes are merging you're expected to merge at the last possible point. This allows more cars to fit on the road to reduce congestion, and it reduces sudden stops.
> #7 In many states (e.g. [1]) if two lanes are merging you're expected to merge at the last possible point. This allows more cars to fit on the road to reduce congestion, and it reduces sudden stops.
Maintaining smooth merging is far more important than where the merging happens.
The page you linked even says "It is legal to wait to merge until the lane closure devices (cones or barrels) start, but we recommend merging sooner than that to give more time to find a gap, complete the merge, and avoid getting in a pinch when the devices make the closed lane too narrow. Merging sooner also avoids the risk of hitting a closure device or ending up inside the work zone."
It recommends zippering, but nowhere in there does it recommend waiting for "the last possible point".
Someone that has it in their head that zippering is best and zippering needs to be done at the end is likely to cause more harm than good, even if they're working off the purest intentions. Keeping both lanes in use is a distant second priority to making sure the merge is smooth.
By definition, zipper merge means late merge [0]. The problem is that if some cars merge too early, other cars will keep driving down the road and then merging in front of the early mergers, it ends up being disruptive in heavy traffic conditions. If everyone consistently merges at the same point in heavy traffic conditions it's more predictable, leading to better through flow.
Tell that to the site linked above, because even though they say "like a zipper" they want it to happen early.
> The problem is that if some cars merge too early, other cars will keep driving down the road and then merging in front of the early mergers, it ends up being disruptive in heavy traffic conditions. If everyone consistently merges at the same point in heavy traffic conditions it's more predictable, leading to better through flow.
I don't blame the early mergers there. If someone zooms down the empty lane then they are not attempting to zipper merge, they are bad actors.
A proper zipper, at the last moment, is slightly better than early merging. But again smoothness is the important factor. Smoothness is 90% of the solution. Do not give up smoothness for the sake of being more zipper-y. If people think you're cutting in line, you probably are cutting in line.
-
Also, anywhere we want to make sure there's a zipper merge, how about we stop having a favored lane? Cut off half of each lane at the merge point.
The rule for the leftmost lane (highway) is that you must not block for other drivers. It is in the rule book (at least in my country). That mean in very clear terms that if you can't do the overtaking in a timely fashion without blocking other drivers, then you should not enter the left lane.
If there is one thing that tend to cause conflict and trigger dangerous situations in traffic, it is when someone driving at 0.001% faster than the next car enter left lane while maintaining the exact same speed, basically matching the speed on the right. That is just as illegal as speeding.
> That mean in very clear terms that if you can't do the overtaking in a timely fashion without blocking other drivers, then you should not enter the left lane.
And then there are the drivers who are in the centre/right lane who, when you try to pass on their left, speed up to try to prevent you from passing them.
If everybody left it, it wouldn't be going 5+ over limit and then it could serve the people who are serious about breaking the law and go big. ... Oh, wait...
> I've been tempted to purchase digital billboard space to raise awareness.
Ironically, digital billboards are often 10x more obnoxious than even LED high beams in my area (and those are plenty awful, FWIW). We've got a few nearby that are so bright they could be used as stadium lighting when they're set to white. Naturally, half the ads running on them feature a white background, so it's like a stadium light that flips on and off every 15 seconds. Considering they're pointed directly at drivers' faces, I genuinely don't understand why there isn't more opposition to them; they're absolutely blinding. I'm seriously considering bugging local and state reps about it until they pass light intensity ordinances in my area.
> Mostly I'm hoping that automatic high-beams, like some Ford trucks I've seen do well, proliferate more!
I have a 2021 Tacoma, and its automatic high-beam adjustment is terrible. It does a reasonable job of turning high beams off when a car approaches, but it has a number of problems that make it unusable. After the car passes it waits too long to reactivate the high beams. That's when they're needed most; my eyes have already adjusted to the other car's headlights, now the road is dark again, and I'm still on low beams.
It's way too sensitive. When a car approaches from a long ways away, it sometimes turns high beams off for minutes at a time. It turns them off when there are widely-spaced streetlights on long empty rural highways.
I finally took the time to figure out where the switch is to turn off automatic high-beam adjustment. I do a much better job knowing when to dim and reactive the lights than the vehicle does.
Maybe it’s an overcorrection because the Tacoma I had, a couple years older than yours, had auto high beams and they would just stay on all the time. They only turned off from reflecting on road signs or when a car was only a few lengths away approaching. Quickly found the button to disable that feature.
The feature seems to be poorly implemented by all manufacturers. I see Teslas driving around flashing high beams every night because they trigger on/off really quickly and the drivers seem oblivious to the rapid change.
> That's when they're needed most; my eyes have already adjusted to the other car's headlights
On a purely practical note from someone who is very light-sensitive, a combination of partially closing the eye closest to the light and fixing your gaze on the the outer edge of your lane (such as lane marker or eode of road) almost eliminates this problem, even for modern stupid-bright headlights.
Added benefit of letting you see more of your own lane in spite of the oncoming lights.
I dunno, maybe where you live is a lot flatter than the roads that I drive on, but the instant I see a car coming the other way (ideally before they come into direct view) is the time to turn off full beams.
