Having a good set of (working) headlights is a crucial feature of any motor vehicle, assuming you want to be able to see the road ahead of you when there’s a lack of sunshine. Headlights are also essential to be noticed by other cars and traffic participants, but if installed improperly they can end up blinding an opposing driver with potentially fatal results. This is a major worry with LED lamps that are increasingly being installed in cars, often replacing the old-style halogen bulbs that have a very different color spectrum and beam patterns, to the dismay of fellow road participants.
This headlight glare can also be simulated in driving simulators, as in a 2019 article by [B.C. Haycock] et al. where the effect is of course diminished because displays can only get so bright. Of note is that it’s not just LED lights themselves, but also taller vehicles and misaligned headlights, all of which makes it important that the angle of your car’s headlights is proper. You want to see the road in front of you, after all, not illuminate every house in the nearest settlement two klicks away.
Compounding the problem is that the shorter wavelength, blue-ish light of LED headlights is more energetic than the more reddish, longer wavelength of halogens and are generally perceived as more intense by our eyes. Ultimately the solution appears to be adaptive driving beam headlights (ADB), a technology that constantly adjusts the headlights to the circumstances. ADB has been common in e.g. Europe already for the past 15 years, and is allowed in Canada since 2018 and in the US since 2022 after a rule change by the NHTSA.
With plenty of improper headlights on vehicles in North America still, it’s best to practice defensive driving, with a brighter dashboard illumination, anti-glare coatings and safety squinting when a miniature solar system passes by during an night-time drive.
A lot of larger SUV’s have auto levelling headlights that adjust the headlight angle if the truck is heavily loaded or towing a heavy trailer. These were most commonly halogen. If anything in that system gets messed up, it can lead to one or both headlights being pointed high.
The NTSB has fairly strict rules about headlight beam ground coverage, which is specified as a pattern on the ground at a known distance ahead of the car, regardless of the car’s size. So in theory even the monster tank trucks that we have now should have their lights shining downwards. However, once the car leaves the factory, aftermarket lift kits and oversized wheels mess that all up. One potential benefit of LED headlights in this is that they’re usually (always, in my experience) an array of individual LED’s, rather than one near-point source like a halogen or an incandescent, so they can be designed to shut off some section of the beam to prevent glare to specific oncoming traffic. (I’ve helped design/build a prototype that does this.) But thus far, nobody seems to want this. They just want brighter lights and more of them.
Living most of my life in Texas, I can confirm that most blaring truck lights are a result of aftermarket lift kits and lax state safety inspections.
It looks like the most common ADB systems are as you describe: steering the beam with projector optics and an LED matrix. These need more LEDs than a traditional high/low beam only LED headlight, and a scanning driver that talks with the ADAS to determine who not to blind, but on the whole not too expensive a solution once it’s popular enough to cost optimize. Again, it’ll take legislation to get beyond a luxury feature in the US.
I don’t live in Texas, but do live in Redneckville, FL, with lots of construction workers and country-folk who are not nearly as bright as the misaligned headlights on their jacked-six-feet-in-the-air 4WD trucks. Who make plenty of money at those trades and spend it on even brighter and worse aligned aftermarket lights and bigger tires instead of the dentist. And the good-ol’-boy sheriff deputies aroun’ here won’t cite them for it. Nor for the ‘ground effects’, ‘angel eyes’ and other vain lighting which is prohibited by multiple statutes.
Thanks for the important work you do guys, but have some courtesy for those of us in our non-jacked-up 2WD trucks who fix all your electronic gear.
It’s not a matter of price. I wanted my next car to have them, but after innumerable hours on the phone and internet, I found no US car, at ANY price, has true adaptive lights. A law was passed, but the creation of appropriate regulations is still in process.
Now they come stock with too much light. There’s no amount of aiming down that can help; you need to have the light physically located lower, if it’s going to reach several seconds down the road without passing through the intermediate distances at windshield height. Although even when it’s low enough, it’s still way too damn bright; the reflection off a wet road from the portion of light that’s aimed 15 feet in front of a car is sometimes bright even when the lights are aimed properly. It’d help if the light was spread out across a larger surface area, instead of coming from a tiny dazzling point source projector. But people feel as if their lights are better if the space directly in front of them is brighter than the sun, even if it means they have a harder time seeing into the distance where they should actually be looking when driving.
You have to realize that nearly all drivers approach their vehicle with…
Smelly water goes in this hole.
Floor button makes go.
Hand wheel makes turn.
Oh no. Car no make lights!
$200?
I can buy light for $30 and plug in.
Never thinks about it again.
Or worse.
Oh! This cool off-road light bar would look bitchin’ on my truck.
$80? Score!
No thoughts were given to what it will do to others, or whether or not it’s even legal to put on your car.
I thought it was a joke, but here actually are states in usa that do not have mandatory annual safety inspections of cars. How insanity like this can be permitted in a “civilized” country, is beyond me. There are always iijits that will 2 by 4 their broken suspension and drive happy go lucky without brakes.
Texas is actually sunsetting safety inspections starting January 1st.
“These changes are due to House Bill 3297. The bill was passed by the 88th Legislature and signed into law by Governor Greg Abbott in 2023, abolishing the Vehicle Safety Inspection Program for non-commercial vehicles.”
Of course, there’s still the aptly named “inspection program replacement fee” of $7.50 that will be tacked onto your registration. And those of us in Austin, Houston, and DFW metros still have to get a smog inspection.
I live in Maine where yearly inspections are mandatory. Know what they do to check your headlights? See if they turn on, and if the high beams work. That’s it, takes 4.5 seconds and they don’t look at brightness or angle. It shows, too. It gets dark at 3:30pm in the winter, and all you can do is pray because you may as well be driving straight into the sun with the incoming headlights blinding you.
Having been subscribed to r/justrolledintotheshop for some time now I can say that I am very happy to subject my fleet to a basic annual safety inspection that costs maybe £50 and ensures that my vehicle is unlikely to kill or harm me or other people.
Seeing what people will happily drive around in in those states where there’s no inspections makes me glad that we have something to at least curtail that sort of behaviour.
Easy solutions:
1) Load leveling rear suspension on trucks to prevent “nose high” situations.
2) Auto leveling headlights. Always returning to a preset level regardless of vehicle attitude.
3) Annual vehicle inspect where headlights are aligned properly.
FWIW the headlight systems I’ve worked on implement both 1 and 2 already, and those are from the factory. I believe the NTSB requires load leveling and auto leveling on anything that’s considered a commercial vehicle or truck.
Lots of states had 3 implemented since the dawn of the automotive age, and as far as I know, they all got rid of it in the 1980’s under lobbying pressure from groups more interested in personal freedom than safe cars.
Low beam headlights should light about 150 feet in front of the vehicle, so the angle depends on ride height. If the vehicle is lifted it must use a steeper angle. I have and easy way to check and set them. Measure right at vehicle and then again 15 feet away, it should be at 90% of the first measurement. Cops can both pull people over and check this with a standard tape measure and reasonably flat area.
I think unfortunately we’ve gotten to where the design of the lights has made it so that you can’t use the low beams that way. The high beams are now the super-mega-turbo-brights so that you can’t actually use them very much without blinding everyone else, and so the low beams can’t actually be very low because you won’t be able to see anything, so it’s more like regular and brights instead of low and high. I dunno.
