groups like Audi/Porsche/BMW have trouble bringing their fancy LED setups to America due to laws pertaining to high / low beams -- meanwhile every Jack and Jill on the road has glaringly illegal aftermarket Xenon bulb setups in refractor headlight housings rather than proper projectors, blinding the hell out of everyone on the road, and the police seem to do nothing about it.
I mean, hey -- i'm usually happy about automotive modifications that the police leave me alone about, but this aftermarket headlight trend is many times worse than a nuisance loud exhaust -- it can literally blind you for seconds during night driving.
The worst thing to happen to America was Autozone and Fast and Furious. Cheap aftermarket modifications to your car being sold to people with no knowledge of what they were doing but wanted it too look cool cause they saw it in the movie. Its led to years of teenagers with no training putting things on their cars that turn them into obnoxious spectacles on the road.
I know I sound like an old coot but frankly I'm glad my dad showed me how to install/aim headlights and along with explaining the benefits of a working unmodified exhaust system and how it should sound.
The Fast and Furious franchise is, not unlike the late 2pac, a reflection of the community. A percentage of America has always been modding their cars and an even larger percentage enjoys dreaming about modding cars - the films draw from that, not the other way around.
It's a mutual thing. The Fast and Furious franchise draws from the car culture in America, but the car culture in America also draws from the Fast and Furious franchise. If the director had chosen to highlight slightly different aspects or de-emphasize certain aspects, car culture in America would be different (though stray too far, and F&F is potentially no longer the same mega-hit).
Artists being blamed for causing preexistent negative phenomena that served as the inspiration for their art. Tupac's lyrics were blamed for being a cause of violence while in reality they were a reflection of the violence that was already there.
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 political commentary about how we'll never recover from Trump unless we do everything the author says.
First, I'm not sure what politics versus math reading has to do with the topic at hand - namely, car headlights. Second, you're complaining about downvotes. Third, you're complaints sound like "kids get off my lawn". So yeah... that's why you're getting downvoted.
To more directly engage with your point, politics isn't just an exercise in group think. It has very real consequences for many people - consider the number of deaths per capita in Germany versus that of Sweeden. The difference in response is one partly of politics and resulted in unnecessary deaths.
I appreciate your argument. What I was trying to point out was that the obsession with car modding is why films in the Fast franchise, even a decade after the first one debuted at the box office, still do extremely well. They're sheer entertainment, just fast driving with some plot points to justify the next action sequence.
What didn't land for you, maybe for more people, was that documentaries, classical and jazz, etc. are not as appreciated because they require some effort to understand and thereby appreciate. That was my point about wishing a textbook would top the bestsellers list and not yet another book shilling apocalyptic hypotheticals about Donald Trump that the author always has some magical cure for. It's like self-help politics, but The Secret is "impeach Donald Trump", every time. It's easy. It's low brow after the first dozen books, as it only intends to satisfy helpless aggression in readers. And while it's nothing new, I wish people were as enthralled with a book teaching math or chemistry or accounting. You know, stuff that's useful to people.
If someone wants to write a book about the process of governance, that's one thing. But if it's another pseudo-analysis-by-way-of-emotion book, it's disingenuous to suggest an anti-Trump political commentary is any more useful today than anything written by Ann Coulter.
Anyway. I'm not a Wrongthink Troll. Just a guy, probably more like you than not in most ways... that has a low tolerance for self-aggrandizing behavior. The tone of the post I replied to just rubbed me the wrong way.
I apologize for the unconstructive nature of my comment. I should have said nothing. Now I just feel like the Tone Police... And nobody likes that.
I guess you are new here, but HN is heavily, heavily edited and moderated. Posts get killed all the time, if they don't have their titles changed or URLs swapped, for not being exactly what certain people want, and other posts resurrected because the founder didn't get sufficient traffic.
Comments get rethreaded and killed at the drop of a hat as well. The buried comment was a non-mainstream opinion, so not welcome here. We have a flag on the profile screen to see hidden posts and they are often the best posts that point out when something makes no sense, but just happen to be worded slightly rude to someone else's point of view.
It's definitely not a place for free thought and people voting up discussable viewpoints they don't happen to agree with. You should just take it as a heavily curated slice of SV echochamber that you can examine, but not modify.
> if they don't have their titles changed or URLs swapped, for not being exactly what certain people want, and other posts resurrected because the founder didn't get sufficient traffic.
Disingenuous headlines are a huge problem and are part of "spin" (aka marketing or propaganda effort).
All available research -- plus tons of anecdotal experience on /. or HN or reddit -- shows that people never read the links that are posted, and, if they did click the link, probably won't read 100% of it. Most people share links without reading articles as well.
The headline is what generates the controversy, and should reflect the actual or original content of the piece. I am okay with mods changing headlines to reflect that. I have no doubt this is a SV echo chamber -- but it's a news aggregator run by Y-combinator, what the hell did you expect?
My uncle told me stories about living in rural Michigan, and how the first thing that people did when a road got paved in the area was set up a quarter mile marker.
A dragstrip is a facility for conducting automobile and motorcycle acceleration events such as drag racing.
Although a quarter mile (1320 feet, 402 m) is the best known measure for a drag track, many tracks are eighth mile (201 m) tracks, and the premiere classes will run 1,000 foot (304.8m) races
It's a fantastic unit if you need to convert distances from metric to imperial, because 1 furlong = ~200 meters. So if you tell someone something is half a kilometer away and they ask what that is in imperial, you can quickly respond "2 1/2 furlongs".
A furlong, the approximate distance that an average draft horse can pull a single-bottom plow before needing a rest, is my favorite measurement because it sounds so grounded in reality. It's just how long the furrow is.
Right next to the parsec, but only because of the Star Wars references :-)
As much as we like to point fingers over the Atlantic, here in the UK our roads are mostly imperial except heights and widths which are in both feet and metres, because lorry drivers from the Continent kept crashing into bridges!
They are even (in our wierd measument system), and reasonable distances for different engines to run out of power/traction/other factor and thus not accelerate as much.
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.
I think it's great that it's relatively common to work on a complex piece of machinery that you use daily. You get the joys of understanding how a large system works and being able to tweak it according to your desires. It could easily go the other way, where every subsystem is DRM'd and only licensed professionals were allowed to touch it.
Letting anyone do whatever they want can obviously lead to problems, like headlights that blind people or parts that fall off and kill the person behind them. But overall, I think I like the world where people are free to experiment and create.
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 pay extra for features you want.
The obvious question here is - 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.
Because they're physical features already installed, it'll probably be okay. Will void your warranty, but nothing the MFG can do. Same way retuning your ECU to make more power works.
Versus something like hacking a subscription for satellite radio, where the feature in question is the content the service is providing, which is easier to frame as illegal.
Then there's the case of hacking hour Tesla to enable autopilot. The hardware is there (like the seats) but the functionality is continually updated via subscription.
I look forward to the lawsuits, with the hope that the consumer prevails.
> 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.
Having features like heated seats tied to a subscription crosses the line. It's one thing to install them in all cars as an additional feature that can be enabled, but charging a subscription for it is ludicrous.
I don't mind soft-locked features too much since it can be cheaper for the manufacturer to just install it on everything than to build two separate models; plus it can be nice as a consumer to still have those additional features available if you change your mind later.
Well, Tesla has started some time ago - the most basic model 3(the one you can only order over the phone and in their centres) comes with heated seats disabled by software and you can pay Tesla to unlock it for a fee. But at least once you did they stayed unlocked forever*
*Well, there's been one case where a second hand Tesla lost all the extra features that were paid for by the previous owner and Tesla argued that the new owner had to pay again, but I think after media complained they backed off and reenabled it
> I know I sound like an old coot but frankly I'm glad my dad showed me how to install/aim headlights and along with explaining the benefits of a working unmodified exhaust system and how it should sound.
Reminds me of the hotrodding chapter of John Muirs[0] venerable How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive [...] for the Compleat Idiot[1] that starts describing the interplay between various systems and how just throwing a hot cam into an engine and calling it a day is a bad idea. Basically - How to hotrod your engine:
1) don’t
2) if you must here’s what you really need to know
> but frankly I'm glad my dad showed me how to install/aim headlights and along with explaining the benefits of a working unmodified exhaust system and how it should sound
In Germany, headlight aim is checked at the 2-yea mandatory inspection, dito for exhaust stuff. Is that not a part of US checks?
The joke is that in the US, vehicle registration is handled by the states, and while some states have strict inspection requirements, many states have none whatsoever, or only check emissions. You can still get ticketed for unsafe equipment, though.
Here in South Africa, inspection happens when you buy a vehicle. After that, it's not inspected again unless you sell it to someone else who will have to take it to roadworthy inspection. The test is pretty good and covers everything from suspension to oil leaks. It does however not cover emissions, as far as I know.
Depends on what state you live in. In my state there's absolutely no routine inspections whatsoever on automobiles, where I grew up there was yearly comprehensive safety inspections required - that being said, you only get a ticket if you fail to get an already registered car inspected.
I've never had my car checked when I did registration. Other states have done it. For a while the next city over did some emissions testing, but it was well known that it was hard to fail and they eventually got rid of it. Rumor is the company making the equipment made out well...
