- cross-posted to:
- fuck_cars
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
- cross-posted to:
- fuck_cars
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
cross-posted from: https://feddit.nl/post/26864473
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/184198
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Stop building so many SUVs and Trucks, and go back to sedans/hatchbacks/wagons and there problem solved!
The headlights that are basically as bright as most cars high beams. Should be illegal
My Subaru has lights that seem to be getting dimmer, at least relative to too many cars. I can get LED replacements. They’re not legal since the projectors wouldn’t change but they’re widely available and would help me
My service station even offered to do it for me.
Incandescent bulbs wear out and go dim over time. I bought some new ones and it solved the issue. Philips Xtreme vision is what I got, it was $15 for the pair.
Maybe ill give it a try - you’re right they’re cheap (although I’ll stick with legitimate replacements, not LEDs)
In basically every single LED headlight they’re the same thing, just angled up or down.
Sort of the same thing, but differences in color temperature matter a lot when it comes to perceived brightness.
Also cutoff height, which changes with every bump in the road. It’s like being flashed with high beams half the time.
My newer car has a very sharp cutoff height so normally it probably is ok. But I don’t know of any roads without bumps
i hate them, i hate them, i fucking hate them
I call driving at night, participating in the mass blinding. It’s fucking terrible.
In a PURELY utilitarian sense would there be more overall harm by me driving around with my brights on to piss people off and therefore incrementally accelerate any solution here, or just drive with normal headlights? Serious question actually. Btw people don’t flash their brights any more - nobody can tell if you have them on or not, because half the cars on the road appear to have them on at all times.
Vehicle size is another issue that comes up regularly, since NHTSA regulations for headlights don’t include a standardized mounting height, even as cars have ballooned in size in recent years. This means a perfectly aligned headlight in a larger car can still wreak havoc on a smaller car: “Where the [midsize] Civic might not give you glare,” Trechter, the former lighting engineer, said, “that F-350 [truck], if you’re sitting in a [sport-size] Miata, is gonna absolutely wreck your eyeballs.”
I drive a midsize sedan an I often have my rear-view and side mirrors lit by these trucks. It’s stupid they’re even allowed.
Taller vehicles need two kinds of headlight: a higher intensity mounted low to illuminate the path, and a lower intensity mounted high to illuminate retro-reflective surfaces like traffic signs.
If a transport truck can have lights at a reasonable height and angle that don’t blind me, so can a standard pick up truck. Many transports actually have their lights mounted lower than pick up trucks and full size SUVs.
Transport trucks don’t “need” super-high ground clearance the way 4x4s do. In order to get a vehicle like this to have headlights at a reasonable height, they’d need to be mounted on the axle, LOL:
(Or vehicles modified that extensively would have to stop being street legal; that would work too.)
Edit: to be clear, this was never intended to be a defense of lifted 4x4s, only an example of just how incompatible their headlight heights can be and how difficult it could be to fix that.
Yeah, the question is not how difficult it is to do, but why that would be street legal. Of course enjoy your toys: vehicles like that are great fun. However if you can’t meet the headlight or bumper requirements to be street legal, it just shouldn’t be street legal. Keep your toy on the trail
The headlights could have been located lower on the grill where the orange turning signals are currently located.
Guess I should’ve found a pic with even bigger tires and even less front grille/bumper! (I would’ve used this as a better example, but I’m pretty sure it’s at the point where the guy trailers it to the off-road trail rather than driving it on the street.)
But seriously though, even on the Jeep pictured, even just the turn signal height is probably about the same as the roof of a Miata.
And almost nobody driving on public roads needs that kind of road clearance either.
Well then I guess a hot take… Those vehicles shouldn’t be street legal at night with those modifications unless you have some sort of alternative light system you can bolt on that brings the height down.
Plus theere are no fenders or mudflaps on that one. Which is illegal in some places as there is nothing to prevent rocks or other debris from being thrown around by the tires.
Aside from the “at night” part – I’m not sure it makes sense to make the vehicle non-street-legal only part of the time when the necessary equipment is missing entirely – I already agreed:
(Or vehicles modified that extensively would have to stop being street legal; that would work too.)
I wish my car had the profile settings to automatically move to prest positions, because then I would have one profile set to specifically be aligned to reflect high beams behind me to aim directly back at a truck tailgating me.