Yeah I had auto leveling headlights on my GTI.. I can’t tell you how many times I was driving on night shift out to ‘lunch’ and the headlights just pointed themselves straight down in front of the car so I couldn’t see anything more than 50ft in front of me. It went back for warranty work so many times and they ultimately said I had to just not hit potholes because it was causing a sensor over-travel on the control arm headlight level sensor. I sold the car with about 30k miles on it.. lol. (really that was the least of its problems though). Just more modules, linkages, motors, and software to error/break for an expensive repair when it is out of warranty.
Yeah like the derps around here with the rear of their trucks dropped so their headlights become like searchlights…for your eyeballs. Thankfully SC banned the “Carolina Squat” and is becoming less of an issue but they still persist in getting that rear end right up to the limit of 4” difference front to rear the law now requires.
“If anything in that system gets messed up, it can lead to one or both headlights being pointed high.”
Don’t know about your car, but my 2010 Jaguar has a failsafe system. If it malfunctions, the lights stay in their lowest position. Yearly vehicle inspection is mandatory here.
Good info, but, surprisingly (unless I missed something) did not address the actual, a-number-one, no-kidding-absolute-you have got to be kidding-one-seems-to-get-despite-having upteen-years-of-design-experience issue: Which is not aftermarket. Which is not towing. Not color. It is simply that the real world, unlike the test environment, is not flat. And, obviously, I repeat- obviously, every time the on- coming car pitches, even slightly over actual road surfaces, I get regularly, for sustained periods, treated to light greater than that of afternoon sun (I compared), as their bobbing auto-levelling beams are now, like .0001 degrees too high, putting me in the main (apparently unlimited, law-wise) beam of an extremely, ridiculously, non- linear radiation pattern. I just cannot understand how this aspect is chronically overlooked, by so many apparently smart people, during nearly every discussion and debate. Another example of technology’s dark side: if we can, than we must. Then, let’s create even more costly and complex technology having potentially deadly single-point failure modes, to undo that. Instead of asking ourselves: “Is it really necessary to see to Idaho, when I am traveling from Mystic CT to, uh, Mystic CT in wet, crowded, curvy urban streets?” Stupid, incredibly dangerous and unnecessary.
SUV LED headlights do pose a nuisance being located higher they tend to blind you if in a sedan. My car has standard LED lights yet I’ve had incoming drivers flash headlights even when my lights are on low beam.
So it’s a problem with most people even with well designed lights specially if they have dirty windscreens and\or sensitive eyes.
Not to mention your car having dirty lights which will diffract the beam to a much wider area.
Not to mention some people in your situation who believe, that just because their car’s LED lights are standard from the factory, that they are not too bright. These people can get angry at oncoming motorists who flash their high beams at them. The manufacturers may be to blame, selling a “feature” to customers of greater night driving illumination, yet knowing the government will not penalize the manufacturer or routinely inspect the lights.
How do you deal with the sensors getting mud, water and ice on them and mis-identifying the oncoming traffic or getting blinded entirely?
All the cars I’ve seen or used had their parking cameras, side view cameras, forward facing cameras and even ultrasound sonars rendered ineffective simply from the salt spray and other crust coming off the road. This time of year the LED lights barely even melt the ice on the lens, which is why half the cars on the road have these glowing blobs at front that beam in every direction.
I wish people wouldn’t have their brights on all the time. They do it because they have a low beam out and don’t feel like replacing it or people who think they are helping themselves see better at night without realizing they are blinding everyone else on the road. It’s a shame the police don’t crack down on it at all. Meanwhile, I see people with 1 or more brake lights out or turn signals out or whatever. People just don’t have the initiative to do a basic inspection of their lights or anything else for that matter. They are putting other people’s life in danger due to negligence and they just don’t give a damn.
Europe has had the switch on the dash to make the level of the headlights adjustable as a rule since the early 1990’s. So that when you attach a trailer of have the trunk full or aunt Bertha on the backseat that you can adjust it as soon as the first oncoming car flashes at you.
Furthermore, it is part of the mandatory safety inspection in Germany and other places to have the headlight level checked and adjusted. EVERY mechanic shop in Germany has that device. I wanted to get my 4Runner’s lights adjusted and two different master mechanics told me that they have never even seen that device (a small box the size of a 12 pack on an adjustable post that’s on wheels). I think we are trailing about 40 years behind here. Lights should be checked frequently.
Polarized lights and windshield visor / glasses!!! Will knock out a substantial amount of the problem.
Also, under frame lights in long blackened tubes (and cleaning brush) so YOU can see, but not blind oncoming!
As usual, until NHTSA requires manufacturers to add a feature that protects everyone but the car’s owner such as ADB, it will only show up in luxury vehicles to round out a long list of otherwise useless bullet points. Like airbags, ABS, and emissions controls, it needs to be a law for a few years before it makes a difference on the road.
Ah, yes. The widely-known-to-be-useless features that are air bags and ABS. Those definitely haven’t saved tens of thousands of lives since they were introduced. There’s no data to support that at all.
Oh wait. Yes there is.
And why wouldn’t you want emissions control? Cleaner air is good for everyone. Maybe it’s not directly saving lives, but it certainly is making things better overall.
I think you misunderstood the previous post.
https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2009/08/government-study-confirms-abs-effectiveness-but-mysteries-linger/index.htm
“The key finding:
ABS by itself has close to zero overall effect on fatal crashes, but significantly reduces nonfatal crash involvements by an estimated 6 percent in cars and 8 percent in LTVs [light-truck vehicles such as SUVs and pickups]. Fatal run-off-road crashes do increase significantly with ABS, but now by only 9 percent, rather than the initial 28 percent [reported in an earlier study], as the public has learned how to use ABS correctly. That 9 percent increase is offset by reductions with ABS of other types of fatal crashes”
So, ABS hasn’t really saved lives, it just slightly reduces fender benders.
Ah yes, because not blinding someone who is barreling towards you at high speed does nothing for your own health and safety.
You’re assuming that a non-negligible portion of the American public is intelligent enough to think that far ahead, and therefore consider such a thing as adding value to their purchase.
Considering all of EU already have these systems by law, it shouldnt be difficult to implement them in usa.
Much like universal healthcare, a problem so hard that only the rest of the civilised world has solved it.
White LEDs have lots of blue (<500nm short wavelength) light but this has very little effect on the perception of brightness because human luminous efficiency isn’t very sensitive to these wavelengths. More likely that the auto LEDs are just pumping out a lot more light.
But we perceive blue light to be brighter, which is the problem.
You may be right about the perception of brightness, but the bluer light almost instantly breaks down whatever rhodopsin we may have made. Rhodopsin is a protein we produce in our eyes to aid significantly with low-light vision, and is destroyed by blue light (naturally what we see the least of at night). It’s part of why bright, cool white LEDs feel so bright at night. Their sheer brightness brightness hurts, and the increased loss of rhodopsin leaves us trying to recover our night vision for longer than just adjusting our irises.
I have a theory, and it’s that LED headlights have gotten so bright because their users can’t see as well in low light conditionson the road due to their reduced rhodopsin, so they need more light just to feel like they can see well. It’s a problem being solved with brute force, rather than science and research.
