Just as I haven't seen it mentioned yet, one thing that makes British roads worse at night nowadays is a lack of maintenance on the "cat's eyes" reflectors that used to line every major road. They are now quite often missing or broken but previously gave you a clear outline of the road for some distance even with dipped headlights. Same goes for signage overall - standards have slipped.
Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright
351–360 of 900 posts
Re: Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly the worst offenders for shooting the lights right in your eyes are the Jeep Wranglers. I drive a work truck on occasion and the Jeeps are about the only vehicle that still get me looking for the fog line. High intensity lights are still really annoying though, and my eyes are probably 7-8ft off the ground.
Wranglers are often lifted via the aftermarket, and I bet a lot of people who do that don't ever stop to consider whether the headlights need to be realigned after.
My experience has been all Wranglers unless they have aftermarket "eyelids". I think their stock lights have zero angle and just blast straight ahead without pointing towards the ground. Most high intensity lights tend to point at the ground so you don't usually get it straight into your eyes.
Re: Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aren't there any checks for that? In EU most DMV equivalents check headlights yearly to catch illegal illumination envelopes (along with other safety-related aspects, brakes and whatnot).
Only a handful of US states have any type of safety inspection
The only one I've experienced (Massachusetts) wouldn't catch any of what we're discussing in this thread. They put it on the emission testing machine, walked once around the car, maybe checked the brakes, and that was it. It was in no way comparable to the UK's MOT test, which is a proper inspection.
Re: Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright
#354I understand that currently this is sort of a collective action problem, but I'm a bit baffled why people ever thought they needed brighter headlights in the first place. In the city, it's so bright that you don't even need headlights to see whatsoever. When cars started automatically dimming the dash via a light sensor, there was actually a period of time where I totally forgot to turn on my headlights because thing…
Where they pass through rural areas the high-speed, multi-lane roads in the UK and continental Europe are unlit. Partly for cost, partly to avoid light pollution. Brighter lights mean being able to see hazards further ahead of you.
Re: Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright
#355The bane of my existence is the new "smart" matrix lights, which claim you don't have to switch to low beams for incoming traffic. I bet they work great in AutoCAD or perfect vacuum, but in reality you have the pesky atmosphere scattering the bright photons every which way - guaranteeing at least 40% hitting my poor retinas.
The problem is that they react to lights from the opposing vehicle, but they are going to hit your eyes before they detect your lights.
That's with simple high beam assist. The matrix ones you refer to actually have another feature which makes things even worse; they progressively dip the light in parts, but combined with the first effect this means that you have a few seconds of being blinded before all of their component leds have been dipped.
Not to mention that they are only reacting to something directly in front of them for the most part -- meaning you can be blinded on curves, or when turn around and looking at them off axis (say as they wait to turn into a road).
Re: Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright
#356One of the main reasons people want/need brighter headlights is that there is much more light inside the car from screens. These don't let your eyes adjust to the dark properly. Older cars had dim green lighting for the gauges and even had a knob to adjust the brightness up and down. You could create a very dim interior instead of the huge amount of white light you get with modern cars and the multiple screens. I'm h…
> huge amount of white light you get with modern cars Maybe this is missing from your Tesla, but in my poor VW the "screen" has a dark mode which is automatically turned on when the lights are turned on - including Android Auto and Google Maps, which is pretty much the only thing I ever use it for. Previously I had a rusty Toyota with a very pale orange display, it was always either too dim or too bright, terrible co…
> Maybe this is missing from your Tesla, but in my poor VW the "screen" has a dark mode which is automatically turned on when the lights are turned on - including Android Auto and Google Maps, which is pretty much the only thing I ever use it for.
Tesla seems to do dark mode on sun rise / sun set.
Doing it with the lights seems like a strange decision - sometimes I want my lights on when it’s bright - e.g. fog, rain or when the sun is low and I want others to see me.
Re: Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright
#357I have a Toyota RAV4 and the lights are distinctly weaker than in other cars I had. It is a mix of low brightness and short cutoff. It is a challenge to drive when the road is even a bit bendy. They are correctly adjusted.
I have a recent-model Highlander and I hate the headlights on it. As you say, the sharp cut-off is terrible. Bendy roads I don't mind, but anyone driving anywhere that has even the smallest amount of hills is going to get this:
1) Approaching the top of the hill: cut-off is too high, blinding other drivers
2) Approaching the bottom of the hill: cut-off is too low, can't see far enough ahead, hope there's not a deer there
And of course the normal up/down motion of the car while driving makes the sharp cut-off line bounce around in the distance which literally gives me nausea. And I don't get nauseous easily.
It's like Toyota hired a team of interns who decided to redesign how headlights work from first principles and then forgot to test them out in the real world.
To make things worse, when we got the car, the headlights were adjusted far too high and the cut-off was pointed up in the trees. Every other car flashed their brights at me, even though the low beams were on. I took it to the dealership to have the headlights adjusted (not a small inconvenience at the time) and when I picked it up, they said they did nothing because the headlights were not adjustable. Got home, and the USER MANUAL showed exactly how to adjust the headlights. Because I don't have the required space or equipment to do it right, I took the car out at night and stopped every few miles to tweak the cut-off line until I got to a spot that was in between blinding other drivers and not being able to see the road MOST of the time.
To totally fix this, all they had to do was NOT make the cut-off so sharp. Like the last 100 years of cars have done.
Re: Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright
#358One of the main reasons people want/need brighter headlights is that there is much more light inside the car from screens. These don't let your eyes adjust to the dark properly. Older cars had dim green lighting for the gauges and even had a knob to adjust the brightness up and down. You could create a very dim interior instead of the huge amount of white light you get with modern cars and the multiple screens. I'm h…
> I'm happy my Tesla
I'd never give my money to the mass-fire-people-at-DOGE billionaire.
What I did, however had, notice, is that people are a LOT more easily distracted these days. Smartphones play a big role, but I also think something changed in the brain. This may be better or worse, but it definitely is very different now from, say, the 1980s. It almost feels as if humans are now +100 years different from the people in the 1980s rather than +40 or +50.
Re: Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright
#359I think a huge part of the problem also ties into the problem of modern "Angry Robot Face" designs. Car manufacturers are trying to make headlights the size of a penny that emit as much light as "proper" ones.
In the 1980s my dad had a Citroën GSA (and indeed I had one in the mid-2000s, when it was about 20 years old) which was a low-to-mid-spec family saloon. It had headlights about a foot wide and 5" high with a bog standard H4 type halogen bulb in. They put out huge amounts of light - far better than anything else on the road at the time - without being glarey.
Get rid of Angry Robot Face cars.
Re: Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright
#360Has any jurisdiction regulated this?