10 ms·

Modern vehicle headlights temporarily 'blinding drivers'

128 points by vanilla-almond 9y ago

ddingus 9y ago
So are low duty cycle rear light LEDS. A constant light appears to be something people compensate for easily. The spackle of dots left in vision during night traffic, not so much.
- isostatic 9y ago
  I suspect the patterns are there because it forces the driver to be aware there's a cyclist, rather than yet another Red light.
  - ddingus 9y ago
    No. I'm talking about low refresh rate LED lights, not bikes. Car rear lights.
    - isostatic 9y ago
      "low duty cycle rear light LEDS" You can see my confusion (low duty) (cycle rear light LEDS) (low duty cycle) (rear light LEDS) :D
codebeaker 9y ago
Maladjusted headlights are worse, my own car has a dial for adjusting headlight pitch for when towing, and my wife constantly adjusts them "up" because she can "see better", I think this is also endemic.
- Gustomaximus 9y ago
  Shouldn't towing increase the light angle upwards? So adjustment should only allow you to drop the headlights from their safe level? Seems a manufacturer error or lack of regulation that people can choose to angle them past a standard safe level.
  - dariota 9y ago
    There are a number of factors that can affect the beam angle. If you're not towing and you've only got passengers in the front and nothing in the boot or in the back, the headlights will point lower than normal and you'll need to adjust them up.
- briandear 9y ago
  Does it help her see better? If so, then how is that the incorrect setting? Perhaps the real problem is the failure of roads to be properly lit. Obviously in rural areas, that’s a challenge and not always necessary, but most people here seem to not be talking about rural areas. In France, it seems that they obsess so much over global warming that the streetlights are pretty much worthless. Which makes the need to “see better” so much more acute. Brighter or better positioned street lights would solve a lot of these issues.
askvictor 9y ago
Slightly related; I'm finding the bicycle headlights (and to a lesser extent, rear lights) are becoming a blinding hazard for other cyclists on darker bike paths. Bike lights have certainly gotten brighter and cheaper over the past couple of years, and more people have them. Certainly, this is a good thing for visibility on the roads, where you're competing to be seen against all manner of light sources, and there is high ambient light. But on a darker off-road bike path, there is little ambient light, and it completely blinds a passer by. For a pedestrian, this is an annoyance; for a passing cyclist, this means you cannot see the path in front of you for a few seconds. I regularly have to shield my eyes from passing bikes in the evening. I don't think there's any real solution to this problem; no-one's going to regulate and police this, and people don't seem give enough cares about (or just don't think about) anyone other than themselves.
- iforgotpassword 9y ago
  this so much. i guess we have LEDs to tjank for that. then people just slap them onto their bikes without giving it any thought or even being like 'yeah I'm gonna make it shine really high so i can see even further'. also bonus points to people who set them to blink because it saves 2$ a year in batteries but is even more irritating in the dark as it's much harder to extrapolate the path of movement.
  - mkj 9y ago
    Yep, the problem with LEDs is it's such a tiny point source. Lights like Busch & Müller's are better - the LED isn't directly visible out the front, it shines off a reflector. Problems solved by German regulation (StVZO)!
  - angrygoat 9y ago
    This problem actually stopped me bike commuting; one of the paths I need to ride on after dark is along a river wall, and the temporary blindness just felt too dangerous. It should be a matter of courtesy to use quality lights, aimed appropriately. I'm sure a lot of people who personally use these lights are also annoyed by other users of them.
nielsbot 9y ago
Definitely true for me. Thought it was because I was getting older, but maybe headlights have changed too...
aynsof 9y ago
A real problem I've found in Australia is the overuse of fog lights. People will drive around the suburbs with four lights blasting from the fronts of their SUVs. It's widespread, it's dangerous, and it's illegal, but it's apparently not enforced.