Though from a game theory point of view, leaving them on for a couple of seconds is probably ideal to remind anyone who forgets to dim their own headlights.
I live near mountains, rolling hills, and lots of farmland. There are many stretches where you can see a car coming from a mile away, long before anyone's high beams are noticeable. But in that darkness, my truck picks up those headlights and dims the high beams.
Hmm, I mostly drive in the English countryside where most often there are hills and bends, bushes and trees, houses and hedgerows. Seeing another car a mile away would probably mean both are heading into a wide valley, in which case the geometry makes it less important.
That said, I'm still not convinced your truck isn't doing the right thing. Even a mile a way you've got perhaps 30 seconds before you are passing each other. Is there much to be gained by leaving them on for a few more seconds? Seeing another car heading towards me is a much clearer and less likely to be forgotten trigger than "ok, about now my lights are probably getting annoying".
Automatic high beams only dip for other cars. They don’t dip for bicycles or pedestrians. Those walking or cycling by the road do not even register. Pure hubris.
RE ".... 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. ...." I had this idea too this annoyance too - but never implemented it.
One way to implement would be to mount a thin object , like a toothpick thickness and 1 or 2 cm long say on the mirror 90 degrees vertically to mirror surface , then (auto? ) adjust so their is no shadow from car's headlights that is behind.
Like lots of my other ideas , when i search for them , they already exist .maybe this one too
Found similar ideas already exist for car rear view mirrors .... ie Google finds ... ".... auto-dimming rearview mirror automatically adjusts to reduce glare from incident light by using sensors and an electrochromic gel layer...."
However my google of words "...auto adjust reflecting mirror to face incident light...." FInd there is much discussion on Faceboot and REddit for people asking for "...mirrors that reflect very bright high been lights BACK at the driver BEHIND ...: Could not find a implementation though ... Maybe it should be an Arduino project ....
A big cause on older cars is haze on the clear plastic that develops over the years. This makes even low beams spread so they blind oncoming drivers. There are kits where you polish and re-finish them, and they do make a noticeable difference in beam directionality.
> I've been tempted to purchase digital billboard space to raise awareness. Eg., "If this blue indicator is on, you're blinding everyone".
The thing is, IMO, there is a growing psychopathic trend of not giving a shit about other people. You can tell them "you're blinding everyone" and they will not care. They can see better, and the fact that you can't see at all as a consequence does not concern them. It's not their problem.
It could become their problem however if you are so blinded that you drive into them head-on. But yeah, I doubt they realize that, otherwise they wouldn't do it in the first place...
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.
I had the exact same issue, and Tesla sent out a service rep to my home to complete the adjustment to spec for free. You can request it through the service menu. Haven't had anyone flash me in the year since.
Thank you for being part of the 0.01% of Tesla drivers who figured this out. I think by default they set them to "maximum height" or something. As someone in a sedan, they are infuriatingly blinding at night by default. I'm sure they're illegal, but obviously Tesla doesn't care.
Source: live within a few miles of the Tesla factory, so I get more than my fair share of them. MOST of the drivers seem completely oblivious to this.
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.
You must never drive on a curvy roads then. Every car I driven waits until the approaching car is fully around the corner, blinding them for a full second before dimming, instead recognizing the headlights around the corner and dimming earlier.
Newer cars with matrix LED headlights account for this, such as the Volkswagen ID series. The brights not only "blot out" the shape of the cars around you, they also rotate when turning or going around a curve, so that you never accidentally point them at oncoming traffic.
It's quite magical and weird to observe in real time. When driving past oncoming cars, you can see a halo of darkness around each car. There are videos on YouTube that show the effect pretty well.
I don't even know what a Chevy Bolt looks like! Maybe the problem is every other model.
It's not hard to know when a car is approaching from corners / hills; there's light before they get there. I have fun manually adjusting the brights; I drive automatic transmission, lighting is the only fun I get.
All Teslas can do this too, as can a huge range of modern cars with so called "auto dipping headlights". Virtually all cars with this option allow you to turn it off though...
The quality of the auto-dip implementation varies enormously as well.
I am not sure that the incredibly bright Tesla Model 3 (and sometimes Model X) lights are on brights but are just stupidly bright at low-beam settings.
They do. Also, the ones with matrix LEDs (most newer Models other than the Cybertruck) automatically create a circle of darkness around anything they detect to be another vehicle.
As someone who's undergone LASIK correction, I have to do this semi-regularly for night highway driving. (For those unaware, the procedure gives you a mild halo effect basically for life, if you've had your eyes dilated before, imagine that, at like 25%). LED headlights are BRUTAL for this, oftentimes I can't even see the car they're attached to because of the insane amount of glare.
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.
Back when sensors, electronics, and servos were unaffordable or unavailable, it made sense to have a low beam height control as the resting pitch of your car could vary by several degrees based on passenger/cargo load, trailer tongue weight, etc.
It seems vastly less necessary now to have that control in the hands of the driver.
No, the level is fixed for the high and low beams. I guess the driver can adjust them with a screwdriver but not while driving.