That’s not the main issue at this level of illumination. Street lighting is not dim enough yet to sustain proper night vision anyways. The problem is that the eye judges the overall level of lighting based on blue wavelengths, making the iris smaller and reducing the amount of light that hits the retina. Blue tinted light feels brighter but you see less under it.
Not proper night vision, but better than not. Even purely cone vision still gets worse if you get hit with a bright light, even after your pupils go back to normal.
LED car lights are seriously dazzling, especially on SUVs, Audis and Volvos. The older HID tech was already retina frying but the newer LEDs are murder if your car is equipped with older halogen lights. The leds are so much brighter that they totally wash out halogen lights, effectively dropping your view range in the dark to a 15-20 feet. This is not enough distance for avoiding biologicals in anything above 15mph.
I don’t get it; the efficiency argument doesn’t really hold water with auto headlights. The extra draw on the alternator is not an issue. Why not just stick with old DOT designs? I’m guessing there are galloping safety regulations for new cars, as is always the case
Power efficiency is only an argument made for electric vehicles without an alternator.
In theory a properly designed LED bulb should offer much better longevity – although that only applies for designs that don’t drive the LEDs at high current, which seems unfortunately rare these days.
Otherwise you’re right, regular ICE or hybrids probably should stick with traditional halogen for the time being through.
That energy comes from somewhere; the alternator isn’t just a magic limitless can of pixie dust. Less power drawn by incandescent bulbs means less power required to turn the alternator.
It’s small, but a bunch of small adds up. My car has a “max efficiency” mode which reduces the power to the seat heaters, reduces the HVAC output, etc. It makes a measurable difference over time.
Indeed. This is the principle behind the function of the turbocharger – it uses the waste energy of the exhaust gases to drive a pump to draw air into the engine so that the engine – which is just a fancy air pump itself – doesn’t have to do that work, resulting in an increase in efficiency and an increase in delivered power.
Same thing with A/C units, like you stated. You can always tell when it activates; the engine loses RPM from the additional work it is doing.
What I mean is that the energy used for headlights is typically a tiny fraction of the waste energy of a system which is optimized for mechanical output, not electrical. Of course you have hypermiler types shaving off tiny amounts of energy draw here and there to minmax this situation, but that’s a very rare edge case and always will be. For the vast majority of drivers, the type of headlight will be a rounding error when it comes to energy efficiency. Turning off the AC will definitely add a lot more milage to a car compared to changing the headlights.
Longevity is an argument of false economy. Regular halogens last for a thousand hours or 50,000 miles. You only go through a handful of bulbs through the lifetime of the car, and they cost less than the fancy LED projector lights.
And 100 Watts more for the lights is less than 1% on the overall energy consumption of driving.
The problem with halogens is they need large reflectors, which designers of todays cars do not want. The reflectors are more expensive to make and take more space than the plastic lenses used in led lights. You can get halogen lights with as low a lifetime as 500 hours in europe, hotter burning bulbs putting out more light at the same 55W limit. Unfortunately they are no match for LEDs or lasers. Btw, if your car uses H7 lights, when running your high beams your lights draw 200W since four lights are shining.
In most of Europe you’re not required to run your lights at daytime, so the 500 hour limit is not an issue. Same with the high beams – they’re only rarely used, so the extra energy draw has no real impact on the energy calculation.
As for the reflectors, LEDs too would need larger reflectors so they wouldn’t be such intense point sources for the oncoming traffic. It’s just style over function.
I want large reflectors / lenses, they have less light per area so they’re less blinding to glance past.
LED lighting gives auto designers an incredible variety of options for shape, layout etc. that just aren’t possible with old halogen lighting solutions, the colour temperature isn’t affected by voltage variations and they’re much more robust, the laser lighting solutions are also pretty cool.
Let’s not forget those custom headlights gives automakers incredible room for profit along with planned obsolescence.
E.g. $2500 to replace a broken headlight on a General Motors SUV.
An incredible variety of pains in the ass! The expense and complexity of doing a simple job like changing out the lights has gotten entirely out of control, and it’s unconscionable that certain lights have digital features which can end up bricking the whole car if they malfunction and screw up the CAN bus.
I think I would prefer to sacrifice certain crazy shapes of headlights for the sake of the above concerns; plus, auto styling has been absolute dog vomit for decades, so it’s not like the extra freedom for designers is providing any benefit.
Signed,
Old man yells at cloud
All the new cars look virtually the same; just variations on a theme. No character or artistry.
TBF that is probably down to narrowing in in optimal aerodynamics for car types.
It seems that every design is gravitating towards a Honda fit hatchback. Think of that next time you’re stuck in traffic or in a big parking lot, once you see it you won’t unsee it.
Aerodynamics is a factor, as is economy… But mainly it is a network effect of industry-proven methods to meet US and EU regulations. There are a few main methods to do this, and one of them is to make basically a dull, generic hatchback. It’s a safe route for all the manufacturers to avoid botched releases and heavy fines. Hatchbacks and SUVs also creep toward each other with time.
Related to this is the tendency for the A-pillar to get wider and wider until it’s an absurd obstruction to vision, because it is regulated to contain more and more airbags which have questionable added safety. Diminishing returns have to hit at some point. But lawmakers don’t want to be the one who didn’t pass some arbitrary safety reg and then have blood on their hands. It’s understandable from every angle, kind of like any tragedy.
I’m sure the old DOT designs were (supposedly) dropped for aerodynamic efficiency (i.e. improved gas mileage).
Factory installed LED headlights usually aren’t a problem. The main issue is when people decide to install LED retrofit kits into headlights intended for halogen bulbs.
This is indeed the problem. And as usual, it’s a cascade of problems. First we had cars designed for halogen bulbs, which as a safety feature added detection of a failed lamp, and depending on the car, took some action if the current through the lamp was much less than expected. This meant that replacement LED lamps had to use nearly the same amount of current as the original halogens. The only practical way to do this was to use far brighter LEDs than necessary. On my car, the action the car took if the lamp didn’t consume enough current was to turn on the high beam as an emergency spare, which compounded the problem by not only being brighter than the original, but by being aimed higher as well.
This is the problem most people come across. The reflectors designed for halogen based bulbs are expecting to see light come from a specific spot. This focal point is the dimensions of the bulb filament. Most conversion bulbs have LEDs to the front and back, often double to triple the diameter of the lens focal length.
This turns the reflector design from a precision light thrower to a blunderbuss. The further from the focal point light emanates, the worse the problem becomes; with HID conversions being the most egregious.
You obviously haven’t been seeing a lot of Ford Superduty pickups on the road with three rows of LED headlights stacked at roof level of most cars. Nor have you seen any of the new GM SUV’s and pickups…often those are the ones with one defective light and the other aimed as high beam into oncoming traffic. I’d like to see height restrictions on headlights and a ban on foglights and multi-level headlights.
At some point, I (as a pedestrian being regularly blinded in the evening by improperly installed headlights) was tempted to buy 5000J flash bulb and build some self-defence “weapon” with proper optics.
Thankfully I moved to different country, and here this problem is uncommon.