- jazoom 9y ago
  I really don't like super bright LED lights on SUVs. They are at eye height and very dangerous.
polskibus 9y ago
I found that it the worst when the other car is a fairly new SUV. Headlights are higher than in a regular car. Even if calibrated, straight out of factory, part of the light is going the wrong direction(ie up)
- sokoloff 9y ago
  Part of the light is supposed to be going up and to the right (for right hand drive countries) to illuminate road signs that are higher than the light centerline.
  - usrusr 9y ago
    And yet they still build counterflow/bidirectional bike paths. Riding them at night is a permanent slap in the face.
  - polskibus 9y ago
    From the right lamp yes, from left much less. I am blinded much more see when a SUV is driving from the other direction then when it's a standard car.
mavhc 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitz%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitz%27s_law Every decade, the cost per lumen (unit of useful light emitted) falls by a factor of 10, and the amount of light generated per LED package increases by a factor of 20, for a given wavelength (color) of light.
y4mi 9y ago
i drive a bike to work, in any weather. the last ~200m of my commute is at the "wrong" side of the road, so the cars are driving into my direction. I generally drive especially slow there. The sidewalk is pretty broad and its incredibly rare that even a single person walks there, but it just want to be careful. when it rains, i need to dismount from my bike, as i'm unable to see anything on the sidewalk/cycle lane. seriously dangerous.
Someone 9y ago
High tech may come to the rescue. Mercedes already sells cars with multi-beam headlights that try to prevent blinding others (https://www.mercedes-benz.com/en/mercedes-benz/innovation/multibeam-led-brings-light-into-the-darkness/ https://www.mercedes-benz.com/en/mercedes-benz/innovation/mu...), and has announced what essentially are powerful DLP video projectors that would go much farther (https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/mercedes-benz-digital-light-geneva-auto-show/ https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/mercedes-benz-digital-lig...)
- usrusr 9y ago
  They will use that technology as an excuse with regulators to further increase brightness on the high setting and then everybody who doesn't get detected will get their eyes completely toasted. Still beats getting run over by an Uber, but it will make life hell for everybody who isn't sitting in a car. On a dark night road, you can already get dangerously blinded even from an overtaking car with the high beam on (please don't do that, always use the low beam when approaching humans, from any side), without ever having a direct sight line to the lights. The technology you are referring to could be awesome if used with caution, but it will inevitably be used for dazzling regulators into allowing even brighter headlights, and as an excuse to recklessly running the high beam all the time.
arkades 9y ago
In the US, at least, there’s also an issue of wider tolerances in headlight design. When lumens were expensive you’d need tightly focused light cones to reach regulation-mandated light intensities at given distances. The new LEDs are cheaper than manufacturing to those tolerances, so... As a result we not only have brighter lights, but also bigger light cones. Engineers and businessmen are just doing their jobs. This will only be corrected by regulatory action.
- usrusr 9y ago
  Even if the beam shapes are perfect: old anti-glare regulations limit the intensity of light that goes above the horizon and with the technology of the time that implied a certain limit to below-horizon intensity. Which was still tolerable when the car hit the occasional bump, peeked over a hilltop and so on. But with LED and improved mirror designs, we can make the contrast at the cutoff line much bigger and now technically regulation-adhering cars can be devastatingly blinding whenever the road surface is not perfectly horizontal.
BuildTheRobots 9y ago
Super-Bright headlights are a massive problem - especially as nearly everyone has their lights adjusted wrong (too high). Seeing as we're talking about lights on vehicles though, why in the world isn't the use of PWM dimming on a vehicle illegal? The first thing you teach kids when programming arduinos is to dim an LED using PWM and then move the LED through space; oh look, it's not a dim light, it's a strobing light! Why in the world it's acceptable to put a strobe light onto a vehicle which by definition moves though space, is entirely beyond me. If you're stuck either behind, or worse, watching one go laterally in your peripheral then it's massively distracting :(
- mkj 9y ago
  PWM is fine. Just needs to be fast enough.
