Why do cars nowadays have such ridiculously bright headlights?
In: Engineering
American regulation and enforcement is weak. LEDs are whiter which is more annoying. A few stock cars came with brighter lights (which are legal and designed not to blind other drivers) all the rice rocket and rolling coal bros bought aftermarket bulbs to get brighter lights.
Because cities are getting cheaper and just not installing street lights in a lot of places anymore
And also usually the issue is not with the brightness itself but with the adjustment as most people don’t even realize you can adjust the aiming of headlights
Meaning that a lot of people just buy the headlight slap it into the enclosure and call it a day without making the proper adjustments needed to make it safe
We have a car with modern headlights and as bright as they are for oncoming drivers they don’t really seem to help all that much. We do not get flashed as ours are adjusted correctly but compared to my 33 year old Dodge truck the difference just isn’t that great other than the color.
Bc boomers can’t see at night and instead of admitting this and turning in their license. They decide to make it everyone else’s problem
Most cars with LEDs utilise a system that supposedly dynamically changes the light beam by controlling each individual LED to manipulate its shape and direction. This system works mainly through the front facing camera constantly monitoring the conditions in front and the car’s computer tries to use this data to adjust the lights accordingly. For example if the camera sees oncoming cars, the onboard computer tries to create a gap in your light beam so that you don’t blind the oncoming driver but you maintain good forward visibility even if you have your high beams on.
At least that’s the theory. In practice it doesn’t work that well, so oncoming and following cars often blind us and it can often appear as if the lights are flickering or flashing. That’s the lights trying and failing to adjust themselves properly.
I also think that because cars are getting bigger. Some cars like suv’s and crossovers are higher. So the lights shine right into the eyes of anyone with a smaller/lower car.
The more people buy them the more people that are blinded and more people buy bigger cars to avoid it.
I’d say a big part of it is also people not cleaning the inside of ther windshields regularly. All that fogginess that slowly builds up makes every light have a much brighter apparent halo. Break out the windex once every month or two, it’ll make a world of difference for night driving.
Wait until you come across the light bars that go across the whole front end that are supposed to be used off road, I almost went off the road, big lifted pickup came around the corner and the whole area of the front end was 80% bright led that was burned into my eyes for five minutes after.
Read this, its a previous post from an engineer.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals/s/zqAlCIoGe2
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