What’s absurd is those aren’t even foglights. Foglights are dim and typically very orange, like French headlights since the war… Because too bright a light in fog will just splash back into your face.
My truck has very dim round sealed beam foglight bulbs like you’d expect from the 1970s, angled down and mounted low. It’s also a lot better off-road than many AWDs with more lift, it comes down to driver experience… but I shouldn’t brag
Factory installed led lights in Volvo and Audi, and all SUVs and vans are most certainly an issue. If you run on halogens, a 20 mile countryside drive will feel like having driven 40.
From my own experience the ADB fitted to cars here in the UK is mostly useless, being unable to cope with anything other than a straight, flat road. A bumpy road or a corner and suddenly you’re staring at a pair of LED neutron stars.
Manufacturers also seem to tune their ADB sensors purely to detect cars. If you’re a pedestrian, cyclist or motorcyclist, well you don’t count. As a motorcyclist who has astigmatism I’ve pretty much given up riding at night, it’s almost impossible to see anything due to the lights from approaching traffic.
The fix isn’t difficult. Forget about worthless tech like ADB, just put in place regulations to require vehicle lights be below a certain colour temperature and emit only a certain amount of their light in the blue spectrum. Make them look as close to halogen lights as possible, in other words.
Very much this. I drive a modern 2023 German car with “Matrix LED” which I understand is an ADB feature, and get angry blinks from oncoming traffic all the time except on flat and not-too-curvy road. I loved it the first time I used it (wow so smart it carves out a beam of darkness for that oncoming car!) but then stopped because of all the embarrassment and safety concerns.
ADB is total failure, even with newest european car models, is very slow to adapt ( maybe the premium and expensive models work best ). So you get blinded always on first encounter. Korean electric cars are the worst, do they even have that feature. It does not matter if the car behind you or comes towards you. When ADB car is driving behind you on twisty roads, you get blinded thru sidemirrors on turns. Because even if it detects your rear lights, let’s maximize light output by lighting ditches beside roads, even when not needed. And let’s never mention automatic Hi/Lo beam control.
“let’s maximize light output by lighting ditches beside roads, even when not needed.”
So, you don’t drive in urban, suburban, or places with wildlife?
I drive in rural areas where is wildlife “Finland”. Where I live it’s small village in rural area riddled with overpopulation of deer and elk/moose, so its good feature. But why ADB equipped car with ‘matrix’ lights with hi beams stills lights back of my head and sidemirrors and blinds me. System seem to detect that there is traffic front of it, but still uses hi beams every time when it sees dark areas on the side of my car. Its fine for straight roads, but not in windy roads, it’s too slow to react and lights keep coming on/off. Why just keep hi beams off, use only lo beams and fog lights. When there is no car front of it, by all means use everything you got.
I concur, ADB only works on straight level roads. Neither is terribly common in Finland.
Why engineer something not fit for purpose (LED headlights), then continue by engineering a complex and faulty compatibility layer (ADB) to make them moderately usable, when the original product (incandescent bulbs) worked perfectly? Are the companies involved really that afraid to admit they made a mistake?
As someone with halogen lights in their car right now I can verify that they dont in fact ‘work perfectly’. They function but modern systems when I’ve gotten to use them in a rental or the like are better, brighter, and illuminate at a greater distance than anything my halogens ever did. That and the fact that I have to replace the dang things on the regular makes them unfit for purpose comparatively.
All we need is for aftermarket reflector designs to be made for all older models of car at an affordable price. Then everyone in my situation could upgrade without causing disruption to others the way just throwing LEDs in as is does.
Halogen lights do in fact work perfectly. What doesn’t work perfectly is our desire to drive at excessive speeds in all conditions. If you are overdriving your lights, the solution is to slow down, not to blind oncoming traffic.
Better for YOU (in your opinion) and worse for everyone around you, IS worse.
How many actual studies on headlights, or road lighting in general have you read?
Headlights/road lights should be JUST bright enough for object recognition.
Brighter lights FEEL safer, but are not, and cause real problems for everyone, including the driver.
You make a valid point, but considering the plethora of old discontinued cars still rolling, its very unlikely someone would bother to make updated lights for any but the most common models.
If no other light sources were interfering, a 30+ year old pair of 50W sealed beam halogen headlights would be enough to see plenty far down the road at highway speed. The reason it’s not enough is that everything else is so much brighter that you can’t get your eyes to adjust.
As someone with halogen lights in their car right now I can verify that they dont in fact ‘work perfectly’. They function but modern systems when I’ve gotten to use them in a rental or the like are better, brighter, and illuminate at a greater distance than anything my halogens ever did. That and the fact that I have to replace the dang things on the regular makes them unfit for purpose comparatively.
All we need is for aftermarket reflector designs to be made for all older models of car at an affordable price. Then everyone in my situation could upgrade without causing disruption to others the way just throwing LEDs in as is does.
Another victim of the HaD Double Post “feature”! You’d think they’d come up with a hack to fix that or is it all bravado and blowing smoke?
Have you ever considered that brighter lights illuminating at greater distances are exactly what’s blinding the oncoming traffic?
But if I’ve got brighter lights, I can see the idiot driving into me head on like he’s blind…
…oh, whoops.
It’s not that simple – the shape of the beam is important. Modern headlights (when correctly aimed) put more light on the ground with less light in the eyes of oncoming drivers.
The drawback is that when they’re not properly aimed, the “more” that should go on the ground ends up going into the eyes of oncoming drivers.
This seems to be compounded by drivers who are unable to figure out why they’re getting flashes of high beams everywhere they go.
Unfortunately, all that clever beam engineering is rendered pointless when you go over a bump in the road and blind everyone anyways.
Throwing more light isn’t inherently a good thing – the eye takes time to adapt so when you have miniature suns blasting out of your car to bounce back at you and are being dazzled by the intense blast from everyone else’s you are more blind in the dark than you would be with everyone using more modest illumination – seriously sit outside away from any unexpected lights for a while and on most nights you’ll be able to see pretty well just in the moon light, at least until you turn your phone/torch on and ruin the night vision, at which point you’ll be virtually blind.
Of course now the arms race for brighter and brighter spotlights that will render you blind to everything in gloom and dazzle everyone else is already in progress…
If you’re well adapted to the dark, you can walk around by starlight and read a book (or drive, but don’t do this) by moonlight. In times past, people told the story of how in a power outage in LA, there were 911 calls from people who had no idea they were looking at the milky way. Now, I wonder if some people would be surprised to learn that the moon can cast shadows, or that it’s meant to be brighter on a clear moonless night than a cloudy one.
Incandescent bulbs sucked. I still have them in two vintage cars. They fail, a rock gets flipped up and cracks them, they’re hot, and they suck up more power than anything else on the car, and with all that, they are TERRIBLE in driving in the dark because they’re still dim. Sure partly I’m complaining about Lucas, but partly I think incandescent bulbs were terrible. I’ve replaced the side marker lights with LED and they’re both brighter and suck up less power.
What car has the bulb directly exposed to rocks?
The heat is a good thing – keeps the lens from icing over.
As someone driving old cars, i can attest that a -99 Saab 9-5 has excellent halogen lights. With legal limit H7 halogen lights and reflectors in good working order, you get enough light as long as you dont drive faster than 100 mph. More than likely your cars have either crappy design before function reflecfors, or oxidized mirror surfaces/crappy electric leads to the lights.
