Just yesterday I read a news article about removing tall overhead lights next to roads because they just cause light pollution and are not needed with modern headlights. Shrug.

We could also just slow down at night. Having 'night-time' speed limits on roads that don't have overhead lights would make all kinds of sense, and would not require even more expensive tech in new cars, and would mean people would not need to have black out curtains on their houses just so it does not feel like they are at a rave all night due to passing traffic.

Driving is inherently risky. Pervasive light pollution has costs of its own. And some people's headlights are straight-up blinding.

Bullshit! I've been blinded by glare from oncoming headlights at noon on a bright sunny day! I try to no longer drive at night because of all the too-fucking-bright headlights blinding me. It's especially bad because I choose to drive a car, not a truck or SUV so all those truck and SUV headlights are at my eye level. It almost seems like modern vehicles are no longer equipped with low beams!

I recently was halfway forced to upgrade to a newer car. My previous car had xenon (HID) low beams and halogen high beams.

I could drive on low beams in total darkness of our winter more or less fine, and high beams were mainly for illuminating sides of the road far away to see moose and the like. Vision ahead was good for at least 100m or so on low beams, probably more.

Current one is bi-LED (same lamp for both beams with a solenoid that covers top half of it to cut off high beams from blinding people in fro

> Adaptive headlights, which automatically adjust brightness to avoid blinding other drivers ...

Maybe they do this in theory, but it seems to me that they don't actually do it until you're 50 feet away from them, and then only if you're both on flat ground. At any rate, the idea that we need brighter headlights that are already on the road has to be the dumbest thing I've heard.

It is the law, at least here in California where we have the most vehicles and the most vehicle-miles traveled, that headlights have to be properly adjusted. We even have official headlight adjustment check locations where you can be sent (in theory) if a cop notices that your headlights are misaimed.

But all you have to do to find misaimed headlights is go out for a drive at night, and you will see them everywhere. It is very obvious which ones are misaimed because they are the ones that hurt.

A lot of people blame this on LED headlights, especially where aftermarket LED capsules are used in vehicles which were designed for halogen lights. This is generally ignorant but not entirely wrong. Some LED headlights replace multiple types, and they have to be adjusted to match the correct type. The base ring has to be unscrewed, rotated, and re-screwed. Then the LEDs are in the correct locations for the reflectors to work correctly. Also, some manufacturers' LED headlights are just full of bright point lights because of the reflector design being bad, that is a real thing.

Anyway if we want to not be blinded we have to support police pulling people over for misaimed headlights and sending them for inspections. I know that is problematic in many ways; all of those ways are related to ways in which we are doing policing wrong, but we can't let them prevent headlight inspections.

If our country wasn't deliberately designed to make it necessary to drive then perhaps we could make all states do mandatory recurring headlight inspections.

Followup, all vehicles should have automatic headlight aiming so that they compensate for when heavy loads are put into them. And the manufacturers should be forced to do recalls when they have high failure rates like they are with seatbelts, because they are an essential safety feature.

Headlights need to be properly aimed, have a proper lighting pattern, a reasonable brightness, and the right colour temperature. Get any one of those wrong, and you could be that asshole blinding everyone around you.

I suspect an awful lot of aftermarket lights end up getting several if not all of those things outside the comfort zone for other drivers.

Add LIDAR sensors and just project an overlay of the environment for the driver to see on the inside of the windshield.

TFA vaguely mentions some data but nothing concrete. Give us numbers on how many severe accidents might not have happened with brighter lights, vs with less bright lights. Anything else is just people having opinions.

Oh, they ARE bright enough. The headlights are just out of alignment and not focused on the road as they should be.

I have a 2013 Hyundai. There is no mechanism to adjust the lights. You either have to put them in correctly every time (easier said than done given the space you have to work) or have misaligned lights.

Where I live, it's not legal to retrofit LED lights. The best I can do is to install expensive halogen bulbs.

New headlights are often too bright. Plus, some car direct extreme amounts of light at the ground. If the car hits a bump, you get a flash worse than brights.

Furthermore, adaptive headlights should dim when they spot a pedestrian. At night, if you are walking and someone shines a super bright light in your face, you can't see anything at all. Same with cyclists. It isn't safe if you can't see the ground 5 feet in front of you due to some a**hole's high-beams.

Mostly is the stupidity of people who think they have to run their high beams all the time.

Meme in real life

We're already into "weird colors, dazzling and glaring" territory, all of which aren't allowed for headlights in any state because they make it harder for other road users and wildlife to see what they're doing to stay safe.

Doubling down isn't going to fix this. The fact of the matter is highbeams aren't effective past about 100 km/h, lowbeams aren't effective past about 50 km/h and there's no ways around that other than install highway lighting. Motorists need to start acting like adults with competent time management, trip planning and risk assessment skills instead of acting like entitled toddlers on the road. No, you don't get to drive as fast as you want, where you want, whenever you want, however you want. You don't exist in a vacuum.

Daytime Running Lights are too bright now too. It isn't that they don't work well, they work so well folks don't realize they don't have their actual headlights on. Every night I see cars driving around on highways with no tail lights on and the drivers are adamant their lights are on. Argh.

