Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

491–500 of 900 posts

Re: Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright

#491

Post by wildzzz »

apparent wrote: post #397
njarboe wrote: post #147

One 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…

My car's screen switches to night mode when it's dark, but if you want to make it the darkest setting, you have to manually adjust it, every single time. I don't know why there isn't a persistent setting for [when the car is in night mode]. I frequently have to adjust this because I want my eyes to adjust to the exterior darkness for safety reasons.

My 2006, 2017, and 2023 cars all will autodim the screens at night. Except for the 2006 model, the brightness knob adjusts both the instrument cluster and the screen brightness and stays where you leave it. The 2006 car had a separate up/down button for the screen.

Re: Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright

#492

Post by mikkupikku »

creer wrote: post #472
njarboe wrote: post #147

One 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…

In my past few rentals, the dial still acts on the driver's gauges - but not on the "entertainment / navigation" screen which remains too bright no matter what! In one, the automatic "night mode" was still crazy bright and independant from the dashboard brightness dial. Absurd indeed.

In my Mazda, turning on the headlights enables a night mode in the both the instrument panel and stereo/etc screen, dimming everything. Which seems like a nice touch, but if I want to run with my headlights on during the day, as seems to be fairly customary these days, that means I can't read my clock. Not great.

Re: Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright

#493

Post by kedean »

EmptyCoffeeCup wrote: post #287

The lights aren't too bright, they're just poorly aligned. Go for a walk of an evening along a footpath into traffic. I guarantee it'll be Teslas and Minis that are the routinely the culprits of dazzling. I'd guess it's cheap, lazily aligned hardware in the Tesla, and the ridiculous design of the Mini that cause the problems. Yes, sporadically you'll be blinded by another model- one that needs an alignment - but it'l…

The lights are too bright and poorly aligned. I walk regularly, and its more than just the tesla's and mini's at fault (Teslas are definitely some of the worst in my experience though, along with Rivian)

https://www.theringer.com/2024/12/03/tech/headlight-brightne...

> On a recent episode of the Carmudgeon Show podcast, auto journalist Jason Cammisa described a phenomenon occurring with some LED headlights in which there are observable minor spots of dimness among an otherwise bright field of light. “With complex arrays of LEDs and of optics,” he said, “car companies realized they can engineer in a dark spot where it’s being measured, but the rest of the field is vastly over-illuminated. And I’ve had now two car companies’ engineers, when I played stupid and said, ‘What’s the dark spot?’ … And the lighting engineers are all fucking proud of themselves: ‘That’s where they measure the fucking thing!’ And I’m like, ‘You assholes, you’re the reason that every fucking new car is blinding the shit out of everyone.’”

Re: Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright

#494

Post by stefan_ »

Zak wrote: post #410
Wistar wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adaptive headlights that actively shield oncoming drivers were finally made legal in the US in 2022 but complicated bureaucratic hoops make them hard to implement. BMW seems to have them working as I find their higher-end lighting (ex: ICON Adaptive w/ Laser Light) to be among the best to oncoming drivers—at least to my eyes. CNN writes about why headlight brightness is worse in the US than in other countries: https:…

The USA seems to suffer from a not-invented-here problem when it comes to automotive regulations. Most of the world adopted the European standard for adaptive headlights, but the USA had to spend years coming up with its own incompatible standard.

There is a reason US school buses look like WW2 troop transport and the long haul trucks are museum pieces in all aspects. It's not even NIH, it's just protectionism.

Re: Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright

#495

Post by lotsofpulp »

paddy_m wrote: post #452
eldaisfish wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you weren't in a short car, you were in a normal car. Society really needs legislation around auto obesity. Cars are too big, too high, too heavy, all at despite being less practical than a station wagon from twenty years back.

Blame the obama CAFE regulations that accounted for wheelbase and car volume, giving manufacturers lower fuel economy standards for larger cars. Then the CAFE standards that hold trucks/SUVs to a lower standard. The economically efficient way to get the fuel economy result would have been to increase gasoline taxes, but that's a non starter politically. Higher gas prices would allow people to choose to keep a cheap g…

While drastically higher gas prices would have been the proper solution, the CAFE standards did not incentivize people to buy larger/taller vehicles.

