Upper middle class cars in Japan like Mazda3, Harrier also supports adaptive headlights. Possibly Koito is the supplier of LED systems.
https://www.mazda.com/en/innovation/technology/safety/active...
Why is America stuck with bad headlights?
351–360 of 493 posts
Re: Why is America stuck with bad headlights?
#352I complained to my state authority about halogen and xenon. The glare aggressive bad. Seriously bad. It should be in the roadworthy testing: does this blind oncoming drivers.
Blue led are equally vile. Really destructive of my night vision
Re: Why is America stuck with bad headlights?
#353> Each of the 911's lighting units includes 84 individually controlled LEDs that allow the car to continuously morph the pattern of its beams. When a car approaches in the oncoming lane, the 911's headlights dim around it while leaving the rest of the pattern bright. [...] Porsche would also dim the right side if road signs on the shoulder were overly reflective. The article never mentions, but how does the Porsche d…
> Is this just a luxury feature or are matrix lights actually common in European cars? My previous car in the sub €60k (2017) and my current in the sub €40k (2019) price category have automatic matrix headlights as well. Besides the usual detection of cars it will also turn off specific areas when signs are reflecting too strong or even completely turn off the upper headlights when you are on a road with continuous l…
I recently also tested such "feature" in a car from 2016, and I was quite unimpressed. As you say it has a lot of miss-identifications such as signs, and it doesn't work at all in mist, but for me it also failed several times to even recognize cars and blinded a few.
For now it seems more like an technical interesting concept than a feature. I do not like false negatives in an technology that could cause result in car accidents.
The speed limit sign detection is more useful as the false positives and false negatives is noticeable but mostly harmless.
Re: Why is America stuck with bad headlights?
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting! In Europe you not only have cockpit adjustable lights but auto leveling very common. Of course the consumer ends up paying for that, and they do cause maintenance issues.
> In Europe you not only have cockpit adjustable lights but auto leveling very common Cockpit adjustable lights have been required by law in Europe for about 20 years. When Xenon lamps arrived, auto-leveling was added as a requirement for them.
Bit the bullet and read the Wikipedia part, which was excellent. Cockpit adjustable headlights since 1948!
https://wiki.relexsolutions.com/display/MOR/Isengard+High+Le...
Re: Why is America stuck with bad headlights?
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
>every subsystem is DRM'd and only licensed professionals were allowed to touch it Kind of like how smartphones are right now.
BMW is doing it right now - some of their US cars will come with features locked behind a subscription model. Want heated seats? They are $99 a year, you get a free 14 day trial to see if you like the feature. Same with adaptive cruise, with more advanced media features etc etc. Their argument is that vast majority of new BMWs in US are leased, so it's "better" for customers to lease a basic model for less, and then…
> if you make these features work without paying(assuming you paid for the car outright), is that illegal? After all, you own the heated seats - you just installed an extra switch to put them on.
If you try and hack through the DRM on the controller, they might try and get you for copyright infringement on the software on the controller. But if you just write your own controller, things might be different.
Re: Why is America stuck with bad headlights?
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why ignore people who ride a bike for transportation? When I was a teen, I rode 10 km each way to school next to a very busy road. In winter, it was still dark. The combination of rain and oncoming cars would make me completely blind.
Because you're a minority and most people haven't been on a bike since they were a child. For most people, their first experience on the road is in a car. They are completely out of touch with what it means to use the road outside of a car. The roads are owned by cars, even though everyone pays for them. This is the way it's been for years and it won't be changing unless we have a serious reform.
That really depends on where you live. Over here, most people ride bikes regularly. Car headlights that can blind cyclists should be considered a serious issue.
Re: Why is America stuck with bad headlights?
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "Around here, riding a bicycle after dark is a dangerous thing to do." And that's the exact thing that needs to change.
The dutch often separate vehicle and bicycle traffic (physically, not just with paint).
But not everywhere. There are still plenty of places, especially on smaller, sometimes less-well-lit roads, where bikes share the road with cars.
Re: Why is America stuck with bad headlights?
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the reason the Fast franchise is some 8+ films in and still doing $500M+ box offices. It's also a good reason documentaries, classical and jazz music, and non-fiction books in all but self-help and cookbooks sell poor. I'd love to see a huge textbook covering pre-Calc through intros to harder topics like Real Analysis and Stochastics top the bestsellers for 22 weeks. But instead, people are buying the 5,431st…
It'd be nice if someone would do something about Wrongthink Trolls. It's not cool to see several downvotes on a random post, three or four levels deep in a comment chain, simply because it criticizes people spending money on useless political spin. It's crazy , maybe even hate speech to suggest a math textbook should be more important than a political memoir? ...on Hacker? Is there some sudden influx of people who jo…
> I'm now less afraid of lonely white kids with guns than I am of anyone else. Thanks.
Oh please, get the fuck over yourself.
Re: Why is America stuck with bad headlights?
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interestingly, a similar version of these systems was demonstrated back in 2012 which could track individual snow flakes or rain drops. They would avoid illuminating the drops so they wouldn’t reflect back at you, thus reducing glare and allowing you to see much further. https://youtu.be/4jwhQM6aDS8
Such system could work in moderate conditions, though it's doubtful. As soon as you get water "dust" in front of the headlight the only thing this tracking can do is to shut off the light entirely, there is no way isolating separate droplets and the cloud of "dust" will disperse the light further into the medium.
Well, if you don't mind the driver having to watch via a HUD there is range-gated imaging which does exactly the thing you're assuming is impossible. :P
Re: Why is America stuck with bad headlights?
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess I'm really old. Before Fast and Furious, I lived through the slammed mini truck / monster car stereo (speakers, speakers, speakers) craze of the late 80s. And before that there were many, many trends, like muscle cars, etc. It's always been like this...
What struck me back then, was how Fast and Furious and Need for Speed influenced each other.
It makes sense, the game devs saw how well the FnF movies did and wanted a slice of the pie.
It worked out so well because it gave people a way to experience car modding and illegal street racing in their own living room. If people are getting their kicks from street racing games... maybe we should make more street racing movies.
I think the nost blatent was when Tokyo drift came out, the next NfS had drift races.