I am thinking it is more the DLRs are too good than that drivers are unaware of the controls. One of these is fixable.

Headlights in the US are almost universally too bright and are a literal hazard to opposing traffic

I'm gonna start carrying a small shaving mirror in my car. For when the inbred retard with the Diesel Douchebag / Bro Dozer / Pavement Princess behind me insists on igniting their LED bar, roof-mounted spots and his hi-beams.

I'll shine that shit back into their faces.

Big problem isn't factory. Big problem is aftermarket and morons who don't realize when they "convert" from filament to arc lamps or LEDs that their lens shape and aiming is all wrong.

I have a number of classic cars that I occasionally drive in the dark. I also have a brand new car with modern LED lights. It is night-and-day difference and modern LED lights are fantastic, except for when you facing them from on-going traffic. LED lights should include mandatory self-leveling or beam shaping. Otherwise they are too blinding and that makes it dangerous for anyone still driving non-SUV vehicle.

I think the issue here is that the beam pattern on LED lights is too perfect. The top edge of the beam is a sharp horizontal line on modern lights. So if you are looking at the light and your eyes are above that line, the light looks dimmer than ever before. That's good. The problem is if the oncoming car is angled upwards, like cresting a hill, and your eyes are below that line, you get the full brightness of the lights in your face. Which is brighter than ever.

With older non-LED lights, there was a gradie

The current headlights on most on coming traffic are too bright and blinding NOW. Whether they are not aimed correctly or are already on HI beams all the time.

If I could find good quality clear retroreflectors I have thought about putting a line of them on my dash board so that what I am seeing would be reflected back to the source.

Before I mostly gave up driving at night I noticed that when out in a very rural area with no street lights I could see fine on either my LOW or HIGH beams in my 2001 car.

In Europe headlights must be 850mm +/- 150mm off of the ground and must have a downward inclination of 1 to 4% ... And they verify these parameters on the drive cars. This report (https://www.aaa.com/AAA/common/AAR/files/ResearchReportEuroSpecvsUSHeadlamps.pdf) notes that U.S. regulations allow headlights to be almost 7" higher than European vehicles BUT FAILS TO MENTION that U.S. regulations are only enforced on the original manufacturers, NOT on the actual vehicles on the road. In Europe, you cannot lif

Why are eyes not sensative enough?!!

Geeze, just upgrade everyone's optics for night-vision.

Read a while back that Polaroid was first created to push the idea of polarised headlights and windshields. This way the lights could be much brighter without blinding the driver in the opposite direction. Polaroid tried to push this tech for a while, but no two car manufacturers could agree on which way to polarised what. Polaroid then switch to a side-hussle in the camera field.

When I learned to drive the guidelines, in order, for safe driving were basically: always watch where you are going, don't outdrive your vision, don't run into anything, followed by obey the traffic laws. People seem to frequently forget or ignore "not outdriving your vision", which means that if something were to randomly appear at the far range of what you can see, and you can't stop the vehicle within that distance, you are driving too fast. This is especially important at night when what you can see is

LEDs when looked at oncoming are too bright, but the amount of visibility they provide off objects is poor.

So, drivers can't see, and people facing the driver can't see. It's a win win!!

So the experts need to change the "Driver Seat" to the opposite vehicle.

The problem goes far deeper. While the NHTSA does publish standards for headlights, they don't do any actual testing and have no real power to require manufacturer of after-market lights comply with them. If you see a product saying it's "NHTSA tested" or "NHTSA approved", those are lies because the NHTSA doesn't actually do those things.

...and the problem with the annoying headlights is generally one the NHTSA has specific guidelines against . For many of these headlights to be compliant, their light wou

Here's a rundown of every person or group listed and a summary of what they say on the matter:

* Advocacy groups have called for bans on LED headlights.

* UK government launched a review into the dangers of headlight glare earlier this year, after many driver complaints.

* Greg Bannon, AAA.: "We actually need more light on the road than what we have” (because headlights are the sole method of illumination in some areas)

* Dr Joanne Wood, Optometry Prof @ Queensland University of Technology: “When ad

...it's all about the aim, not the light source

A lot of lights are improperly aimed

I like to take walks with my dogs and kids, as it is getting darker earlier and earlier we are noticing it is becoming a big problem off on the side of the road. Often times I will actually walk backwards if an event is ending as the constant stream of super bright lights is to much to walk into.

A laser pointer only produces a few mw of total light intensity and would be useless for illuminating a road (even if you spread out the light) but is blinding bright if pointed at your eye because all the light reaches your eye AND the optics of your eye focusesit to a tiny point on your retina.

Even if you use a lens to make the laser illuminate at large area, it will still look very because the source size is so small. A laser has a very small "transverse phases space": small source size and small di

First of all: how did we all survive driving at night all the time back in the days of round sealed-beam headlamps, and later with halogen bulbs in our headlights, if they're allegedly so pitifully weak that it's dangerous? Didn't seem to be a problem so far as I remember.

So far as wanting LED headlights to be even brighter than they already are? Hell, no! As a fellow motorist as well as a cyclist who rides at night, they're already bright enough.

Some people are talking about them not being aimed correc