> Its led to years of teenagers with no training putting things on their cars
Untrained people fiddling with their cars didn't start with The Fast and the Furious! If anything, this era marked the beginning of the end of all that.
In the UK we were doing Jap-style and had Max Power long before F&F. Fast and the Furious might be responsible for widening the pool of people though. Although in my experience, the modding scene didn't actually massively increase in size from what I saw.
The old timers "aged out" and into better, stock cars, and the young kids coming in could actually only do less with the available cars (modding anything reasonably recent is a frustrating and expensive task, and so were limited to things like headlights and exhausts).
When I wanted to put a small new lip spoiler on my car I got an insurance quote for 4x because of it. Suffice to say I left it stock.
The almost wholesale shift of obnoxious drivers moving from BMW M cars across to Audi's RS line after Top Gear started mocking the former and talking up the latter was a fast, pronounced change.
Apart from that, not sure. Top Gear was always pretty good when it came to car culture, it's just a lot of surface level "car fans" just follow their word and end up being the face of the trend.
Where I live we have countless boy racers with farty exhausts obnoxiously informing everyone at all hours of their amazingly unique and original ideas about how to modify cars. I pin the blame in no small part on Top Gear for spreading a dumbed down car culture to the masses. That's not to say I didn't enjoy watching it. I just don't enjoy what it contributed to bringing about.
That's nothing to do with TG. They've been doing that for decades. Top Gear's mods were stupid, and no teenager uses it as the motivation for modding their car.
If anything, they get their inspiration from across the pond. TG is an older man's comedy show.
The worse thing that happened to driving was we were convinced it should be fun. Sharing public space with big, heavy, dangerous boxes of metal should never have been been spun as fun.
My parents live near Lake Michigan (although decidedly NOT on the lake) and I made the mistake of visiting them last weekend and driving home on Sunday night when everyone was migrating from their lake house back to the city.
I think I spent roughly half the drive back with stars in my eyes from people in Audis and BMWs blowing by me with their ridiculously bright headlights. If I made the mistake of checking my blindspot at the wrong moment of glancing in the side mirror when one of them was blowing by me I'd be left half blind.
I don't know whether they were driving with their high beams on accidentally on a crowded expressway or if their lights were just that bright but it was a damned menace. Give me shittier yellow old style bulbs any day over that.
When people improperly load vehicles, especially when towing things like boats, the headlights tip upwards. You were probably seeing overloaded vehicles, trailers with high tongue weights because they pushed everything to the front rather than center the cargo over the axle. That pushes the back of the truck down and the headlights up.
Most of the European Audi and BMW range is equipped with adaptive LED or laser headlights that selectively dip for oncoming traffic; self-levelling headlights are mandatory on new cars in the EU.
Not just "new cars" - a 2001 car that I drove had xeons with the leveling already mandatory. And it's checked at the bi-yearly technical inspection, and the police can forbid you to drive the car further if it's not working and they catch you (not sure if all around EU, definitely in Czechia and Germany).
And with all that fancy auto-leveling and auto-dipping they have snuck in a massive increase in practical brightness levels which is extremely blinding to those for whom the systems don't auto-dip.
Nobody tows with an Audi or BMW in the US. People here tow with an F150, which is equipped with an incandescent bulb in front of a chrome-plated plastic reflector.
People tow small boats and jet skis with their cars. HN just never crosses paths with those people because they're both above and below the income range around here.
Yes, I’ve seen it. Comparatively very few people in the US tow with cars compared to the rest of the world. For two reasons:
1. Pickups are comparatively very popular in the US.
2. The US has more stringent regulations for towing than the rest of the world; a vehicle rated to tow 2000lbs in EU often is rated to tow nothing at all in the US. [0]
In my experience it's more like a lifted GMC Yukon XL that came with incandescent bulbs but has had them swapped out for something 10x brighter and angled perfectly to hit the rear view mirror in any car less than 50 ft off the ground. God, I hate SUVs.
All it takes is aftermarket lighting with the cutoff in a different position and nobody willing to bother reaiming the lights. I see this a lot. The low beams are notionally not too bright but they are pointing forward without any effective cutoff.
Checked? Here in Michigan we have 0 car inspections. No smog, no safety check. Its great. We have 3 things that almost everyone in the state can firmly get behind:
1) No tolls roads
2) No mandatory vehicle checks
3) No traffic cameras
My state gets a lot of things wrong, but they get those 3 things right.
The only thing i ever have to do in California is a smog check. I drive regular cars and I take care of them, but I never had to test for anything other than smog check here to renew the registration.
Whats funny to me is those leveled trucks get going at speed the wind pushes their noses up making them squat down the road. Blinding everybody in the process.
The pirate eye patch is a legitimate solution for this.
I used to drive a Fiat X1/9, which is a very low car by modern standards, putting me on eyelevel with SUV/truck headlights. Preserving night vision can be more important than stereoscopy
It's funny you say this, because I got a lot of flak on Reddit for saying the same thing.
You can see this effect clear as day when it's foggy - every other vehicle with projector headlights are aimed down, at the road, yet Toyota's (and Corollas especially it seems) are very blatantly aimed up, and at best are exactly level (which is still incorrect).
Honda drivers, on the other hand, seem to leave their high-beams on as a hobby. Over the 100k miles I've put behind the wheel of my truck in the past year, I could count on one hand the number of cars that have left their brights on, total. You'd need both hands to count the number of Honda's daily.
I assume they're aftermarket when they're on an early 90s economy cars, they're two different colors, and the refractor is scattering the light up past street signs -- not when they're just bright.
Part of the problem stems from the fact that as cars age the headlight lenses oxidize and the original bulb's light becomes insufficient to light up the road ahead of the car. Some drivers are fixing the problem by swapping in much brighter aftermarket bulbs as opposed to replacing or resurfacing the lenses. It's easy to verify this by looking at the headlights of the offending cars after they've parked.
There are a few products that clear that up. I remember my mechanic doing it for me and it does make a noticeable difference. I would think any auto parts store would offer it to anyone buying bulbs as an up-sell.
In my experience at least, the cars I always have issues with are new ones with stock headlights, not modded cars. There are far less modded cars of course, but they always seem to be aimed lower to the road because they are lower cars in general.
>groups like Audi/Porsche/BMW have trouble bringing their fancy LED setups
Unfortunately those fancy LED setups are a headache for the rest of us drivers sharing the roads with those models, because they're also bright as hell from the factory.
Fortunately the tacky way Audi had implemented its rear-lights signalling wasn't adopted by the wider industry, and I think the VW group itself is having second thoughts about it. A rear-light should only inform me about the driving intentions of the car's owner, not visually distract me with its rear-life <marquee>-like implementation.
Unfortunately those fancy LED setups are a headache for the rest of us drivers sharing the roads with those models, because they're also bright as hell from the factory.
They're bright but they're not pointing to your eyes because that's not allowed in Europe either.
If you stand in front of your car and look at its LED lights, then duck down and look at the actual beam, you'll realize the great difference.
Even normal halogen bulbs can be blinding to other drivers if they're aimed too high. That's why such aim setup wouldn't let the car pass the MOT test either.
People in Europe drive on much tighter darker roads and drive more modern versions of said vehicles and I've noticed no such issue. Aftermarket and self maintenance 15 years ago yielded significantly worse conditions.
I agree however that the sweeping led indicator implementation isn't really of value
> Unfortunately those fancy LED setups are a headache for the rest of us drivers sharing the roads with those models, because they're also bright as hell from the factory.
Really? I'd say about 10% of cars here are LEDs and an additional 25% are Xenons, and honestly it isn't particularly bothering. They don't blind you because the beam is pointed downwards.
> Fortunately the tacky way Audi had implemented its rear-lights signalling wasn't adopted by the wider industry, and I think the VW group itself is having second thoughts about it.
Not sure about that, they're rolling it our across VW models now, and Renault (or was it Peugeot) have started copying it on some models...
> Not sure about that, they're rolling it our across VW models now,
My bad then. At least I think they made the newer implementations a little bit less obnoxious, I can only notice them on Audis that are a few years old (like 2013-2015, even newer), on the newer Seats or Skodas they are not such in "your face".
> They don't blind you because the beam is pointed downwards.
Maybe the drivers around these parts of the continent are doing it wrong, thing is that driving at night has become particularly challenging when there's even slight traffic coming from the other way. And I don't think I'm that old (I'm 39) or with a particular bad eye-sight. It also doesn't help that I drive a small 1.4l hatchback while the majority of newer cars seem to be higher CUVs/SUVs, in which case them "pointing their lights downwards" practically means them pointing the lights straight at me.
> Unfortunately those fancy LED setups are a headache for the rest of us drivers sharing the roads with those models, because they're also bright as hell from the factory.
People don't realize that with these lights, they put their own safety at risk.
The funny thing is, German tuners complain the other way. Why are factory cars allowed to have a certain noise level (or something else) and I am not allowed to do the same thing with after market parts.
But then we have TÜV and all kinds of laws around that.
Is this still a big problem? While I would have agreed with you, say, back in the 2000s when the whole "import tuner" craze was in full swing, I don't think this is popular anymore. The car mod scene seems to be close to extinct now, with whats left being a lot less crazy than those in the past.