People’s desire to sit higher up and be in large vehicles, which have always been more expensive than smaller, lower vehicles, is what causes them to be bought. And once a significant portion have them, it becomes safer to be in one yourself, further incentivizing their purchase.

But 99% of the time, it’s just because people like the feeling of sitting higher up than others, and the ego boost from taking up more space. The simple evidence is the popularity of Suburbans/Sequoias/XC90s/etc over minivans, like Sienna/Odyssey. There is absolutely no functional benefit of the former over the latter, yet the former is more popular.

Re: Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright

#496

Post by adamwong246 »

There is an arms race to be the brightest, biggest vehicle on the road. Each driver wants to be the safest and many want a shiny high status vehicle. The result is a runaway feedback loop of ever more worse design

I would love to hugely curtail automotive design:

- of course, dim the headlights to a reasonable brightness.

- The Escalades have to go. Big trucks are for business, not taking the kids to school.

- No screens in the console.

- Absolutely no AI self-driving mode until it can be designed by the government. Allowing AI's to pilot cars based on the crappy engineering of a whiny trillionaire is nuts, yet we've allowed it. Let the government set the standards for "smart roads" to force cars to share sensor data.

- Crush every cyber truck into a cube, while you are at it.

Re: Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright

#497

Post by wildzzz »

creer wrote: post #472
njarboe wrote: post #147

One 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…

In my past few rentals, the dial still acts on the driver's gauges - but not on the "entertainment / navigation" screen which remains too bright no matter what! In one, the automatic "night mode" was still crazy bright and independant from the dashboard brightness dial. Absurd indeed.

My 2006 car had an independent brightness setting for the infotainment screen but that's likely because the infotainment system just wasn't as fully integrated into the car as it is today. It wasn't a touchscreen so since everything had a button, you could have easily designed it to use a VFD or similar.

Re: Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright

#498

Post by ebbi »

We had a Hyundai Santa Fe as a rental vehicle this past weekend, and our first drive to our motel (which happened to be at 10pm at night), we kept getting flashed by oncoming drivers with their high beams. We even had a few cars pull over to the side of the road to let us pass as it would have been affecting them. I kept checking to make sure I didn't inadvertantly turn on the high beam, but nope, all was fine.

Until we stopped at a gas station and I found a little knob to adjust the height of the light output. Not sure where this feature would be useful when you could just use the high beam when needed, but it was annoying even for me, the driver of the vehicle.

Re: Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright

#499

Post by wildzzz »

boldlybold wrote: post #326
bob1029 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Older cars had dim green lighting for the gauges and even had a knob to adjust the brightness up and down. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xgh2zbifn7E

I knew before clicking this was going to be a Saab, I miss mine!

Saab loved to talk about their fighter jets in their car marketing.

Re: Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright

#500

Post by pwg »

everdrive wrote: post #10

I 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…

> Out in the country, you still don't really need brighter headlights. Other cars' headlights will always be visible and they have reflectors, so it's not as if you'll struggle to spot other cars. The road lines are actually reflective, so it's not as if you'll struggle to see the road lines. And generally speaking out in the country, there won't be pedestrian foot traffic, so it's not as if you need the bright lights for them.

Not correct on all counts. Depending upon "where" out in the country, you can very well be the only car on the road for as far as you can see to the horizon.

A very many country roads do not have any reflectors (those are often only installed on highway roads, not the roads you use to get to/from your destination to the highway.

Some country roads will have reflective paint lines, but a good many will have non-reflective paint lines, and/or no lines at all or the paint is so worn down that they may as well have no lines at all.

And while the rate of encountering pedestrians will be way less than in a city, it is very much not the case that there "won't be pedestrians". There very much will be pedestrians, sometimes. And for those rare sometimes you very much want to be able to recognize them from as far away as possible.

The purpose of high beams in the country is not "brighter" (calling them "high beams", while correct, causes many to believe that "high" refers to "brighter"). The purpose of "high" beams is longer throw (the light goes further down the road, so you can see obstacles from a greater distance). The "high" in "high beams" refers to the fact that the angle of throw is set "higher" to cause the lamps to illuminate a greater distance down the road.

Post reply on HN