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Why is America stuck with bad headlights?

caranddriver.com

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Re: Why is America stuck with bad headlights?

#381

Post by brianwawok »

justapassenger wrote: post #213
Reason077 wrote: post #2

Lack of matrix headlights is a glaring omission on Teslas sold in Europe, too. Pretty much any other high-end car in Europe has them, at least as an option.

Tesla’s lack tons of stuff that’s standard or an option on other high end cars. They need to catch up on things like ventilated and massage seats, HUD, CarPlay, bird view cameras and many many more. They’re effectively simple cars, with powerful computer and drivetrain. Adding localized and very complex feature is likely very low on their to do list, especially as their RD spending is ridiculously low, and trending d…

CarPlay is silly. CarPlay was made for legacy manufacturers who can’t make a decent UI. The UI on Tesla is generally ahead of CarPlay. Not even sure how you would do CarPlay.. a small pop-up window? It couldn’t take over the whole nav or you lose Energy display and a host of other good stuff.

Re: Why is America stuck with bad headlights?

#382

Post by throwaway0a5e »

decafninja wrote: post #27
serf wrote: post #14

groups like Audi/Porsche/BMW have trouble bringing their fancy LED setups to America due to laws pertaining to high / low beams -- meanwhile every Jack and Jill on the road has glaringly illegal aftermarket Xenon bulb setups in refractor headlight housings rather than proper projectors, blinding the hell out of everyone on the road, and the police seem to do nothing about it. I mean, hey -- i'm usually happy about au…

re: "aftermarket xenon bulb setups" Is this still a big problem? While I would have agreed with you, say, back in the 2000s when the whole "import tuner" craze was in full swing, I don't think this is popular anymore. The car mod scene seems to be close to extinct now, with whats left being a lot less crazy than those in the past.

>Is this still a big problem?

No. Retrofitting Xenon bulbs is an expensive pain in the ass compared to dropping in some LED replacement bulbs for a marginal increase in light and little to no increase in glare or change in beam pattern because they're made to be geometrically equivalent to the halogen bulbs they replace (which they kind of need to be in order to work adequately in all possible applications for whatever bulb they replace)

At the very high end you can get stupid bright LEDs but pretty much nobody does that because they are expensive.

Most of the glare you see is from OEM headlight assemblies (regardless of the type of bulb installed) that were simply not designed with not blinding other people as more than a "check the compliance box so we can get back to optimizing for every other metric" sized priority.

Re: Why is America stuck with bad headlights?

#383

Post by namibj »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #308
danShumway wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking away someone's transportation would be a bigger punishment than locking them inside a prison? Prisoners also can't drive cars around, so jail is a strict superset of that punishment. I'm not going to take a hard position on it, but I'm at least mildly skeptical that jail would ever be appropriate for something that can be just as easily solved by progressive fines and revoking a license. Jails in the US are re…

Jail is much more short term than prison. It can easily be a smaller punishment than having to buy a replacement car. Especially if it's something like this, where you might only spend a day or two there and have community service on top.

You can have your car back if you fix the headlights. Make it be a mandatory appointment to show up at after e.g. a week and get your car checked for having fixed your headlighs.

Also, have a choice of getting your car booted with some electronic boot that you can unlock after sunrise, or getting your car towed. You'll have to show up for the checkup anyways, so that's when you can drop the boot off.

Either way, imprisonment won't fix the problem, which is a faulty vehicle. The inconvenience of not being able to drive the car until after sunrise, along with a typical towing/booting fee, should be sufficient incentive to not drive with faulty lights, given how easy they would be for police cars to measure/detect with an inexpensive, small camera unit at a proper location on the police car, which then signals the driver about a suspected violation.

Passing a police car that doesn't have anything better to do, while you have your faulty lights on, should be common enough to make driving like that a risk too high.

Re: Why is America stuck with bad headlights?

#384

Post by throwaway0a5e »

partiallypro wrote: post #138

I get the criticism, want, and need...but comparing a $120K+ Porsche to a $20K average car isn't exactly a fair comparison, even when it comes to headlights. The replacement cost on that headlight is probably astronomical, where I can replace a bulb for $40. I don't even know if the Boxster which is around ~$60K comes with these headlights. A quick lookup and those Porsche headlights cost ~$2K EACH.