You will see them far more often on large trucks in the USA these days.
Especially true for midwest drives across long stretches at night where the brightness is much more annoying than in the middle of a city.
If the truck is lifted, the brightest points of the light can hit you from further away, worsening the problem.
It is also bad when someone is behind you with this setup, especially lifted trucks. Some cars have a rear mirror that can dim them to tolerable levels, but not the side mirrors. So you'll get flashes from them as you drive unless you lean forward or angle the mirrors away.
I've started to see some of those lifted trucks (almost always white, for some reason) with LED strip arrays mounted into the front grill fascia at just the right height to glare directly at the eye level of passenger cars.
Its becoming more of a problem as aftermarket LEDs get more popular. The xenon kits were only installed by people who wanted to be 'cool', but LEDs are getting installed by people who want to save money or effort in replacing their halogen headlamp bulbs.
What is worse about the LEDs is that they are sold as "compatible" to various vehicles, when that means they will work mechanically/electrically, but not optically (some actually try to put LEDs in the same spot as the filament). All of the units I've seen cause the car headlamp to put out light at higher angles than a halogen bulb will, causing more glare for opposing traffic.
IMO it’s WORSE. The new craze are the LED light bars. I had one on my old truck for off-road use, but there are idiots that drive with them turned on driving down public roads. They’re so bright it can take 10+ seconds to see normally again.
No. Retrofitting Xenon bulbs is an expensive pain in the ass compared to dropping in some LED replacement bulbs for a marginal increase in light and little to no increase in glare or change in beam pattern because they're made to be geometrically equivalent to the halogen bulbs they replace (which they kind of need to be in order to work adequately in all possible applications for whatever bulb they replace)
At the very high end you can get stupid bright LEDs but pretty much nobody does that because they are expensive.
Most of the glare you see is from OEM headlight assemblies (regardless of the type of bulb installed) that were simply not designed with not blinding other people as more than a "check the compliance box so we can get back to optimizing for every other metric" sized priority.
We also missed out on the yellow sodium headlight craze in Europe during the 80s or 90s. Headlights in the USA must be whitish in color. Anyone know why?
Yellow headlights used to be a legal requirement for driving in France and we had to put yellow film on when driving there until the EU standardized white headlights.
As far as I remember that didn't happen in all countries. I remember seeing them when going on vacation to France (Corsica) in the mid 80s, but never at home.
No, it was only France, where they were mandatory.
In other EU countries they were however allowed up to a certain date (in Italy they are accepted only for vehicles built before 1993, and in the same date France made them not mandatory).
The yellow is not "a" yellow it is a very specific one, called "Selective Yellow":
Don't forget people with raised pickups that now have their headlights above the height of your eyes. I've had to point my rear-view mirror at the ceiling with those behind me.
Also fog lights being left on at all times. When I'm being followed by an SUV with a relatively high chassis and a set of fog lights that the owner blithely keeps turned on, it can be very nearly physically painful for me.
What's low relative to the height of the driver in the kinds of vehicles that typically come equipped with fog lights can be quite high relative to the kinds of vehicles that typically don't. Also, a lot of fog lights don't, from what I can tell, seem to be anywhere near as focused as headlights.
Granted, I'm no expert on fog lights, so I could be misunderstanding the details of the situation. I've never owned them, so I haven't had occasion to know how they're supposed to work. All I really know about them is that they regularly blind me when I'm driving at night.
Also appropriate for the jackwads who compulsively & pointlessly slam on their high-beams, whenever their headlight field captures a pedestrian (who's on the sidewalk, way away from the road).
You say that, but I was once driving on a dark, national limit road through the forest one night - and had turned off my full beams because I'd just passed a run of cars coming the other way. I caught a glimpse of a pedestrian and instinctively turned them back on just to catch a glimpse of a (complete f'king moronic) person in full black pushing his bike (with no reflectors) in the road talking to the pedestrian.
After that, as a pedestrian I'd rather have a full beam to the face than think a car might not have seen me, even if I'm safely on the pavement.
I misworded my point on that bit, I more meant I'd rather take a full-beam to the face when I'm on the pavement if it means the driver is aware of the hazards around them.
Occasionally (and in my experience it is only a handful of poor actors compared with the number of cars on the road), I'd take getting intense glare as a pedestrian if it works in everyone's safety.
Appreciate it's a different call for cyclists etc, but as a pedestrian I'd welcome the trade off more than drivers not using their full beams when they deem it neccessary.
We have a number of tools at our disposal as drivers to minimise bad situations. Personally I think overuse of high-beams is more valid than under-use in quite a number of circumstances (and exceptionally bad in others).
Your comment implied that drivers who instinctively switch on their high beams to get a sense of a situation where they need more visual input are "jackwads" which I tried to highlight isn't the reason they're doing it.
Wanting to see more when you're driving a massive piece of machinery at decent speeds isn't something that makes you an outright asshole.
Those points weigh in favor of someone who thoughtlessly high-beam'd a pedestrian, for the first time - which is reasonable. Also reasonable is considering their actions and realizing they gained no meaningful amount of safety by blinding a pedestrian.
If they've blinded countless pedestrians over an extended period, then they aren't considering anything. Inconsiderate people are jackwads.
I would start with lobbying politicians to change the traffic laws and driving license exams that explicitly tells drivers (at least in my country) to not turn of the headlights for cyclists and pedestrians.
Disobeying traffic laws in order to be nice is tricky, especially if doing so has an remote possibility to cause an accident. The blame will always be on the driver.
Yes. A four-wheeler will just go on straight ahead in a stable and predictable manner when I stop giving control input. But a two wheeler will quickly come off course when I lose visual feedback because it's a dynamic balance that requires continuous recalibration. It's a very good idea to signal that you are getting blinded.
Eh, as someone who rides a road bike pretty often, this is par for the course for the "community"
We should be glad the kind of person who would go out of their way to endanger themselves and others with something as useless and petty as... retaliatory light flashing is on a bicycle instead of a 2 ton vehicle.
The people who give cyclists a bad name are never self-aware
I'm not trying to be petty, or throw a tantrum. I'm not talking a 10000s of lumens here. It's just the only sure fire way to educate the driver about the problem fast enough. It usually works out that we both stop shining lights in each others eyes, and and pass safer and wiser.
having had several german cars in the past, it's not that hard to import euro-spec headlights and install them, but your jaw might drop when you see the price.
I challenge you on the assertion that this trend of illegal lighting is many times worse than obnoxiously loud exhaust.
Life safety is certainly a bigger factor with the headlights, but all other aspects are orders of magnitude more disruptive on the acoustic side. Having bright-as-sun headlights driving around town at 3am is not going to cause a lot of trouble for most residents (as they would be indoors sleeping peacefully). On the other hand, someone driving around at 3am in a turbo diesel truck with muffler delete may be able to single-handedly rouse your entire town from its slumber.
Which one of these actors has the most adverse net impact on society?
Let's see, what's worse? Being rudely awakened, or being maimed/killed by a driver who literally cannot see?
I suppose in terms of net impact to society, there's no way of deciding without knowing in advance if the hypothetical victim is Mother Theresa or Hitler, so it's kind of a wash.
But for me (and feel free to disagree), I'm going to err on the side of preventing a devastating impact to a small number, over a minor annoyance to many.
I know very little about headlights, but I do know that too many cars have a certain kind of extra bright, blue-white headlights which hurt my eyes. I don't know why they are allowed, but I'd love to see them banned.
They may be great for the driver, but getting blinded isn't much fun for oncoming traffic.
> "When a car approaches in the oncoming lane, the 911's headlights dim around it while leaving the rest of the pattern bright."
And what if it's a bike in the incoming lane? Or on the separate bike path on either side of the road? Will it detect that?
Because too often, clever car technologies don't properly account for other traffic than cars.
The blue headlights are absolutely atrocious for everyone: pedestrians, other cars, people living in nearby houses, ...
They aren’t even good for the drivers themselves. The blue light kills your night vision and makes it impossible to see into shadows.
Car headlights (and road lighting) should have a limit on the maximum power at each wavelength, with very strict low limits in the blue part of the spectrum.
The marketing of blue headlights is based on almost fraudulently misleading claims about the visibility and power efficiency they’ll provide. They should be banned.
And what if it's a bike in the incoming lane? Or on the separate bike path on either side of the road? Will it detect that?
Does the oncoming bike have a headlight?
My car doesn't have matrix headlights (since I'm in USA) but it does have a necessary tool. It has a camera which detects oncoming vehicles.
In my experience the camera works quite well. It dims my headlights more quickly than I can react manually. It also dims them when there's a lot of overall lighting (such as street lights).
I can't attest to the specific situation of a bicycle. Around here, riding a bicycle after dark is a dangerous thing to do.
It's practically impossible to cycle at night on roads without street lighting due to cars. Has been for many, many years. The people who would want to do it (generally people into the sport and out for training) just accept this. Nobody else cares.
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.
> Car headlights that can blind cyclists should be considered a serious issue.
Even people who design bicycle facilities don't consider this. They'll happily install a bidirectional bike lane where contra flow cyclists are effectively riding against motor vehicle traffic. This puts cyclists on the wrong side of the headlamp beam.
