791–800 of 900 posts
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I can control the angle, but permanently aiming it down so far that it can't get in anyone's eyes is completely impractical. You would only see what's directly in front of you and you would miss a lot of stuff.
Not sure about your particular model but most front lights are designed to make the path visible in front of you, and not above.
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I have a car with LED lights. It's easily the best car I've had for vision at night. We very occasionally get someone flashing us at night, wrongly believing our high beams are on. However, from a safety point of view, I'm not convinced the trade off is actually in favour of reducing illumination for everyone.
If I flash a car, it means they're blinding me. I don't care if it's their high beams or not. It doesn't matter.
The point I was trying to make is that reducing the brightness isn't a simple trade off. How many accidents are caused by people being "blinded" vs people not seeing something until it was too late?
If it needs regulation to fix then that regulation should try to balance those things. Perhaps by automatically adjusting the headlights when another car is detected (maybe matrix style headlights, or a simple angle adjustment).
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The recommended 3 second gap is a much bigger distance than most people recognise, especially at high speed. On another note- I feel sad that you could tell your mate "the way you're driving is making me uncomfortable" and be met with basically "your discomfort isn't valid because [technology] so I won't change my behaviour".
I was with a friend who was driving and he literally said that the car in front of him was driving fairly close to him. I have a funny bumper magnet that says "sorry for driving so close in front of you" that mocks this inversion of cause.
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I'm the one who's flashing you. I'm flashing you because your headlights are bothering me. Showing me that you can bother me even more does not make it better. Still, obviously, nothing you can do, or the driver in general. And I guess the manufacturers aren't incentivised. Regulation is the only thing that I can think of that will work.
"Nothing they can do"? I've never owned a car so genuinely don't know but surely you can buy whatever lights you want for it and/or correct the alignment? I helped a friend with aligning the headlight after changing the bulb some years ago, I hear newer cars don't let you change the bulb yourself necessarily but then surely the mechanics can be asked to do this when they change it anyway, or upon the next inspection…
This was my initial thought too, but thinking about it for a second, I'm sure it's some absurd proprietary connector or housing, with a DRM chip of course, and only comes in the one variety to protect their brand.
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You forgot THE LEFTMOST LANE IS FOR BRIEF PASSING, NOT DRIVING
The rule for the leftmost lane (highway) is that you must not block for other drivers. It is in the rule book (at least in my country). That mean in very clear terms that if you can't do the overtaking in a timely fashion without blocking other drivers, then you should not enter the left lane. If there is one thing that tend to cause conflict and trigger dangerous situations in traffic, it is when someone driving at…
And then there are the drivers who are in the centre/right lane who, when you try to pass on their left, speed up to try to prevent you from passing them.
> TRL's data suggests that LED and whiter headlamps may be linked to glare and that drivers might find their whiteness harder to cope with. As a long-time walker in the US, anecdotally, I've noticed some especially blinding car headlights, and they seem to be among the whiter ones. "Hey, thanks for ruining my night vision and my sleep cycle." But I usually can't tell whether the cause of the problem is the the aiming…
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I don't need bright lights, most people don't and we havent done anything to get them, they just come with the car for most people.
You bought a car which had them, that was a choice. I have never bought a car with extreme bright headlights, and I never will.
But the choice of headlight is probably one of the lowest factors when deciding on which car to buy, you just live with what the car manufacturers are shoving on us.
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The recommended 3 second gap is a much bigger distance than most people recognise, especially at high speed. On another note- I feel sad that you could tell your mate "the way you're driving is making me uncomfortable" and be met with basically "your discomfort isn't valid because [technology] so I won't change my behaviour".
I was with a friend who was driving and he literally said that the car in front of him was driving fairly close to him. I have a funny bumper magnet that says "sorry for driving so close in front of you" that mocks this inversion of cause.
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Just because this is YC, I thought I should pitch in - A high-trust society that solved coordination problems through legislation, could solve this with a win-win technofix solution where everybody's headlights are as bright as the sun and nobody suffers ill effects. That technofix solution is polarized headlights, and right-angle-polarized night driving glasses or windshield tints.
> high-trust society that solved coordination problems through legislation What is the point of being high trust in the first place if you have to have a government violence backed law for everything? High trust societies don't have governments dealing BS minutia like automobile headlights. That is expensive in all sorts of ways, assuming you even do it right and don't accidentally create some perverse rent seeking b…
Successful government regulation is the operationalization and protection of self-regulation by legal bonds against defectors, more often than it is totally opposed by capital.
High-trust societies are not some Moldbug-Thielian neofeudalist-libertarian ethnically homogeneous blob, they're just societies that try to fight against their coordination problems with social norms, and when social norms prove insufficient*, by collectively bargaining with each other on a code of conduct. We call that government.
*Money is the root of all evil - it is historically synonymous with an attempt to bargain with opponents who refuse the same social norms, with wergild, with denominated debt-slavery, with foreign trade interactions. Monetary exchange is a mode of interaction for when trust breaks down. In the other direction, money is what poisons relationships and wrecks norms; Consult The Social Network or Treasure of the Sierra Madre for examples.
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My other pet peeve is the opposite - they've got LED daytime running lights, and use those instead of headlights. They're driving around at 11pm with no taillights and abysmal forward lighting, but there's enough of a glow from the DRLs that they assume their lights are on. Or worse, they're accustomed to "automatic" lights and don't even know where the switch is, so they're driving around at dusk or in fog, rain, or…
This hit on a peeve of mine, that automatic high beam systems really suck for pedestrians. Manual control is genuinely better in this regard. Try walking around at night in a wealthy neighborhood, and about 1/8 of the cars just blind every pedestrian.