>but comparing a $120K+ Porsche to a $20K average car isn't exactly a fair comparison, even when it comes to headlights

It's not fair but it gives software devs an opportunity to bike-shed on the tech and clutch pearls over other people's behavior (god forbid the poors install $10 Ebay LEDs that aren't even as bright as the halogens they're replacing) so 300+ comments later here we are.

Re: Why is America stuck with bad headlights?

#385

Post by OliverJones »

Yeah. In 1964 my family returned to the US from the middle east where my dad worked. We brought the family Peugeot car with us. It had yellow antifog headlights, then popular in Europe. Dad couldn't register it in the US until he changed the headlights.

This stuff isn't new.

Re: Why is America stuck with bad headlights?

#386

Post by pas »

galvin wrote: post #362
phinnaeus wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would we move to chip when it's already obviated by tap?

For security reasons, contactless card payments are limited to small transactions and can only be used a certain number of times between chip and pin transactions. Since it lacks a second authentication factor the compromise is to limit how much can be spent if the card is stolen. The US could skip chip and pin if it switched directly to contactless mobile payments.

It's tap and PIN for higher amounts. The same thing, just wirelessly.

Re: Why is America stuck with bad headlights?

#387

Post by speeder »

tardyp wrote: post #292
mullingitover wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My uncle told me stories about living in rural Michigan, and how the first thing that people did when a road got paved in the area was set up a quarter mile marker.

For non mid west born ppl, A dragstrip is a facility for conducting automobile and motorcycle acceleration events such as drag racing. Although a quarter mile (1320 feet, 402 m) is the best known measure for a drag track, many tracks are eighth mile (201 m) tracks, and the premiere classes will run 1,000 foot (304.8m) races

US people and their weird measurements :P

But honestly, why these lengths specifically?

Re: Why is America stuck with bad headlights?

#388

Post by Reason077 »

brianwawok wrote: post #381
justapassenger wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla’s lack tons of stuff that’s standard or an option on other high end cars. They need to catch up on things like ventilated and massage seats, HUD, CarPlay, bird view cameras and many many more. They’re effectively simple cars, with powerful computer and drivetrain. Adding localized and very complex feature is likely very low on their to do list, especially as their RD spending is ridiculously low, and trending d…

CarPlay is silly. CarPlay was made for legacy manufacturers who can’t make a decent UI. The UI on Tesla is generally ahead of CarPlay. Not even sure how you would do CarPlay.. a small pop-up window? It couldn’t take over the whole nav or you lose Energy display and a host of other good stuff.

CarPlay would work quite well on the Tesla UI. On the S/X display it would appear in landscape form, taking up half the screen just like other "apps". On the 3/Y it would use the right 2/3rds of the screen just like other "apps".

They won't do it though, because as you say Tesla does most stuff just as well, if not better, on their native UI. And they want to keep people in their ecosystem.

The main advantages of CarPlay on Tesla would be: 1) ability to install 3rd party apps, and 2) Much better voice support. But both of these are things that Tesla could implement/improve in their own software.

Re: Why is America stuck with bad headlights?

#389

Post by dunce2020 »

jrockway wrote: post #90
lvspiff wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst thing to happen to America was Autozone and Fast and Furious. Cheap aftermarket modifications to your car being sold to people with no knowledge of what they were doing but wanted it too look cool cause they saw it in the movie. Its led to years of teenagers with no training putting things on their cars that turn them into obnoxious spectacles on the road. I know I sound like an old coot but frankly I'm gla…

I think it's great that it's relatively common to work on a complex piece of machinery that you use daily. You get the joys of understanding how a large system works and being able to tweak it according to your desires. It could easily go the other way, where every subsystem is DRM'd and only licensed professionals were allowed to touch it. Letting anyone do whatever they want can obviously lead to problems, like hea…

> But overall, I think I like the world where people are free to experiment and create.

Then get a guitar or a paint brush.

Re: Why is America stuck with bad headlights?

#390

Post by AdmiralGinge »

speeder wrote: post #387
tardyp wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For non mid west born ppl, A dragstrip is a facility for conducting automobile and motorcycle acceleration events such as drag racing. Although a quarter mile (1320 feet, 402 m) is the best known measure for a drag track, many tracks are eighth mile (201 m) tracks, and the premiere classes will run 1,000 foot (304.8m) races

US people and their weird measurements :P But honestly, why these lengths specifically?

As much as we like to point fingers over the Atlantic, here in the UK our roads are mostly imperial except heights and widths which are in both feet and metres, because lorry drivers from the Continent kept crashing into bridges!
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