So, basically the same reason we have bad everything. Our institutions and regulations are outdated relative to the rest of the world, so we get stuck with shitty stuff.
For instance: payments. Europe and Asia got chip cards and tap-to-pay decades before we did, even though Mastercard and Visa took part in their invention. America had credit card infrastructure first, so our payment networks were stuck with it, while other countries could start off with better stuff.
Without the consumer demand that Google/Apple Pay (and later coronavirus) created, we still probably wouldn't have widespread tap-to-pay.
As a Canadian it's almost incredible to see how far ahead even we are compared to the US in terms of payment options. A lot of the debit machines were tap-compatible over 10 years ago, and even then it took banks several years to implement and supply cards. In fact I remember getting my first tap-capable card in high school and had to go to the bank to activate the feature, and it wasn't long after that when my friends and I were running hacked Android Pay apk's to enable NFC payments here. Even with regards to "chip and PIN," I'd wager most machines built in the last 10 years have never had a card swiped through them, and even if they have, the payment will almost never go through until you try again with the chip.
I honestly can't remember the last time I actually used my debit card to buy anything. With tap limits of $100 per transaction and $200 per day, 99% of my regular purchases can be made through my phone. It's very rare I take my wallet out of the car.
For fairness one must say that our free run-of-the-mill wire transfers being instant is a relatively recent development. They used to take multiple days in pre-SEPA-days, and international payments were a hassle (and also usually not free). And even today not all transfers are instant, as both banks must support this feature. But the processing time for the non-instant ones is down to one day across the board at least, so that improved.
It was never a technical reason to begin with that transfers took so long (i.e. multiple days), rather that banks made some side money by treating the transferred money as free loan.
Similar to stuff like the common free international roaming, SEPA is something that the EU massively fought for the consumers against the entrenched players.
Not sure where they took multiple days. Same bank: couple of minutes. Different bank: depends of the time of the day. If you missed the last clearing, the transfer will happen next day. Otherwise clearing was done 3-4 times per day. So the only way for the payment to be delayed for days would be making on Firday evening.
Country-specific thing, most likely.
Depends on the country. Poland had intra-day free interbank transfer system called Elixir since 1994.
Basically it pays to be backward with these things - you skip many bad solutions and can learn from others. Our bank system was reconstructed almost from scratch in early 90s so it's quite modern now.
SEPA really is great. Would be awesome if more of the world (including the US) adopted IBAN - maybe it would lead to a similarly cheap and fast global payment area.
Banks in the US are very risk aversive when it comes to new technology about 6-7 years ago I was working with a team in the US and the next project that they were doing was implementing chip and pin for a single type of card for a bank. One person was trying to move to another team to avoid it. We had chip and pin in my country for years at this stage. I used just think that they were worried about the new technology but now that I am older I think that the business wanted to implement something new without investing in existing systems. I left the company shortly afterwards so no idea what happened.
According to our sales guys who say that US banks are the worst when it comes to new technology, Australian banks are the best apparently. Apparently there were some government initiatives to force the banks to use new technology, some really leaned into it and even changed entire management layers.
I think fear of the unknown is classified as a risk in some places, they completely changed management style and structures after I left so maybe the company changed as well.
The back of my card wasn't signed until I went to America. Then the 'clerk' 'rang me up' and asked me to sign the back of my card so that she could check it against the receipt I just signed.
(Really!)
I'm not old enough to have had to do that anywhere else - 'Chip & PIN' was required in the UK from 14 Feb 2006; I'm not sure how long before that it became available/widely used.
Yeah that’s mainly correct I believe. The USA had an earlier electronic system well established by the time chip and pin was available. The costs to switch would have been greater than the amount of fraud prevented.
We see this in other systems like NYC’s metrocard VS London’s Oyster. Metrocard was an early system that works reasonably well. Now the MTA is deploying a new modern system as metro gets near its planned lifetime.
I think the USA has been far more innovative with credit cards that give rewards. Many of my EU friends complain they can’t get more airline points, etc with their cards.
>The USA had an earlier electronic system well established by the time chip and pin was available.
So did many other places.
> I think the USA has been far more innovative with credit cards that give rewards.
US credit card schemes charge merchants massively more, so yes, these fees can then be used to give "rewards". EU cards have lower rewards because the fees are limited by law.
It's not something to be proud of. You're paying higher prices as a result.
I guess USA citizens tend to have higher incomes than Western Europeans which could maybe explain why Americans pay higher prices. But I’m not sure we do.
It’s weird though that 3x as many Western Europeans move to the USA than the other way around.
Americans pay higher prices than they would otherwise pay for the same goods because of the card reward schemes, not necessarily higher prices than Europeans pay. Taxes are very different, for a start.
I think you do have higher incomes, generally, and a lower tax burden. Fewer government services too of course. Not sure that's much to do with credit card reward schemes though :)
My country, Canada, has chip cards and tap-to-pay. Whenever we get interns/new hires that grew up in China they remind us that even this is behind the times.
Apparently they pay with their phone. They scan a QR code and get the bill on their phone... or something. I've never experienced it myself.
...there are phone payment options in canada, using NFC. Can confirm having done it on a pixel 3a and a iphone 8+. Usually through your bank or visa provider app.
I was counting NFC based things as tap-to-pay. I use Apple Pay for most of my purchases.
But they always say that doesn't count. And I see why. You still gotta wave down a waiter, ask them to go fetch a machine, wait for them to come back, potentially sending them back because they split it incorrectly. That's not the same as scanning a QR code on the table, having it load up your bill, splitting it if needed, and making the payment. If that works as well as I imagine it to, that could all be done in the time it takes to wave down the waiter.
This gets thrown a lot but I think the reason the U.S. didn't move from the swipe system to the PIN is the speed of processing your card. With the swipe, the cashier just swipe your card and you're done. With the chip, I have to wait and then enter my PIN and then wait. It's just a hustle.
This process is nearly instant in every country I have used it in except for the US, where it inexplicably takes 20 seconds of waiting both pre and post pin entry.
For security reasons, contactless card payments are limited to small transactions and can only be used a certain number of times between chip and pin transactions.
Since it lacks a second authentication factor the compromise is to limit how much can be spent if the card is stolen.
The US could skip chip and pin if it switched directly to contactless mobile payments.
The problem is actually that America was innovating / standardizing first, and there is still inertia with those old systems. Meanwhile, newer institutions like the EU have the benefit of hindsight by looking at what America did without having the downside of momentum with old tech.
Lack of matrix headlights is a glaring omission on Teslas sold in Europe, too. Pretty much any other high-end car in Europe has them, at least as an option.
Tesla’s lack tons of stuff that’s standard or an option on other high end cars. They need to catch up on things like ventilated and massage seats, HUD, CarPlay, bird view cameras and many many more. They’re effectively simple cars, with powerful computer and drivetrain.
Adding localized and very complex feature is likely very low on their to do list, especially as their RD spending is ridiculously low, and trending downward for last few years.
CarPlay is silly. CarPlay was made for legacy manufacturers who can’t make a decent UI. The UI on Tesla is generally ahead of CarPlay. Not even sure how you would do CarPlay.. a small pop-up window? It couldn’t take over the whole nav or you lose Energy display and a host of other good stuff.
CarPlay would work quite well on the Tesla UI. On the S/X display it would appear in landscape form, taking up half the screen just like other "apps". On the 3/Y it would use the right 2/3rds of the screen just like other "apps".
They won't do it though, because as you say Tesla does most stuff just as well, if not better, on their native UI. And they want to keep people in their ecosystem.
The main advantages of CarPlay on Tesla would be: 1) ability to install 3rd party apps, and 2) Much better voice support. But both of these are things that Tesla could implement/improve in their own software.
CarPlay's UI is far better than any manufacturer I've seen so far. Using the same UI/UX as your smart phone is way more intuitive - and it'll keep pace with OS updates. I wouldn't buy a car _without_ CarPlay at this point.
That is true for legacy, but for me not true for the Tesla UI.
I quite enjoyed CarPlay in my Honda, it solved a huge hole. But I really don't find that same hole. The only apps I really used was maps, and podcast app. I have both in the tesla info-tainment section.
Would be cool if they opened the market for third party apps, could be handy for some stuff... perhaps someday?
So you would do it in the background where the map currently is? And the AC controls pull up over it?
I guess no reason that couldn't work. It wouldn't not anything about battery health, and it would require a cable which most people don't use, but it could work.
I read that Tesla does have ventilated seats. That Tesla isn't a fan of HUDs (I think they are OK but not important at all). That bird view cameras aren't possible unless Tesla moves their existing cameras or adds yet more. It's silly to call them simple because they lack some esoteric features while ignoring useful features they have that other cars don't, such as dynamic software updates (and many others such as their piloting).
> It's silly to call them simple because they lack some esoteric features
Esoteric to people buying used 10 Toyota’s (there nothing wrong with that btw). But standard in high end cars. I’ve listed only few that come to top of my head, but it’s very long list, from features, through tiny gadgets in interior, sound insulation, and many others
> while ignoring useful features they have that other cars don't, such as dynamic software updates
Exactly as I said, powerful computer.
Tesla is really good at computer stuff and drivetrain stuff. But they are very poor at rest of the car stuff. There’s nothing wrong with that - different people have different priorities for what they want from their cars.