If it’s vintage, surely it was sealed beams where the actual bulb is way behind all the rest? And they only consumed 100 watts or so. Much less than things like air conditioning if you had it or at least the radiator fans if not. They’re supposed to be hot, and they’re mostly just dim compared to the absolute retina scorching lights everywhere now – they worked fine back in the day.
Brightness and intensity are not the same. For instance, you can comfortably look directly at a traditional 40W tungsten light bulb for an extended period because its light is distributed over a broad area. In contrast, a milliwatt laser can cause blindness due to its concentrated light. The same principle applies to car headlights. Older cars had large headlights that emitted light evenly over a wide area, whereas modern LED headlights are highly intense pinpoints of light that can be painful to look at. Instead of blaming the technology, the issue lies with prioritizing aesthetics over practicality and the shrinking size of the emission aperture in modern headlights.
Yes and modern high-intensity lamps exhibit a sharply defined transition between illuminated and non-illuminated areas. On uneven road surfaces, this abrupt cutoff can cause noticeable fluctuations in light intensity as the vehicle tilts upward or downward. In contrast, older-style lamps feature a more gradual light distribution at the edges, reducing this effect and providing a more comfortable experience for oncoming traffic.
Blue light is not inherent to LEDs, it’s a choice by manufacturers. The same as you can buy warm led bulbs for your house, warm, even amber, LED bulbs could be made. But manufacturers have chosen to make cool blue piercing LEDs because on paper they’re more efficient, plus they look “cool” and “futuristic”. LEDs can also be made brighter or dimmer.
LEDs are not the problem as a technology. It’s the types of LEDs that are being sold.
Yes it is. All practical white LEDs work by down-converting from blue using phosphors, which means there is necessarily a strong blue spike in the spectrum even when the color temperature is nominally low. The spectrum does not wind down smoothly towards the shorter wavelengths like it does with halogens – there is always a spike at the frequency of the actual LED emission frequency and the rest is secondary emission from the phosphor.
If you don’t want blue spike emitting white LEDs, your options are either RGB LEDs which are far more expensive and suffer from color fringing and rainbow projection issues because each emitter is separated physically so each color comes from a different spot on the die, or you use UV diodes instead of blue, which is both more costly and less efficient, and has a shorter lifespan, and it leaks UV.
No, you can just convert away almost all the blue by using more phosphor, or filter it out if you want to be thorough. I have some cheap colored polycarbonate glasses that do this well enough that they’re safe against direct hits from blue lasers, while still passing most of the light below the cutoff just fine. With those, you’d see less blue from a led than you’d see from an incandescent without the glasses, I believe. So put the same material in front of the led if you want.
Thank you. I’d only add the taller height of modern vehicles means more likely those more laser-like lamps will be aimed in the eyes of other road users.
The light leveling control, or the headlamp leveling system, is a small dial typically found to the lower side of the steering column. It lets you adjust the height of your vehicle’s headlights to compensate for the car’s load and angle. However, many people aren’t aware of this feature, and mechanics often leave it set to the highest position. Lowering it by just one notch won’t affect your visibility but can greatly reduce the risk of blinding other drivers.
“Ultimately the solution appears to be adaptive driving beam headlights (ADB), a technology that constantly adjusts the headlights to the circumstances.”
FFS, why change a thing that already works? The solution is not always more tech..
The thing is new headlights save lives, not everyone drives on well lit roads only.
If you can’t see at night with a pair of 55-watt halogens helping you, you shouldn’t be driving at night at all.
Have to disagree here, welll made h7 halogens reflectors made of glass leave nothing to be desired when new. The cheap plastic reflectors made from the early 2ks => HID LED lights took over are totally useless.
Or we could have corner cubes as standard equipment for car grills and provide “feedback” to oncoming drivers on the effectiveness of their LED headlights.
“I suggest a full frontal assault with automated laser monkeys, scalpel mines and acid.” – Strax
You joke but there are laser headlights.
https://youtu.be/lVtnH0KscS4
You joke but there are laser headlights.
https://youtu.be/lVtnH0KscS4
You joke but there are laser headlights.
https://youtu.be/lVtnH0KscS4
You joke but there are laser headlights.
You joke but are there laser headlights?
There laser lights are but joke is ?
Gin juke mutt mare are graser bed fights.
https://youtu.be/PwpD3USKEKw
LED much better for me. I have foheen reisch and am blinded by the red light halogens or incandescents put out. Also causes intense burning eye pain and 10 to 15 seconds of almost complete blindness. I used to have to wear dark red blocking sunglasses to drive at night or be in building with incandescent lights. Would turn headlights off when alone on road as could see better by moonlight or even starlight. About 20 years ago I installed a pair of $3500 at the time HID lights on car, now can leave on when alone on dark road. Since then have upgraded to LED on same car. With many adopting LED, I rarely have to wear sunglasses at night, normally just close eyes for a few seconds when car with incandescents approaching.
And I have to do it for these LEDs, lasers and bad HIDs. I think we should go night vision goggles for all and quit the light pollution.
I remember fondly doing 190 mph on a deserted highway in a friend’s 1980s corvette headlights off while wearing Vietnam-era night vision goggles. Few moments of waking life have been as thrilling as that.
Try it in a helicopter!
…or a C-130
Are you offering? ;)
“normally just close eyes for a few seconds when car with incandescents approaching.”
You’re describing someone who should not be driving ever.
Or you can apply limo dark tint to the area where oncomming traffic is lighting it up. I have a graduated 3 layers of that on the left hand side of the window which pisses off everyone else driving my (dare I say it) F250 since I am light sensitive and all you yahoos have your &£€%™©© lihhts aimed too high. Works even for them lifted over lit never seen dirt offroad things.
From my experience there is another problem. Whenever i ask mom or friends or other people about beam height switch, they don’t know what l’m talking about.
So i think that problem is not only too much trust in automatic systems, but also some kind of lack of knowledge how lights should work like.
How’s your experience with friends?
If I asked a hundred people, friends or strangers, 90% would have no idea what adjusting the beam height means.
Beyond the basic minimum driving controls, nobody cares.
I need to know what every button or function is on every everything I own. Always. And then I need to figure out the most efficient way to use it, least presses, smallest hand movements, shortest time.
I suspect I’m a bit of an exception.
An outlier.
Ii modern cars with automatic height adjustment you often don’t have this manual button…
Displays can only get so bright and this a discussion of night driving? Displays should not even be in a car at any time visible to the driver, this is common sense and is an even bigger problem than headlights used only at night. There was a standard for in dash info, 8 characters in several seconds. Eye focus needs to be at distance all the time without in-dash distractions.
I rode in someones car at night with a tablet sized aftermarket “radio” glaring blue light with no way to dim it when headlights are on vs. day. Looking out of that car I was blinded, but he thought it was OK. I’ve seen disco lights blinking in the inside of cars.
Could some standard up to date unit light be integrated into all cars and trucks like sealed beams were for so long? These things can be smaller than old sealed beams. That way camera or cop almost anything else would be tagged and the rest of us can get back to driving. The current way is unenforceable.