I have done this in a parking lot before to someone parked behind me.
Seriously, if you park your car, turn off your beams ffs.
Same goes for the drive thru! You don’t need your headlights to see 12 inches in front of you in a line.
For as long as I’ve owned a car I’ve dreamed of installing a flip-up mirror in my back window for this purpose
You don’t really need a second set of lights for signs. The light reflecting off the ground from your 9 trillion lumen headlights, and the efficiency of reflective signs are plenty.
Most LED lights have a VERY sharp cutoff. Without the light reflecting off other things anything outside of the line of fire is almost pitch black.
Reflective signs are specifically efficient at reflecting light back at their source and nowhere else (retroreflectivity). Obviously it’s not perfect, but the fact that that cone is so narrow is part of why it looks so bright (not dissimilar from the cutoff of the LED lights you are describing). Meaning that light reflected off the roadway before reaching the sign will generally be reflected back at the roadway. With how large some vehicle grills are being built nowadays, it may be possible for a low mounted headlight to be far enough away from the driver that retroreflective signs are no longer as effectively illuminated for the driver. Truckers probably already deal with this, I haven’t driven in one, but I suspect road signs are not as well illuminated for the driver as in other vehicles. We don’t rely solely on retroreflectivity to make our signs visible, so it’s not all or nothing, but it may be worth keeping some nominal illumination (could be like moderate flashlight levels of brightness) at driver level so we can continue to take advantage of retroreflective technology
Fucking blue lights. Also fuck Teslas that do auto brights because that shit does NOT work correctly.
I drove this rental Toyota a few weeks ago that did not let me not use the autobrights, and they blinded a bunch of people and I’m horrified.
Sorry everyone.
deleted by creator
My dad drove a '56 Cadillac for many years, with a factory-fitted electric eye on the dash that would dim high beams if oncoming lights were detected. It was a simple system that worked really well. So it says something about Tesla if they managed to fuck that up.
I think you’re shitting on the wrong car. I don’t trust auto-brights for exactly the reason you give but so far my Tesla’s are flawless and react before I can. Auto brights are common now and most of them suck
I can tell you from years of experience, Tesla high beams will turn on and blind me all the fucking time regardless of time of day. So please, don’t patronize me and my experience.
You’re not paying attention if they can react faster than you can. It’s not hard to notice headlights coming from around a turn.
And the auto-brights also notice them
95% of the time I get blinded by an oncomming car’s headlights, it is either a Tesla or a Mercedes.
The vast majority, it is a Tesla.
I read somewhere that a Tesla resets their headlight possitioning to the default value after every software update.
If that is true, I have two responses:
- That is fucking dumb.
- I wouldn’t be surprised if it would actually be determined to be illegal, though they would probably argue that it is the driver’s responsibility to check their vehicle before driving, which would be a fair argument unless if the car didn’t change the settings on it’s own.
Unfortunately it is not just Telsa and Mercedes, I went out and surveyed this in a parking lot after an event a while back, while people were filtering out and getting in their cars to leave. It’s many makes, Toyota, Kia, Chevy, Dodge etc.
How did you do that?
If the lights an equipped with auto-levelling feature, it will beam them down and up again upon every start for 2 reasons:
- to test, the levelling mechanism isn’t broken
- to prove during inspection, that this feature is not broken.
In any state that requires safety inspections that is 100% definitely illegal, proper headlight alignment is one of the things required to be checked to pass an inspection.
The question I had was if the responsibillity would be on the driver or on Tesla.
Interesting. I always wonder about that for my Tesla. The lights are insanely bright, but there’s also a clear sharp cutoff. I can see my headlights not shining above bumper height on the car in front of me. It seems like it is working as claimed and should not cause glare
Sure enough, other Tesla’s are the same. There might be a brief flash at certain angles but in general Tesla headlights are easy on the eyes.
Same with Audi …… except some seem stuck on high beam
It’s other cars. I don’t know if people just drive with high beams on, or trucks have headlights too far off the ground, or people replace their old style bulbs with LED, without replacing the projectors
I’ve been pondering a very similar design. I feel that if I can fix a mirror down and it completely blinds the car behind me using their own lumens, then that’s their problem.
A 5 kwatt Xenon strobe would be even more effective.
/s because even on Lemmy, you never who when some literal-minded fool will go try it and get someone killed.