I’m just mentioning that headlight automation was being done back in the 1960s with simple electronics. Just a photo cell and a lens. The driver can adjust sensitivity.
Headlight regulation obviously stopped making any sense at all when they allowed bigger cars to put them up higher. Like you are gonna regulate all kind of beam parameters and then miss the most important thing.
Older cars have the height adjustment control too. Either as a physical dial or a menu entry. It's useful when transporting something heavy or when you're driving on totally wrecked roads so you can spot potholes faster etc. But most people don't know that, dial it all the way up and just leave it there.
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.
Adaptive headlights that actively shield oncoming drivers were finally made legal in the US in 2022 but complicated bureaucratic hoops make them hard to implement. BMW seems to have them working as I find their higher-end lighting (ex: ICON Adaptive w/ Laser Light) to be among the best to oncoming drivers—at least to my eyes.
CNN writes about why headlight brightness is worse in the US than in other countries:
The USA seems to suffer from a not-invented-here problem when it comes to automotive regulations. Most of the world adopted the European standard for adaptive headlights, but the USA had to spend years coming up with its own incompatible standard.
It's not a bug, it's a feature? US manufacturers are not widely known for technological innovations. Deviating standards are a way to keep them competitive in their domestic market.
There is a reason US school buses look like WW2 troop transport and the long haul trucks are museum pieces in all aspects. It's not even NIH, it's just protectionism.
BMW have one of the more annoying matrix main beam setups, as far as I'm concerned -- it's not great at picking out my car, and seems worse than others I've encountered. A redeeming feature is that it does seem to be smart enough to stop blinding me if I flash my own main beams.
The (2017) Ford Galaxy has actually pretty decent auto-main-beams. Importantly, the stalk controls don't stop working but also if I'm just a fraction of a second late in turning them off manually and the system beats me to it, they stay off. They also stay off when driving on roads with street lights.
I have a car with LED lights. It's easily the best car I've had for vision at night. We very occasionally get someone flashing us at night, wrongly believing our high beams are on.
However, from a safety point of view, I'm not convinced the trade off is actually in favour of reducing illumination for everyone.
No one is truly blinding you. Even old incandescent headlights can be unpleasant. Some people are more sensitive to it than others and things like a car coming over a slight hill or bend in the adverse direction can change the alignment of the lights in such a way that they appear much brighter.
The point I was trying to make is that reducing the brightness isn't a simple trade off. How many accidents are caused by people being "blinded" vs people not seeing something until it was too late?
If it needs regulation to fix then that regulation should try to balance those things. Perhaps by automatically adjusting the headlights when another car is detected (maybe matrix style headlights, or a simple angle adjustment).
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?
The automatic wipers on non Tesla cars use infrared sensors that have existed for decades, so they're a well known quantity. The Tesla wipers use the front cameras to detect rain, and those cameras are focused at a distance that's far enough to be able to see other vehicles, so they're not focused on the windshield, which is why they're unreliable.
> 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.
Not sure why people are not believing you. I have a Volvo and the headlights and taillights are illuminated at all times, even when the headlight switch is "off."
The only thing that turning the headlights "on" does differently is enable high beams.
Thanks - I'm ok with that. As also mentioned, I'm NOT when it's a dark car at night with ONLY DRL and no rear lights at all - which I've seen a LOT of lately..
Your vision may be good enough to see ahead of you by candlelight, but other drivers are not going to expect a nearly invisible car approaching at night. Turn on your headlights.
I don't know what's invisible about the outside edge of my headlights, and my taillights, being illuminated. The car is very visible. If it were invisible, and I do a LOT of nighttime driving, I would've gotten pulled over for it already (and I haven't been).
DRL's aren't dim enough to make your car "nearly invisible". If it's enough light for the driver to see the road via reflection, it's more than enough for the oncoming driver to see via line of sight transmission.
My vehicle does not dim the DRLs with the beams on. The brightness of the DRLs is also inoffensive enough that I don't think they're worse than the beams at all. They're also essentially evenly-lit light bars, and not point sources like the beams, which further helps.
> headlight beams have been misaligned and that's extremely distracting/infuriating so I hate using them anyway
One might consider taking the 5 minutes to align your headlights? Even if you're alone and don't have a helping friend with a tape measure it's not difficult to just make them a little more properly adjusted.
Saab also had a feature where it would turn off all the lights in the instrument panel, but you could turn them back on by hitting the top of the dash. Might be a Swedish thing as Volvo had it too.
Saab also had a battery warning light, like most cars. However, if the battery was not charging, the light would not come on. Also if the bulb burned out, your alternator wouldn't work.
My saabs, of the 5 I own, only have working lights in about 2 of them. One has no tacho (from factory), one no speedo (broken)
Turns out you pretty much dont need any of that stuff 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.
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".
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.
The problem is largely that the same Cops who should be writing the tickets are the very people putting criminal light bars on their lifted pavement princess trucks.
I just got done with a trip. Unfortunately there's a number of numb-nuts who don't see the problem with driving on regular roads with their lightbars on.
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.
One thing that helps is to make sure you don't look at the headlights directly. It really helps to look at the white line on the side of the road when the other car is close to preserve your night vision.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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'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.