So no speedometer no fuel guage and no check engine light. Gotcha.
That federal standard applied to texts and numbers like phone numbers not near static information of the steam gage era. You can’t look at line of text scrolling on a display for several seconds to read it and drive. Call letters or frequency speed etc. OK, digital tach dumb and distracting. Oh and they put a tach out on the hood or use heads up to keep that slow to re-focus pill of protoplasm in your eye focused out there. Race drivers know this. Red light during night patrol and sky watching has been standard practice for a long time.
the red light for nigt vision is interesting — my best experience is with green light as dim as possible (good illumination in the dark, while nearly impossible to discern if on or off in daylight)
So, what is really at the core is that we have better regulation.
“Better? Or worse?”
We certainly have more of it. I loved your work in Half-Life 2 btw
This is a non problem. If you don’t look at the lights, they don’t blind you. Simply watch the road ahead and it’s not an issue.
No, they still blind you.
You clearly havent met a bad LED high beam.
One of the biggest problems come from misadjusted headlights. When you buy a new car the steering is NOT aligned and the headlights are NOT adjusted. the factory puts them “in the aproximate” range of good. If you don’t believe me do a search for an alignment rack in a manufacturing facility. The headlights should be pointed slightly down and to the right (USA) so you don’t blind drivers. I drive a 2005 Jeep Wrangler with sealed beam headlights. My headlights have to be adjusted with each bulb replacement. My headlights converge about 100 feet in front and on the fog line (passenger side white street marking). Use your favorite search engine to look up your specific aiming procedure. https://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/a257/how-to-adjust-lights/
I fully concur however that some aftermarket bulbs are horrendous. Our mail service just replaced the light on the older mail trucks with the intensity of white hot sun that you can’t even look towards when they are approaching.
If someone’s headlights are that bright no amount of adjustment will make them safe.
I don’t drive on smooth flat straight roads. The sharp cut-off on many modern lights just means it’s a more distracting flash as the car behind hits a bump or goes over a hill. I’ve been known to fold in my wing mirrors to avoid dazzle from following cars. (No there’s not always somewhere safe to stop to let them past and they often slipstream but refuse to overtake)
I put darkening films on the side windows on the spots where the mirrors are. Helped a bunch, and can still see if reversing in the dark by lowering the window 3 inches.
There is nothing stopping manufacturers from installing LED headlights with a lower color temperature.
This does not remove the strong blue spike in the light spectrum. Color temperature is simply the average of long vs. short wavelengths. You can lower the color temperature by adding deep red,but your eye will still respond badly to the remaining blue component, which you can’t remove because a white LED is a blue LED with phosphors painted on top to convert some of the light to longer wavelengths.
Yeah ideally for safety-critical stuff and street lighting they’d use a filter that actually blocks the blue spike instead of covering it up with a red spike, kind of like spraying febreeze all over a pair of sweaty underpants.
But that would lead to inefficiency!!! We’ll just have to see what the results are in 40 years when all nocturnal insects die out from butting their heads against streetlights
What about yellow light ? Those use blue lights also ?
Proper yellow or amber LEDs are direct emission – no blue, but also very monochromatic. Anything that looks “white” and allows you to see in color, whether tinted blue or yellow, is made with a blue diode and some combination of phosphor dyes.
For the lower color temperatures like 2700K, they include additional red phosphors to pull the weighted average of the spectrum down, so instead of a continuous spectrum you have a light that is predominantly blue, greenish yellow, and red, which is the reason for the poor color rendering properties of white LEDs. This gives you a CRI somewhere around 80 which is common for household bulbs.
Manufacturers could use additional phosphor dyes and filters to further reduce the blue emission and even out the spectrum to almost the same (CRI=97) as an incandescent bulb (CRI=100), but this will reduce the light output and cost more, so they don’t. They get the best lumens/Watt output at the lowest price with a piercing blue-yellow LED (CRI=50-60).
https://www.softlights.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/LED-Spectral-Graphs.jpg
Here you can see an illustrative graph. In the 4000K and 5000K curves you can see three distinct peaks: those correspond to the blue diode and the yellow-green and the red-amber phosphors used for this particular LED lamp. The color temperature is simply a product of varying their relative intensity.
Even at 2700K the blue spike is still present – it’s just dominated by the color of the phosphors. In a halogen lamp, the blue spike would be completely gone and the spectrum would slope down smoothly from 500 nm towards 420 nm. It’s this blue spike that dazzles the eye when looking directly at the light in the dark, because it corresponds to natural light at a much greater intensity. The eye tries to adjust as if it was seeing more light when it’s not.
Yes you can, either use more phosphor to reduce the blue further, or use a cheap filter to block the remainder. See my other comment; if the same wavelength can be blocked by cheap color-filtered safety glasses with minimal light loss (80% transmission in the passband IIRC), it can be done on headlights or wherever else.
Surely LED lamps with improper beam patterns are illegal?
If I tried that I’d just changed to replace them with something legal.
Who is to know when there are states with no annual safety inspections *?
Leds are an issue even with emergency vehicles. Blue lights on police cars will leave you seeing stars.
A very valid point, same applies to emergency vehicles with blue lights, depending on your locale.
Tip of the hat to the artist. I feed bad for that car as it experiences the trauma of its mutant power manifesting for the first time.
Anyone want to pool our funds to pay to have a Cyclops-style ruby visor drawn on the poor thing?
The biggest issue with after market LED bulbs is that the actual source of the light, which used to essentially a point source, is now larger and a different shape – typically longer and protruding more in the front and rear directions. This means a reflector for a halogen or incandescent bulb is no longer reflecting the light properly because the source of the light isn’t in the same spot. The light is effectively “out of focus” and throwing light where it was not intended to go.
It’s not just lumens, is the direction those lumens are put to work.
This! Reflectors made for halogen bulbs are designed to reflect light from a very precise location within a bulb… which is exactly where the original filament would be. There are no LED bulbs that accurately place an LED in this location. Indeed, it’s quite impossible since at best, there are two LEDs installed back-to-back and separated by a strip of metal meant to pull heat from the back of the LEDs. Therefore, a perfect focus can never be achieved. This is why attempting to recreate a sharp cut-off in a headlight designed for a halogen bulb results a blurry mess with even the best LED replacements.
For some lucky reason LEDs in my 2016 Honda HRV have an excellent pattern with a sharp cutoff. Never been flashed ny oncoming drivers.
Adaptive headlights are the answer. Mercedes has had it for years. The lights are still a confidence inspiring, light up the sky kind of bright in the right conditions. When meeting oncoming traffic, or when following another vehicle on the road, the lights becomes smart and noticeably less offensive to the opposing driver by design.
It’s an excellent system. Very reliable.
The best part is no one flashes you anymore and if you meet a vehicle equiped with this feature on the highway at night, that persons vision confidence is maintained while still not overly sacrificing your own. There’s a lot of safety in that.
I have a 2094 L322 Range Rover with HID lamps and they are quite adequate with out being annoying. In addition my truck is so gentlemanly it has a shutter that when on low beam limits the light from traveling much above horizontal. I can’t say it’s great for every car I meet on the road at night, but for the majority off passenger cars you won’t be blinded as we meet on the road
♪♫♪ Uuuuuh blinded by the (led) lights ♪♫♪
If I recall, don’t train engineers dim their lights when passing another train?