But let’s not dismiss validity of the features, just because someone’s favorite toy doesn’t have them.
“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. The other driver doesn't get blinded, but you still have blazing lights on your side.”
Sometimes known as pixel lighting, matrix systems are based around a high-beam unit consisting of a cluster of LEDs (the Audi matrix system consists of up to 25 LEDs per high-beam unit), rather than a single high-beam bulb that you might find in a conventional headlight.
This allows you to block out certain portions of the beam so you don't blind other drivers as they approach.
Most nicer headlights are shaped[1] in a way that the drivers side beam is shorter than the passenger side beam. You don’t want to blind drivers and it gives the passenger side more visibility. They also adapt to turns. Matrix headlights do the same and much more. High beams illuminate the whole road and not just the ground in the same lane as the car.
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.
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
My comment didn't have anything to do with the headlights except pointing out that the 'impossibility' of not illuminating the drops in the air isn't actually an impossibility with sufficiently crazy hardware. -- A fact I expected other readers to find interesting.
My apologies if it sounded to you as something I was saying could realistically be done with projector headlights.
So, I'm riding to work by bike and in winter times I came to hate these lights.
They destroy any natural darkness adaptation, which takes some time to set in again and then already comes the next car.
These super fancy lights don't give a shit about the sidewalk or wild life. To me they increase no security whatsoever and contribute mainly to the ongoing light pollution.
Probably they even decrease safety overall by randomly blinding humans/animals.
It's not just a problem in US. Ever since Xenon headlights became the norm in upper mid-class cars and up (2003?), I'm having trouble driving at night (here in Germany). I have no data to back this up, but I'd say subjectively glaring is much less of an issue since LED became standard (2010?).
I get the criticism, want, and need...but comparing a $120K+ Porsche to a $20K average car isn't exactly a fair comparison, even when it comes to headlights. The replacement cost on that headlight is probably astronomical, where I can replace a bulb for $40. I don't even know if the Boxster which is around ~$60K comes with these headlights. A quick lookup and those Porsche headlights cost ~$2K EACH.
> I get the criticism, want, and need...but comparing a $120K+ Porsche to a $20K average car isn't exactly a fair comparison, even when it comes to headlights.
You get matrix light as an extra from nearly all manufactures in in Europe (or at least Germany). Certainly from all "premium" manufacturers but e.g. also from Opel or Volkswagen. In fact Opel (formerly owned by GM) was one of the first to introduce them.
Matrix LED are available with most large manufacturers in Europe. You can buy a $30k car equipped with those as well. They always cost extra but are not exclusively sold with high end cars.
But you can replace your bulbs for less than $100, it would appear due to the housing mechanics, etc you'd have to replace the entire headlight unit if one went out for this particular setup.
Also the quote I looked at was used, someone else here posted it might cost more like $5K each, new.
No, I can't. There are no replaceable headlight bulbs on my Toyota either. Just like this Porsche, you replace the entire unit if it goes bad. This is the norm for OEM LED headlamps -- they're considered lifetime parts, not wear items.
I'm not sure why you think this but it is very incorrect. I can't speak for your Toyota, but most car headlight assembly's absolutely allow for replacing the bulbs inside them.
Your dealership may not tell you this because they're incentivized to sell you that 2k housing, but do some research and you will almost certainly find that you can replace the bulb for $50 or less.
> most car headlight assembly's absolutely allow for replacing the bulbs inside them.
Yes, because the vast majority of OEM head lamps are still not LEDs.
You must be thinking about HIDs.
OEM LED housings almost universally have no user serviceable access for their LED components, nor do they have standardized "bulbs". You can find plenty of videos of people 'opening' LED headlamps on YouTube [0][1] -- it is a destructive process. The housings are sonically welded with the LED components inside, and the only way in is by cutting them open.
While there are retrofit bulbs for halogen housing (made in the shape of halogen bulbs) for the aftermarket, no OEMs use these for factory LED lighting.
But you don't have to take my word for it:
1. Go look up any vehicle with factory LEDs on the websites of Sylvania, Philips, Hella, etc. You will find that they do not list bulbs for those lamps.
2. Read the owners manual or parts diagram for any vehicle with factory LEDs -- you won't find bulbs in the parts diagrams, and the owners manuals will explain that the housing must be replaced.
It’s a really poor argument and also very misleading. They make it sound as if this is something special that is not found on this continent. Many manufacturers have excellent LED headlamps. They just have a static beam pattern. I’m sure over time as cost becomes less of a factor and as regs change these adaptive units will become more common.
They're also from a luxury brand that commands a premium price above and beyond its actual cost of supply. Give it five years and an entry level Hyundai will come with equivalent headlights and they'll only cost $100 to replace.
But do they break down as often? If it's about physical breakage (car crash), you're going to change more than just the light bulb for either tech. And it will cost more with traditional bulbs, too.
Why would you want to replace LED headlights? LEDs themselves are typically specified for 50k hours, a much longer useful life than car engines (~10k hours / 180000 km). Also, because these are individually dimmed array lights, even if a single element dies, it's not a big problem and wouldn't require replacing the unit.
>but comparing a $120K+ Porsche to a $20K average car isn't exactly a fair comparison, even when it comes to headlights
It's not fair but it gives software devs an opportunity to bike-shed on the tech and clutch pearls over other people's behavior (god forbid the poors install $10 Ebay LEDs that aren't even as bright as the halogens they're replacing) so 300+ comments later here we are.
> 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 detect oncoming cars and overly reflective signs?
If it involves a computer doing real-time image processing, I can certainly see why the US government might be cautious considering headlights are an important safety feature for a car.
I also assume a system like that would probably be very expensive. Is this just a luxury feature or are matrix lights actually common in European cars?
I also assume a system like that would probably be very expensive. Is this just a luxury feature or are matrix lights actually common in European cars?
It's relatively high-end, but it's rapidly trickling down - you'll find adaptive headlights on many mid-range models from Mazda, Ford and Volkswagen.
>I can certainly see why the US government might be cautious considering headlights are an important safety feature for a car.
I'm pretty sure it's just institutional inertia. Compared to a feature like adaptive cruise control or autonomous emergency braking, the risk of an adaptive headlight system failure is quite minimal.
> 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 lighting, drive through a tunnel, drive through a city or town (GNSS and/or sign detection assisted I guess), it's really foggy and so on. While I had to manually activate automatic upper headlights on the previous car, my current car basically turns it on at start, no matter what time of the day, even when turned off previously. When it's bright it will basically turn off the headlights all together by itself and just kick in as needed. Really convenient.
Driving a lot at night I'd roughly guess from experience that about one out of twenty cars have automatic matrix headlights, maybe less. Anyway, I'd say it's common, but far from the norm.
Edit: As I drove to work today, one of the things that's not so convenient is that you have to keep your car clean or at least the smudge off the cameras. :^)
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.
> The article never mentions, but how does the Porsche detect oncoming cars and overly reflective signs?
My Jeep Grand Cherokee does this, auto-dims the headlights when oncoming cars or reflective signs appear. I assume it's just the dumb way, if something "bright" is ahead of me then dim the lights. I don't think you have to do a lot of "image processing" to single out the direction a very bright light is pointing.
Yes. I just wanted to know if this was a ubiquitous feature in Europe or just a new tech that hasn't yet left the luxury market. The article title implies that the US is significantly behind the times here and I wanted more info to gauge how true that is.
Yea, sorry. I was trying to highlight that automotive tech arrives on expensive models and is driven down to the entry level vehicles as the component manufactures are able to ramp up production volumes.
My mk8 Ford fiesta (this current gen was never launched in the US) already does that: it does real-time processing to determine when to enable and how to angle the LED high beams in real time so it's not just a European manufacturer thing. I was genuinely surprised at how well it works.
Cars have been doing this for a while with auto high beams which is standard in a lot of new cars. It’s quite good on my car and i use it all the time on road trips.
Last car I owned detected lanes and cars approaching from behind.
I had to disable the sound alerts. If someone had told me how many exceptions make the alerts bogus, I wouldn't have believed it. Not a single time the alerts responded to a real danger. On the contrary, I was alarmed for nothing, creating danger as I nervously looked around trying to understand what was wrong.
Sensor that switched lights on or off was nice though.
I got rid of a Mercedes C class that autobraked twice at random causing near accidents each time. The area where I live has a lot of narrow bridges and the autobrake would get triggered by the bridge posts. Traction on those bridges can be pretty uneven, especially when moist. First time came pretty close, second time I was prepared. There never was a third time. Stuff like that should work or be fitted to some test vehicle. That's not exactly an edge case.
Smart cars aren't smart. I've had a few rental cars over the last couple years that did autobreaking/speed control, and without exception it was unexpected in a way that made the situation less safe. It might be fine for someone who had only ever driven with those features, but adding them as new defaults is irresponsible at best.
Are you sure they got triggered by the bridge posts? These systems tend to exclude any non moving objects. I've driven several cars with emergency braking installed and it never reacted to a static object, even if I was headed for it. The only time I found it can mis-trigger is for cyclists that you'd be able to pass easily.
