Sunglasses, the built-in visors, and the blue-green colored glass at the top of the windshield don’t cut it when the sun is rising/setting and in the middle of your line of sight. Why haven’t manufacturers tried to solve this safety issue with a wider-reaching solution yet? Or if they have, why weren’t the proposed solutions successful?
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Well you kinda need to see through the windshield dude. Can’t just polarize the whole thing. We don’t have something that blocks out just the sun itself, and if we did it would also trigger on headlights or stoplights. Going further, if we did have a complex computer system doing something like that, would you really want to pay 3k to replace a windshield if some gravel hits it?
It’s a very hard problem to solve, because the light source (the sun) is right where you need to be looking for obstacles. So you’re trying to look where you can’t see anything.
There’s no real solution to it; even camera images will be washed out from the sunlight and fail to show anything aside from the sun, the sky, and a black foreground.
The closest you can get is the solution in self-driving vehicles: radar-sensors that can detect vehicles in front of you. However, these are expensive and not super-selective; they’ll detect when a car-sized (or larger) object is in front of them, but not if there’s a box or a pothole in the road.
I’ve seen a news article about a guy in California that invented this system that consists of a windshield that is like a clear TV screen that tracks the position of your eyes and creates an opaque image in the windshield that blocks most of the sun. This was like 10 years ago.
I’m not sure you realize just how bright the sun is and what it takes to block it out. Have you ever worn eclipse glasses? They have special lenses that darken the sun enough that you can safely look directly at it. But you literally can’t see anything else. If you made a windshield out of that, you wouldn’t be able to see out of it.
Brakes have been around since cars existed. Slowing down during periods of reduced visibility is always a good bet.
The best solution is actually wearing yellow sunglasses or helmets with yellow filter like F1 helmets
Convertibles can be extremely challenging in the sun and that’s when you want the top down the most.
The bigger problem is adopting the technology. Safety standards are ridiculous. For example the US only just allowing adaptive headlights. Not exactly a new technology. Or rear view cameras which give far better performance than an actual mirror. If the technology to block high intensity sunlight were available, getting into production models could still take decades. So is it worth the time and money?
You would need something like this:
[**https://pro.sony/en_NO/technology/variable-auto-nd-filter-technology**](https://pro.sony/en_NO/technology/variable-auto-nd-filter-technology)
Implemented as a panel within your FOV.
As others explained, it’s a hard problem to solve. And eg. making your entire front screen a LCD to selectively black out the sun is very expensive.
And on the flip side, it’s not like people are buying less cars because of this. As long as there is no money to be made from a change, the won’t do it.
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