I don’t drive, but even as a pedestrian, having twin supernova burn your retinas out of your skull
while you’re trying to cross a street in addition to the having the bright white street lights shining
down from above turning everything in their path a stark white-gray along with people who wear dark
clothing at night that decide to cross in front of your car just as the light turns green.
Lighting up every square centimeter of a city isn’t the answer. Having headlights that can light up Mars
from New York City isn’t the answer. People are already having trouble seeing in the dark as their night
vision is being affected by these streetlights, headlights, computers, phones, tablets……
I think and this is my own opinion, that there will be a time when someone born today will never be
able to have the night vision that people in the 1970’s had. Also, in Australia, aren’t the lines on the
road painted with fluorescent paint so they glow under UV light? More light isn’t the answer.
People are wearing sunglasses at night because these new LED lights are brighter than Betelgeuse.
I see cars on the road all the time with one headlight out. They’ll pass a cop and the cop does nothing.
Then you see the ads for “Battle Vision” anti-glare glasses for driving at night.
Even some bike lights are ridiculously bright. So we have all these technologies emitting ‘blue’ light
and they sell sunglasses to eliminate the ‘blue’ light. I’m so glad I rarely go out at night anymore.
Autonomous vehicles shouldn’t have a problem.
“autonomous” Tesla’s that rely 100% on vision systems don’t have problems because according to Telsla’s lawyers it’s the vehicle operator’s fault when the cars FU and turn off their controls a fraction of a second before an accident and the human operator is “in full control” at the time of accident.
Yep. A failure mode that tosses accountability into the lap of a lulled-to-sleep human after long periods of inaction is a crime. It can’t be merely hand-waved away by claiming “he should have been paying perfect close attention for hours of dull, repetitive stimulus that required absolutely no input on his part.” That is almost custom-designed to produce bad reaction times in humans. They know it and don’t care.
Here[tm] we use that for greeting, the lights are rather position lights than illuminating lights. That said, in the last 20 .. 30 years high beams became common, and some locos aren’t any more capable of dimming the head lights. Additionally, the light switch doesn’t switch the light any more, but tells the board computer to switch the lights, which means every so often I press the button twice for a short blink, the computer only gets one of these, and I end up blasting the oncoming train with a full high beam :-(
Worst thing at night are the displays, which produce about 70% of all the light you get in your eye outside railway stations (even in dark mode), so I cover them with three sheets of paper. Luckily the “interesting” things are on real instruments, which emit much less light, and if something pops up on the covered display, I can readily see that through the paper. After 10 minutes in the dark the “position” lights are bright enough to see more in front of you than you would see using the high beams (due to the shadows it casts next to the light).
One of my EE professors espoused the idea that all vehicles should have polarized headlights and windshield glass. If, for example, everyone’s lights and windshields were polarized at 45 degrees upward and to the right, you would see light from your vehicle (and others traveling in your same direction) strongly, but your windshield would attenuate the headlight beams of oncoming vehicles because they’d be at cross polarization.
What could go wrong?
That’s an interesting idea. But that still wouldn’t solve the problem of pedestrians, unless the pedestrian wears polarized glasses as well.
What would go wrong is that polarizing filters block out a great deal of light, so you would be driving with a heavily tinted windshield.
When you illuminate an object, the light that comes back at you may be reflected or re-emitted by the atoms of your object. Reflections change the polarization depending on the angle of reflection, and re-emission gives you a photon with a random polarization that may or may not pass through your filter, so you will see a big drop in the brightness of objects viewed through your filter even it it was 100% efficient at the polarization of your choice.
Polarizing filters are not 100% efficient, so you would see a big light drop both in emitting the light and receiving it back, requiring you to push something like 4-5 times more power to the headlights to cancel the effect. Then everyone else on the road who isn’t wearing polarizing glasses would be blinded, including people who look at your lights through the rear view mirror.
50% of the polarized light is not passed through the filter.
Obviously such a concept would actually need real world testing but 4-5 times is massively overstating it once you put the concept in the real world IMO – once you get rid of the being badly dazzled by the weaponised headlights of oncoming traffic issue you could drop the output power of the system to 1960’s headlight levels and nobody would really suffer anyway. Yes it isn’t going to be perfectly transmissive or blocking and the reflections won’t all be correct, but when neither side is now blinding the other so the eyes can stay adapted for dimmer light…
Even just having a slight polarisation filter that is deliberately aiming to only block 20% say of the wrong light on the windscreen with as good as you can get on the headlights would be a huge improvement – you have then turned the eye searing bright really tight beam of modern headlights down while making very little difference to general visibility.
If you lose 50% of the light through one filter, and then 50% of the light through the second filter, you’re left with 25% of the light that was originally emitted, minus the amount that was re-polarized by the objects to the wrong direction.
Polarizing filters are like sunglasses. Put two shades on and see how much you can make out in the dark.
One of my EE professors espoused the idea that all vehicles should have polarized headlights and windshield glass. If, for example, everyone’s lights and windshields were polarized at 45 degrees upward and to the right, you would see light from your vehicle (and others traveling in your same direction) strongly, but your windshield would attenuate the headlight beams of oncoming vehicles because they’d be at cross polarization.
What could go wrong?
What I hate even more are those combined tail/brake lights which cause distracting trails of after images every time your focus shifts. They’re just using a single set of LEDs and dim them using PWM in normal operation and only power them continuously while actually braking. Every night drive feels like an LSD trip nowadays.
I dont notice LEDs being that much of a problem, what i have noticed is many people seem to drive with their high beams activated. I can tell bc many cars light up 4 bulbs instead of 2 when theyre using them.
Sounds like a you problem, not a me problem. More brighter more gooder. Btw I also drive with the transmission in top gear at all times, and the windshield wipers set to maximum even when it’s not raining
A lot of well designed halogen lights were fantastic and from a standpoint of not blinding oncoming victims vs. visibility for the driver, performed very well. Halogen lighting became extremely commoditized and manufacturers sought “the next big thing” – Let us introduce high intensity discharge! The pinnacle of automotive headlights was the HID/Xenon lights. Energy efficient (as compared to Halogen), super well-collimated light with mechanical cutoffs for low beam mode which (when properly aligned) kept the bright light below oncoming drivers line of sight while providing fantastic illumination with a lifespan of bulb+ballast that commonly reaches 20 years.
Unfortunately, HID lighting became commoditized and manufacturers wanted the “next big thing” to generate profits for the investors and make cars look cool. Introduce the most poorly collimated light source ever! Hello LED! What’s that? We can’t really control how wildly diffused this light source is for the automotive application? That’s ok! Screw those oncoming drivers! Make them brighter!!!
The switch to LED headlights had nothing to do with energy efficiency, as automotive alternators have continued to grow, not shrink. Typical LED headlight current is not much less than its halogen counterpart, if less at all.
It was the worst design move for automotive headlights ever, and those who think they can see better are simply reacting to the ridiculous diffusion of the light source causing them to perceive better vision due to greater peripheral light scatter. Another big factor for “oh wow my LED headlights are better” deception is the fact that most of the HID/Halogen vehicles that people think of were 10-20 years old when they decided that they couldn’t see well with them, due to the headlight assembly needing a new bulb, or needing the lens sanded and re-coated in new urethane (You know the cars I am talking about – Lens so oxidized that it looks yellow because the clear wore off 10 years ago and they just kept driving it while complaining about it).