Yes, 100% sure. Bridge posts come within 8" of the car and when you approach the bridge the return of the two (steel) posts is enough to trigger the radar based collision detector. Pretty dumb really, if there is nothing in front of the car and you're going forward you can't possibly collide with it and hard braking in a situation like that is much more dangerous than simply rolling through. I figure with the cars' GPS and a list of exceptions they could fix that sort of thing in a band-aid style fashion but they were not interested. I'm not going to wait to see what other edge cases aren't covered.
There are two kinds, one based on radar and one based on stereo camera. The radar systems have to ignore static items or they’ll detect overhead road signs as hazards and brake erratically. This is why Teslas run into static obstacles. The camera systems OTOH can handle static items.
Our 2017 Suzuki Kei car has a stereo camera system and it will brake if you’re about to run into a car stopped at a red light.
FMVSS (Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards) are prescriptive, not descriptive; they're also really really slow to update them.
The difference between between FMVSS and UN/EU regulations could also be considered a regulatory moat. In today's globalized world, I can't imagine that the moat is worth it anymore.
(Disclaimer, I work for General Motors, this is strictly my own opinion)
My first 'new' car was a 2001 Hyundai Elantra, and while they're economy compact cars with minimal features in the US, they have a lot of upgraded features in Korea. One of the silly things I did in my early 20s was to swap out US parts for Korean parts - and I was able to sell my US parts for more than it cost to import their Korean upgrades.
So, for no good reason, I had an econobox with OEM wood-look dash and trim, chrome handles, OEM gauges for oil pressure, voltage, and fuel economy, upgraded stereo and suspension, leather trim, etc. It's silly what kind of hobbies spring up when you're living in central Pennsylvania and maybe aren't using your free time as productively as you could be.
Point is, definitely check out the factory options available in your car's country of origin - but also make sure you know they'll definitely be compatible with the increasingly computerized systems you're swapping them in to, and make sure you're not doing anything that's going to end up failing annual inspection.
I did this on my 2003 Volkswagen GTi. I swapped the Jetta front end onto it and found a set on a vw forum. They were not cheap but it was amazing to have euro stock OEM HIDs while most everyone else I knew were running junk Chinese kits.
depending on the vehicle model, the differences may only be in coding / software, as well, so research that as well before investing money in expensive headlight units.
one disadvantage of all of this cool headlight technology is that the modules often cost over $1000 each - painful repair cost for even minor accidents!
I imagine in most cases that's just swapping halogens for HIDs. Lots of cars these days have HIDs (or LEDs, which look very similar to most people). I can't imagine you'd stand out. Maybe if you imported matrix lights.
The only thing that comes to mind as immediately obvious is the absence of amber on the sides, which, if it was ever an issue, I think could be solved. But it has never been an issue.
I've had E-code headlamp assemblies in my car for nearly 20 years. The car has been registered in two states where both do yearly vehicle inspections. No inspector ever failed the vehicle because of the E-code headlamps.
I was not aware there were headlights that had a light pattern like that. Looks pretty cool.
Years ago (`70s-90`s) when I built custom cars it was a pretty huge deal when the rectangular headlamps were approved. It created new ways to style the front end of a car, but we all were jealous of what they were doing in Europe with headlamp designs.
The new LED headlamps offer way more styling opportunities and better lighting, but it's not surprising to learn we're still behind Europeans in regards to this.
I really hate led headlights here in USA, They are too bright and need to be banned. People using these should be jailed for endangering lives. I don't know why but This seems to be particularly common here on big pickup trucks, which is even worse because they hit you right in your eyes if you are driving a regular car due to height difference.
Also, I've had adaptive headlights on my subaru forever.
Good LED headlights aren’t blinding. It’s often aftermarket nonsense that causes problems. As someone else mentioned, the culprits aren’t often LEDs; there are some crazy bulbs out there, and the people using them just don’t care if they’re blinding other drivers. It’s ridiculous.
There doesn't appear to be any dearth of traffic enforcement in general in the United States. They carry special devices with them just to measure your window tint, FFS. Is there some reason they can't be incentivized to enforce actual safety laws like this one, too (or instead)?
Know one major US city where the state police ran a campaign on the various interstates entering that city (and the surrounding unincorporated roads) where they were writing tickets for lights that violated state law. Went on for a few months and there was backlash (from suburban teens families) to the right folks in the state that got them to stop the campaign.
Exactly, just confiscate the car until lights have been fixed. It's much cheaper for the state than jailing people and there's a huge incentive to get the problem fixed quickly.
what does jailing someone achieve here? what is with this gross authoritarianism? most of these people using these bright LEDs dont realize how bright it is for the other drivers - it's probably just to make the roads brighter because driving in America is extremely different than the rest of the world (very very rural highways - with essentially no extra lighting)
> what is with this gross authoritarianism? most of these people using these bright LEDs dont realize how bright it is for the other drivers
There are wishes for gross authoritarianism because US has problems with lesser, appropriate regulations. The way other countries handle this is periodic vehicle inspections - just like smog checks but with more points - which also measure from the lumens and angle of your headlights to whether your wipers work properly, failure of which bars your car off the public roads. If this was suggested in the US eyes would roll, heads would turn, nanny state arguments would be invoked. In the absence of reifying such moderate measures, people let go of their pent up frustrations of failing to be a cooperating society in the form of wishing imprisonment or worse onto each other.
> most of these people using these bright LEDs dont realize how bright it is for the other drivers
How can you possibly not know that. You are literally making them bighter so it would obviously be brighter for the drivers too. why do you think its illegal in the first place.
Again because most of American roads have literally no lighting. They are not raised from the surrounding land. They have no sort of guard rails. If you want to drive safely at night on these roads you need a longer visibility distance.
You're likely not thinking about if this is going to bother someone else or not. And most US law isn't even clear on whats street legal and whats not.
When you are literally blinded by somebody's headlights making you momentarily blind, you are a danger to yourself and others and could kill yourself and / or others which is not even your fault to begin with! Jail time doesn't sound too insane then. I've literally had to close my eyes whilst driving due to someone's ridiculous headlights being super bright on the opposite side of the road.
So write a ticket the first time, and if they don't change then jail for endangering others, right?
I don't think people are especially concerned about the exact punishment schedule here, they just want consequences that result in safe cars, much like with drunk driving laws.
Someone mentioning jail doesn't mean they want it as an immediate first-line consequence. It's a simplification, so please recognize that before crying 'ridiculous'.
Taking away someone's transportation would be a bigger punishment than locking them inside a prison? Prisoners also can't drive cars around, so jail is a strict superset of that punishment.
I'm not going to take a hard position on it, but I'm at least mildly skeptical that jail would ever be appropriate for something that can be just as easily solved by progressive fines and revoking a license. Jails in the US are really awful, so they'd need to produce great results for me to prefer putting someone into one of them. And it's not clear to me that they even reduce recidivism rates for crimes of this nature any more than other alternatives.
We should be pretty hesitant to send people to prison. Particularly with the knowledge of how calls for increased "tough on crime" policing typically go in America -- well meaning people should keep in mind that advocating for the expansion of carceral laws often results in unintended consequences.
Jail is much more short term than prison. It can easily be a smaller punishment than having to buy a replacement car. Especially if it's something like this, where you might only spend a day or two there and have community service on top.
You can have your car back if you fix the headlights. Make it be a mandatory appointment to show up at after e.g. a week and get your car checked for having fixed your headlighs.
Also, have a choice of getting your car booted with some electronic boot that you can unlock after sunrise, or getting your car towed. You'll have to show up for the checkup anyways, so that's when you can drop the boot off.
Either way, imprisonment won't fix the problem, which is a faulty vehicle. The inconvenience of not being able to drive the car until after sunrise, along with a typical towing/booting fee, should be sufficient incentive to not drive with faulty lights, given how easy they would be for police cars to measure/detect with an inexpensive, small camera unit at a proper location on the police car, which then signals the driver about a suspected violation.
Passing a police car that doesn't have anything better to do, while you have your faulty lights on, should be common enough to make driving like that a risk too high.
You are correct, I dont care the punishment schedule as you put it, but here if you keep avoiding paying a ticket they will jail you for a few days. I have had a relative go to jail for not paying a ticket, it wasnt fun but hes highly unlikely to not pay a driving ticket or make the same mjstake. Whats worse is I think he paid for it but somehow the wrong county was involved or some mess its been a few years so I cant remember what the mixup was.
I didnt mean to imply they would immediately go to jail, but usually laws come with consequences and jail would eventually be up in that tree of consequences.
IDK, I’ve seen some very incredibly lights on what look to be modern, unmodified vehicles.
Since you don’t seem to have any statistics to go with your assertion that most of the bright lights are because of aftermarket installations, I have no reason to believe it over any of the alternatives such as:
- Lights being too bright from the factory (because some regulations don’t specific peak lumens).
- Lights being misaligned from the factory (a small amount makes a big difference).
Or the most likely to me:
- People carrying a significant amount of weight in the back of the vehicle. This would be most commonly seen on trucks and SUVs, but could also be a smaller car with something heavy in the trunk.
