Bring back standardised headlight, and a maximum height allowance on vehicle's headlights so that they're not right in a sedan's driver's rearview mirror when a pickup is tailgating.
this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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maximum height allowance on vehicle’s headlights so that they’re not right in a sedan’s driver’s rearview mirror when a pickup is tailgating
That's actually already legally mandated at least in states that require state inspections. Headlight angle is supposed to be one of the things you have to check in order to pass inspection.
In practice, mostly nobody checks it and it doesn't matter. But it should.
Not just the angle tho, the height of the headlights themselves! Even if aligned properly if the headlights are 5' off the ground and my back window is 3.5' when they tailgate it illuminate the inside of my car !
Can't you just install couple of headlights facing backwards (asslights?) for such occasions?
I always adjust my rearview to shine the light right back at the driver.
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I hate it when someone with these lights is in the passing lane behind you, and their lights reflect off your side mirror directly into your eyes. The worst is when they're only going like 102% your speed, so they linger there unless you adjust your own speed to change their placement relative to you.
Shouldn't all headlights be okay as long as your headlight angle is calibrated right? That's like the first thing they teach in driving school
There was a recall on, I think, Chevy headlights. The LEDs were too bright, unfortunately recalls are at the will of the owner.
Even if the lights are leveled correctly, part of the problem is how directional LEDs are. On a flat surface you're fine. If you're cresting a hill so your vehicle is level and there's someone coming up the hill towards you, your headlights are shining directly in their eyes. As soon as you start descending the hill your headlights are now pointing in the right direction relative to oncoming traffic again. Adjust the headlights down and you just change the angle that this happens at. Adjust the headlights down so it only happens on particularly steep hills, and your headlights are basically useless because they're not illuminating enough of the road in front of you.
Quite a few years ago I had a Citroen DS 23, whose headlights moved with the steering with a simple mechanism, so it illuminated the curves much better and also dazzled drivers coming in front much less. I don't know why this has not become standard, very easy to implement by manufacturers, it is simply a bar that connects the headlights and another connected to the steering, it is nothing more than this.
I'm with Homer. Fuck that guy
Some people here in CR use bikes with these. The only difference is that the lights flash constantly
Part of it is also outdated regulations. They recently updated the regulations to allow adaptive lights that turn off the parts of the led array that would blind oncoming drivers while maintaining road illumination. The technology has been around a while but the US didn't allow car makers to use it.
It wasn’t allowed in the US? Wow. Didn’t know that. In EU it’s available since about ten years. Current systems have high definition projectors with >1 million pixels which can display nearly everything on the street before you.
My pet peeve about headlights is that auto manufacturers used the same fittings for standard and HID bulbs and allowed users to replace them of their own accord.
So plenty of places and third parties made HID bulbs for standard bulb fixtures, and people installed them thinking they would make everything better for them when driving at night. They're the brightest and therefore the best, right? Nope.
HID bulbs should be in specific housings and fixtures which control the direction of the light better than standard bulb housings. With regular bulbs (incandescent), this isn't a problem, since the amount of misdirected light is not enough to cause problems. When you exponentially increase the amount of light with an HID bulb, that leakage is no longer trivial, and rather blinding.
This is why I'm in support of LED headlights on cars. They're still "blue" and very VERY bright when you're in the cone of light they emit, but they're usually a non-user-serviceable component. So unless someone intentionally goes and screws with their headlight alignment, they generally eliminate most issues with very bright headlights. They keep the light directed at the ground, giving the driver very good coverage of the road while not blinding oncoming drivers (mostly). The downside, IMO, is that, since the bulbs are no longer able to be changed by the user, by design, you now need to buy a whole new headlight assembly if your headlight stops working. While LEDs are generally very long lived, that life can be significantly reduced due to problems beyond your control, like manufacturing defects that can go undetected for years until suddenly the light simply stops working; costing possibly hundreds of dollars to fix, where a standard set of bulbs would be maybe $20 at most.
IMO, between this, and automatic headlights, and on some cars, automatic high beams, as long as people use those systems as intended, being blinded by headlights in most scenarios should be a thing of the past..... Of course that requires that people use the systems as intended.... Which is a bit like wishing for world peace. The populous unanimously agreeing to anything is basically impossible at this point. Even something as basic as "killing people is bad" is not something that everyone can agree on, since there are entire movements of people who think they should be seeking peace by killing all of the people who disagree with their position. I don't want to name names on that, but it's a thing that a few very notable groups fervently believe. To go into that a bit further, most would agree that anyone trying to commit the "murder, death, kill" on anyone should be stopped by any means necessary, which includes, but isn't limited to killing the person trying to kill others; this is largely considered to be an acceptable exception to the rule, but again, not everyone agrees with that. I won't go further with it, since I think the point is made... We can't, as a society of people, universally agree on anything. So there will always be exceptions.