IMO the best automotive lights ever were the HID-Halogen combos with HID for low beam and halogen for high beam. The HID low beam remains on when the high beam is activated. I have several old beater cars with this design; With the lenses sanded and recoated and decent (DOT approved) bulbs I can see upwards of a quarter mile in front of me and the contrast of the illuminated path in front of me is so fantastic… I have never seen an LED light that comes close to this (not even the truck lights which should probably be illegal due to the fact that they are blinding to the point of causing pain for oncoming drivers even in low beam mode) and I have never seen any LED headlight be able to provide the excellent contrast between illuminated objects that these older technologies provide – With LED everything gets washed out, terrible contrast ratio and many of them are diffused enough that you are practically blinding yourself with your own headlights (from the close objects illuminated) without getting any benefit over a bottom of the barrel halogen from 2 decades ago.
2 words: fresnel lense. Don’t see these anymore on headlights. Used to be on all the filament bulbs for light pattern aiming
Simply overloading the back of the vehicle will point those lights up into people’s faces. I understand that there is a lot more overhead lighting in European countries, such that there are zones where headlights are not allowed and not needed?
As a former optical engineer, some basic optics. The smaller the light source for a given power the more intense it will be, therefore the greater the likelihood of it causing temporary blindness. Unfortunately LED’s are very small light sources. Whilst it is possible to spread the beam with fancy headlight optics real world conditions such as rain drops or a dirty or even smeared windscreen can bring the beam back into focus at the retina of an oncoming driver or cyclist, resulting in a head on collision .
The blinding risk to a driver using headlights is backscatter in heavy rain or fog . This problem was recognised by the French early in the 20th century, and solved by the use of yellow headlights. It worked, as a side effect also reducing eye strain for all, they should be compulsory everywhere!!
The short wavelength and high intensity of LED light sources can only make this problem worse. The fitting of Pairs of LED headlights to cars, and single LED headlights to motorcycles should be banned. To be used safely for headlights LED,s need to be configured into a far greater number of forward facing lights, thankfully LED’s being physically smaller and producing less heat allows this to be done, the result should be the safest vehicle lighting in automotive history.
Unfortunately cars are normally sold in daylight with thier lights switched off, therefore are designed to look good under these conditions. This is now obviously reducing safety and needs to be corrected!!
Nobody says anything about pedestrians when I take my dog out at night I can’t see a thing in front of me when I am walking
At the speed you are moving, you can safely stop and look away. In a car, you cant look away and stopping in the winter is not an option
Another huge issue is when the opposing car is coming at you on an incline – you are staring right into their blue laser-like headlamps. We need to regulate the lumens and reach of the headlamps, and (wishfully) the temperature also.
On my Chevy ’11 Tahoe, ’15 Silverado and ’18 Silverado (I was leasing for a while, that is an entirely different discussion) the headlights were originally aimed considerably uphill from the factory. I re-aimed the lights to the top of the headlight spot was slightly downhill. In a “level” parking lot this was about 2 inches across the width of 2 parking spots. People suddenly stopped flashing brights at me all the time.
The ’18 had LED lights that were awful, very very blue. My -6 diopter glasses had chromatic aberration where the reflection from my truck’s headlights would not stay on road signs. There was no recourse. I was told to get eye surgery by the dealer.
I now drive a 2021 Crosstrek, and will be keeping it for many reasons, headlights being near the top of the list, with initial reliability as the primary reason. There is no need for LED headlights to be garbage. Since moving in ’20 I have less need of a truck, and can still rent or borrow one as needed.
This is the fault of the federal government and its failure to regulate imports. Prior to eBay and Amazon becoming so popular with importing cheap Chinese electronics all bulbs and lighting accessories for your car had to be DOT Approved. Actually they still do. But you don’t see the government doing anything about unapproved lighting equipment coming in via these Chinese mass marketers.
Therefore, you have vehicle lighting. That is way too bright.
Unfortunately, it’s like an arms race. I held off upgrading my lights because I didn’t want to blind people. However, about 6 months ago, I realized that the majority of the vehicles in my area have obnoxiously bright LED headlights that are painfully obviously not factory. When those vehicles are coming at you, they dilate your pupils and after they pass then it’s really dark and my headlights become ineffective and I can’t see anything for a while. And of course every car that comes head on at you causes this.
Well like I said it’s an arms race. I had to finally break down and go through the LEDs in so that I can see the road myself with all this other light pollution being focused in my eyes
I drive a 2023 Chevy Traverse for work. The headlights are HID and are actually located in the bumper cover just below the level of the bottom of the grille. They have a mechanical “baffle” inside at the top of the assembly that covers the top 1/3 of the lens when on low beams, Giving a very distinct cutoff. Stoped in traffic, the cutoff is just below the rear window of even smaller cars, yet people still flash their high beams at me. I nail them back and then they honk. They aren’t out of adjustment either as I had the dealer look at them after the first couple incidents…
All of the LED replacement bulbs available in my local auto parts stores are marked “For off road use only”… Not clearly, it’s usually buried in the small print.
I have a tendency to drive one of two types of vehicle. My wife’s vehicles are all Jeeps (1951 CJ-3A to 1997 TJ) which are taller (even when not lifted). Mine tend to be four cylinder cars (currently a 2008 Subaru Impreza). They are much closer to the ground. There are times when oncoming vehicles are way too bright presumably because they have badly adjusted headlights. People don’t seem to care.
Yes these issues are fixable. But getting people to care enough to fix them is going to be an uphill struggle.
Emergency vehicles, esp police cars, are the biggest problem. They have so many lights going in so many directions. And those lights are intense!
It’s very difficult for me to drive past them. Sometimes I have a physical headache after an encounter.
LEDs are not the problem. USA lack of proper driver training, complete lack of enforcement and poor infrastructure is the problem.
Idiots use high beams all the time, won’t respond to flashes and cops don’t care to enforce the rules. Try that in Europe. Cops would chase you down the road to issue ticket for such behavior.
Cars with various modifications, especially cheap chinese LEDs in housings unsuitable for such bulbs and offroad LED bars used in the middle of the city. Unfortunately in the US inspection only really cares about emissions, no one cares to check and adjust the lights.
Roads are bad, bumpy and this causes lights to shoot in the windshields of the incoming traffic. USA still didn’t figure out that they can install small flags on the barriers to prevent blinding from the incoming traffic. There is hope, I saw small section with that feature on a new stretch in PA recently.
I live and drive around tri-state area and I drive at night more often than during the day. I don’t have a problem with modern cars with LEDs. When I’m blinded the problem is always caused by idiot between steering wheel and the seat. I despise Honda drivers who for some reason are the worst and most frequent abusers of high-beams. Even worse are offroad wannabees or Uber rocketships with amazon LED bar specials that obviously are marked for offroad use, but no cop will ever issue a ticket for this junk.
My idea (that never got built) from 2016..
https://hackaday.io/project/11142-active-shutter-vehicle-headlight-glare-reduction