Not sure on the authority of this resource, but they list the most common reason headlights would need to be adjusted as:
> In most cases, headlights simply slip out of adjustment over time. In fact, most headlights will need to be adjusted every few years. Here are a couple of reasons your headlights may be pointed at the sky:
>
> Reason 1: Too much weight. One of the most common reasons that headlights are not shining on the road or are blinding oncoming drivers is due to excess weight in the trunk or cargo area. This will push down the rear of the vehicle enough to tilt the front of it up, along with the light beams.
In a case like this a ticket or warning from a traffic cop would likely be sufficient for someone to adjust their headlamps, but you instead jump to jailing someone? That’s a bit extreme.
Maximum permissible wattage in USA headlights used to be 55 watts each (and probably still is). I don’t think there was ever a limit defined in lumens, so now we get LED lights with crazy brightness since they still use under 55 watts.
If the regulation isn't "55 Watts or equivalent brightness to 55W incandescent" then the regulation is pretty dumb. I mean it has to have a minimum brightness (regardless of power use), so why not a maximum brightness rather than a maximum power too?
Seriously. Driving at night with a lot of oncoming traffic is starting to become a serious hazard. Maybe doubly so if you have a car that sits relatively low to the ground.
I tend away from nationalistic exceptionalism and inferiorism. I tend to find one nation that seems very well together in one area is often all fouled up somewhere else. But I've just seen so many examples of America's inability to build working beaurocracy lately that I begin to wonder. This of course is a fairly trivial example but others are not.
I'm sure I'm consuming cherry-picked media and if I went looking I could find the U.K. government with its pants down over here or Japan up to something silly but I have been wondering of late.
The UK seems to have made a mess of their Coronavirus response (fewer cases but even more deaths than the USA). That accounts for most of the current news. Johnson has recently continued the trend of nominating far too many people to the House of Lords (the unelected upper chamber of Parliament), which is a severe weakness in British democracy, second only to the terrible voting system for the Commons (lower house) in my opinion.
"Boring" bureaucracy like the headlights is rarely a significant problem. The idea that the government is fundamentally incompetent and shouldn't be trusted even to tie its own shoelaces seems uniquely American -- in Britain, if part of the government isn't working the people look for a politician to blame, usually either for interfering or cutting the budget.
Even more idiotic is my truck. I put a camper on it. I can't drive it at night because the weight of the camper tilts the entire truck back just a bit so that the head lights are aimed right at driver's eyes even on the lowbeams. Everyone flashes me and gets pissed off. Hopefully Adaptive headlights account for things like this.
self-leveling is required on bi-xenon headlights even in the US, so this is quite strange. if you have older-style headlights, there should be manual adjustment screws on the lamp housing you can fix this with in a matter of minutes.
Those are in no way permanent. Many of them even have built-in stands that can lift and support the camper, allowing you to simply drive the truck out from under it.
Lights are always adjustable. On my last car, there was just a screw where you adjusted it one way or the other and it would move the beam up or down. You pull up to a wall some distance away, and adjust the beam so it's at the right level.
The only equipment you need is a screwdriver, and the only knowledge you need is which screw to turn and a basic understanding of "that's too high" vs "that's too low". It takes ten minutes tops.
In my experience, people driving trucks and people with high/blindingly bright headlights are highly overlapping sets of people. So you can at least feel consolation in that those people are probably not surprised in being pissed off by you.
Sounds like too much tongue weight. Assuming you aren't exceeding your vehicle's tow capacity, the tongue weight should be about 10% of the loaded trailer weight (check your owner's manual) which the suspension should be designed to handle and thus not tilt your vehicle under load. Or you may have a worn suspension...
A vehicle in the US that would be colloquially referred to as a 'truck' almost certainly does not. Headlight level controls are extremely rare in the US.
Been driving about 20 years in the US, owned eight or nine cars (mostly small to mid-sized sedans and minivans) over the years between me & the wife, and I can't recall ever seeing headlight level controls.
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.
They are usually in the bottom of the bumper as a little screw, or on the inside of the engine bay in the front near the top of the radiator. They are in most cars.
My last Japanese car with HIDs had manual adjust. Everything I've owned since was auto leveling. I've never owned a manual adjust (unless you count the screw on the headlight itself...) on a halogen headlight equipped vehicle. And I've owned a lot of vehicles over the years.
I'm not sure if you're trying to mock the fact that I said I had a Land Rover. That's not very kind.
I mean an old Land Rover Defender - a working vehicle that rattles and doesn't even have air bags. It still has a headlight adjustment wheel as it's a functional feature, not a luxury.
I've not worked on newer cars in a long time, but when I did you could purchase "adjustable shock absorbers" that use compressed air to lift the back of your truck when it was loaded down with a heavy trailer attached to the trailer hitch.
If it's outside the adjustment range, there's too much weight on the trailer hitch. There are limits (usually documented in the manual) and both the rear suspension and headlights are the reason for them.
Because we elect garbage politicians who engage in wholesale bribery and are more interested in maintaining power than doing the job they were elected to do. We're getting exactly what we deserve, and honestly, I think that's too much.
The point of real democracy (versus what I call model/book democracy) is to extract useful value from fallible individuals while preventing them to do too much harm (like seizing too much power).
The better questions are then:
* Is it getting worse?
* Are politicians more preoccupied with their interests than in the past?
* Is it because it is easier now to manufacture misinformation?
* Is it because people vote for parties and not for individual politicians?
* Is having less focus on individual character an inevitable result of polarization of society?
* Would more truthful and unbiased news coverage help?
* Would more education on the principles of civic life help people make better voting decisions?
* Is technology causing general disease of attention deficit and focus problem on the scale of entire society causing it to make worse decisions overall?
A lot of those "adaptive" LED light suck! Loads of times I'm stuck with some guy behind me with flickery, colour-changing lights pointing right at my face through the mirrors.
I wish someone would do something about the excessively bright LED taillights people are installing. I can't stand having my eyes burned out behind these fools.
The American market has had "adaptive headlights" for nearly 20 years. They tilt up and down, side to side, depending on the orientation of the car. My 2004 Lexus IS300 had them. And they were HIDs, so they were plenty bright. (My base model 2012 Toyota's headlights completely suck in comparison...)
But our headlight market and rules are pretty ridiculous. Most "fancy" non-HID bulbs are a ripoff and actually make visibility worse, and it's also illegal to convert a halogen setup to HID. Combine this with the fact that some designs are just crap no matter what the bulb type, and we have a general market failure to understand the real performance of headlights. People think they can generalize headlight types, but it doesn't bear out in practice. https://www.consumerreports.org/headlights/are-hid-and-led-h...
This is not a standard feature of new cars, but it's pretty affordable addition for middle segment cars (In my MPV it was an extra 700$). Premium cars getting this more and more frequently, not LED, but lasers in case of Audi (and VAG).
I am grimly curious how many Americans would view a primitive combination of high beam/low beam/fog lamps/accent lights as being preferable to a sophisticated headlight that can do it all, simply because they get off on dazzling people with their absurd headlights.
I am european and still prefer the simple system. As a software developer - knowing what kind of bunch we are - the less software for critical systems the better.
Clicking a button or switching a lever with tactile feedback, immediate response that does exactly what is expected is vastly preferable to any smart system.
But it is a gradient. There are simple "adaptive headlights" that try not to do anything too fancy. Just aim at the road, adjust for elevation, and the direction you are turning. Could imagine a hinge and a gyroscope controlling that, in theory.
These matrix ones that add in adjustments for other cars and for signs are maybe a little too far on the curve for me as well. Anything using computer vision is not something I'd be excited about.
I am all for innovation. But having some behavior of the car being a black box to the driver is recipe for trouble. And of course there are always edge cases that the developers didn't forsee.
The more complicated a car is - the more training will the driver need. So standard drivers license at some point may not be enough.
> 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. The other driver doesn't get blinded, but you still have blazing lights on your side.
That is amazing. And I suspect that one could incorporate more autopilot technology. Perhaps to better illuminate pedestrians, bicyclists, motorcyclists, and wildlife. Also perhaps police vehicles, identified through markings and/or tag number.
I 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
Some European cars are sold with laser head lights as an optional extra. As a driver meeting usch a vehicle I ponder if that is safe for my eyesight? After recent scandals I don’t fully trust the car industry to self regulate as they have mislead consumers before for example Dieselgate. Thus I think it’s good that there is car safety regulations but that led lights probably should be allowed. I think too many consumer decisions are made on the basis of ego what is good for me/self as a consumer and not necessarily what is good for others.
The laserlights, like ones marketed by BMW, are not shining the laser outward into the world - they use them to warm up phosphor which in turn produces “regular” light.
In a sense, it’s somewhat akin to an old school incandescent bulb, but using much less energy. In US, laserlights are reduced power due to regulations
The biggest problem with government regulations is that they are often written in a reactionary or temporary way, but then become enshrined either by bureaucracy or entrenched interests.
This is a classical case of regulating at the completely wrong level.
Forget low beams and high beams. All that needs to be regulated is that the headlights can't point to other drivers, cyclists and pedestrians at a too great intensity above N inches/centimeters from ground.
Set those intensity limits to safe levels, make NIST (or some equivalent organisation) come up with a national standard test to enforce them, and let car makers use whatever technology to make headlights as long as they pass that test.
A friend of mine has this type of headlights on his BMW, and while they are very cool at night with the adaptive beams that light the road without blinding other drivers, I can't say that I find them to be a must-have, and I'd be hard-pressed to pay the premium to get them on my car compared to my current xenon lights that can only corner as I turn the wheel.
Unless you're frequently driving at night, you'll be just fine with halogen or xenon lights.
Is blinding that big a problem? Assuming the lowbeams are well adjusted, they should never blind anyone. The number of times each winter that I forget to switch off my high beams for an oncoming driver and blind him is between zero and one.
It is to me, but my vision at night isn't the greatest. I see quite a few people with HID/LED lights now and the blue shifted spectrum and poor aiming have caused me problems.
So I paid around $2k for mine. Most people thought I was crazy. But, living at the time in an area with a lot of dark, wooded roads as well as what seemed to me to be an extreme deer overpopulation, I don't regret it one bit.
I wish we had the lights they turned with the steering wheel as a standard option. Is there any reasonably priced car with this feature, or is it only in Europe?
That exists now with a number of models here in the U.S., and is sometimes called "cornering lights." The original article refers to what this Motor Trend article [0] calls, "Adaptive Driving Beams."
What is reasonable for you? I'm in the US and my 2018 subaru crosstrek limited does that and the current 2020 limited version has LED Steering Responsive Headlights and starts at 27,395.
Mercedes has a good demo video about current state of this tech (EU only) - when you drive a car with it, it’s literally magical. Alternative tech uses a projector-like screen with 4K resolution, allowing for very precise light control.
Current resolution generally seems to be less than 100 headlight 'pixels' so we may need more resolution before we can dim someone's face specifically.
But that could get especially interesting when you connect it to a self driving system. The car's AI could become a more active participant in 'looking' at things.
I don't think they are too common in 20000 EUR cars yet, but they are continuously trickling down.
A quick look shows that they are an option in Opel Astras that start at 21390€ (inc. 24% VAT plus 2000€ car tax) in Finland and under 20000€ in e.g. Germany, though.
The median price of new cars is around 30000€ here. The most common models are Skoda Octavia, Toyota Corolla, Nissan Qashqai (all three start at around 24000€), of which Skoda Octavia is available with matrix headlights and the two others are not, if I looked correctly.
Most people buy used, though - ~85% of car purchases are used cars.
A quick look through used cars market at nettiauto.com seems to show that there are many Opel Astras with matrix headlights for sale starting at around 14000€, but not many others at those prices.
Even more importantly: Why is America still stuck with cars that honk when they're locked and that have indicator lights flashing in the same color as the tail-lights? One is a nuisance, the other one a straight-up safety issue.
When I lived in Canada we had to turn on the honk mode because there were too many people using devices that block remote vehicle locking. The honk is an obvious indicator that the car did, indeed, lock.
Aren't the flashing indicator lights also an obvious indicator that the car did indeed lock? Or even just the sound of the locks locking. It gives an audible click in all cars I know.
Yes, if you have line of sight. If you don't, sound has the advantage of going around corners.
I have encountered situations where I might need to operate the locks without being immediately in line-of-sight, like when I leave the vehicle before other passengers, someone else needs to get something out of the vehicle, etc.
Yeah, locking/unlocking the car out of sight sounds like a bad idea. It doesn't sound like a sufficiently important use case to justify obnoxious sounds.
The noise only happens if you want it to, anyway. All of the US manufacturers who add that feature only make it occur if you press the button 2x in succession.
I like to use the honk to locate my car when I've forgotten where I parked it. Unfortunately, my 2016 Corolla makes a beep inaudible from more than a spot or two away. :-(
That’s one of the things I miss the most of driving through america.
Being able to make your car honk from your remote is magic to someone like my that always forgets where the car was parked. I’ve tried to see if I could turn that feature on on cars in Europe but so far, no luck.
I thought that was the dumbest thing when I first moved to Canada. Then I bought a car and continued to think it was dumb for a couple of years before I realised that my car too used the brake lights to indicate.
They aren't red indicators, the car just flashes the brake lights. There's no difference for the observer between indicating and a dodgy connection.
> Why is America still stuck with cars that honk when they're locked
I've never encountered a car in the US that honks when they're locked the first time -- but many domestic models honk when you lock them twice in quick succession. Many people like the feature, for audible confirmation that the vehicle is locked, or finding your car in a parking lot. Abusing the feature is also a suburban dad pastime.
> have indicator lights flashing in the same color as the tail-lights
This one is a safety issue, and even US regulators own data shows that amber lights are safer. However, the US does have a minimum lamp size regulation that most other countries don't. I guess the original idea was to allow the combination of the two lights in exchange for a larger minimum lamp size.
Those things are annoying but what's really bad is GM's insistence on a 'feature' where the white reverse lights are turned on after you exit the vehicle for illumination purposes. In the parking lot, it looks like it's about to move.
Unless there is thick fog they can just see you with their eyes.
There's security arguments for having it (i.e. confirming locking/detecting jamming) but pretending people cannot see you or otherwise hear you, but can hear a single honk isn't a realistic set of seemingly contradictory circumstances.
I like it for locking, especially on large parking lots where not one is bothered by it anyway. Most honks on double locking are short and not as loud as normal honking. I never used it in a residential area but for supermarket parking lots it's a nice feature and I can't see how it would bother anyone.
Is there some other feature you can use to find your car in a parking lot? I have pretty bad ADD so this happens to me a lot, but I assume it happens every now and then to most people in any case.
The alarm. Not good for anything else, so may as well use it for that. Or pop the trunk if you can, and if it'll pop up high enough to be noticeable, and if you don't have anything in there someone might walk off with. Or that iPhone feature where it makes pretty decent guesses about when you're parking a car and tells you where it is.
In, say, a major shopping chain suburban parking lot, anyone annoyed by a car alarm going off for five seconds is just looking for something to be annoyed by. Different story on a city street or in a neighborhood, sure.
Not sure how truly effective the Porsche solution really is. I have a hard time believing that computer controlled sensors can effectively direct beams of light. What about conditions which scatter light? None of the interesting problems are addressed in this article, instead we are left with a clickbait title.
I also just avoid driving at night these days. Even on road trips I deliberately start at sunrise and end at sunset. Among the reasons is awful headlights. I don't drive at night unless I have to.
Yeah. In 1964 my family returned to the US from the middle east where my dad worked. We brought the family Peugeot car with us. It had yellow antifog headlights, then popular in Europe. Dad couldn't register it in the US until he changed the headlights.
I have a 4 years old Passat that has them, the visibility is incredible. Especially on the sides of the road, where normal lights go kind of dim. This kind of bureaucracy is very funny in US, cause I thought that one think US is build on is progress.
I recall arguing about European specs vs American specs a couple years back on reddit. Very strong insistence that the American route is superior. Don't think that legislation is getting updated any time soon.
I feel that night driving has become more tedious since the advent of LED lights and moronic drivers wielding them in high beam mode. Reading this thread, it seems this is a world wide problem.
Reminds me of motorcycle helmet standards in the United States, where “DOT” is the minimum legal requirement. For people who want to live, ECE, Snell, or the new FIM standards are a must.
What's even worse are the standards for bicycle helmets which are governed by the CPSC (Consumer Products Safety Commission). At least there are better standards out there like Snell.
I'm glad we don't have these because the mfgrs and dealers would just use it to screw over the buyers.
It would be full of ongoing software bugs that can only be fixed if you pay for a $75 oil change at the dealership. Sometimes the headlight firmware will crash while you're driving down the road and somehow the owner will be 100% liable not the mfgr kinda like self driving car crashes. The module will be designed to crack the first time a piece of road gravel touches it and the module will cost at least $1000 and require disassembling the entire front end of the car to replace.
Defects like those would be subject to mandatory recalls. New vehicles are already full of software-controlled features. My 2017 vehicle has had three recalls that were purely software patches.
ok... i'll admit, that was awesome!!! i think everyone on the planet has wanted something like this for awhile now. when driving at night, i'm constantly blinded by people who keep their high beams on. it's gotten even worst over the years with leds and raised trucks and cars where the beams are at eye level. this could really help make night driving safe all around.
All these people stroking it to fancy new LED or projector lights clearly have never had to service (pro-tip: you usually can't) or replace them. The projectors in particular have a bunch of asinine failure modes as they age. Good luck finding a complete assembly for less than half a grand. Screw that.
Give me sealed beam lights that cost $20 and if they're not bright enough then give me more of them (e.g. 2013 Ford E-series).
The reason that they're permitted in FMVSS 108 was to allow automakers to save money. Hence the reason luxury brand cars with LED tail lamp have them in the USA.
I just leased a car after a decade of car-free living (not doing crowded public transport again until we have a vaccine) ... the headlight situation is 10x worse than I remember. Driving at night is a brutal.
Regulation is not intrinsically good or bad any more than, say, law or any other social convention. If you want to contribute to the conversation you need to discuss the different factors which make a particular example better or worse than alternatives — for example, you could start by asking whether the reason why this innovation from Europe is not available in the U.S. is because Europe does not have regulation or because the quality of that regulation is different.
I mean, hey -- i'm usually happy about automotive modifications that the police leave me alone about, but this aftermarket headlight trend is many times worse than a nuisance loud exhaust -- it can literally blind you for seconds during night driving.