  - yeutterg 9y ago
    Yep, usually if you are above 3 kHz or so you are good! Unfortunately, a lot of today's LEDs PWM just outside the frequency we could detect flicker without moving, around 100-200 Hz. IEEE 1789 has something to say about this.
    - mkj 9y ago
      I don't think 3khz is enough. Say you can scan your eyes 180deg in 0.1s, and at 3m distance you can discern 1mm features. If it's 8bit PWM at lowest output (1/256 on-rate) you need about 3(m) x 3.14(pi) / 0.1(s) / 0.001(m) x 256 so you don't see gaps between dots, 24mhz PWM. That does seem high...
      - yeutterg 9y ago
        You're right that it's probably still detectable. But IEEE considers ~3+ kHz as "no risk." My interpretation is that it could be annoying but unlikely to cause an accident, etc. Some of the really good LED dimming solutions I've seen that employ PWM are in the 30+ kHz range. Of course, constant current dimming is the best, but it tends to be expensive.
jonhendry18 9y ago
Lights get brighter, irises narrow letting less light in, so your own headlights are less effective and you miss details in the shadows. So get brighter lights. Repeat.
cmrdporcupine 9y ago
Living rural it's amazing how many urban drivers leave their high beams on the moment they get on a rural road, not understanding the right protocol for turning them on and off depending on oncoming traffic, etc. I don't know how you get through a driver's test like that, but it happens. That, and it's getting hard to differentiate between high beams and regular lights on trucks and SUVs. On a dark rural road it can be downright dangerous.
beloch 9y ago
There's a bit of a feedback loop in play here too (i.e. Brightness wars). If you have dim headlights and are the only driver on the road, your eyes will adjust and you'll see pretty well. If you pass a driver traveling in the opposite direction with dim headlights you'll lose a bit of vision for a little while. Blindingly bright headlights won't necessarily let you see a lot more than dimmer headlights and fully adjusted eyes would. However, if you run into another driver with dim headlights, your eyes won't have to adjust nearly as much and your vision will recover more quickly. The guy with dim lights is going to be blind for a while though. If you want to minimize the time you spend readjusting to your own headlights after passing oncoming traffic, you want brighter lights than anyone else on the road. Not just bright, but brighter. Thus, there's an incentive for headlights to just keep getting brighter and brighter as technology enables this. Solution? Regulate maximum headlight brightness.
- thunfischbrot 9y ago
  Solution is correct, but you'll never outshine others' headlights shining into your eyes. It's more important that others' bright headlights adjust quickly enough that they do not shine into your eyes. Since the advent on Xenon lights headlights need to automatically adjust so they don't blind drivers. They are just not fast enough or smart enough (shining over a hill crest).
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- theluketaylor 9y ago
  In the US maximum headlight brightness is regulated, but the rules and tests are written extremly poorly. The test is in a specific place at a specific angle, so there are a ton of headlights that can pass the test, but are far brighter everywhere else. Obeying the letter of the law while flaunting the spirit. To make matters worse, due to the way the rules are written advanced systems that dim LED headlights specifically in the path of oncoming cars are not legal in the US. It's becoming common on high end European cars to not just auto dim but isolate oncoming vehicles from illumination while maintaining brightness elsewhere. The key to good regulation here is to write rules about how much light can be experienced by oncoming vehicles of various height and driver positions and let engineers figure out how to meet it.
FractalLP 9y ago
Agreed...it took me awhile to figure out that drivers didn't have their brights on...they're just that bright. This is dangerous and needs to be regulated (coming from someone who isn't very pro regulation)
- isostatic 9y ago
  "coming from someone who isn't very pro regulation" This affects me so it should be regulated. If it doesn't affect me it shouldn't be regulated.
  - draw_down 9y ago
    Welcome to America!
  - briandear 9y ago
    No. It could potentially kill someone so it might ought to be regulated. Some of the stuff the pro-regulation types want regulated is nonsensically stupid: in the EU, the shape of cucumbers, the brand names of cheese, the power output of a tea kettle, the strength of hair dryers — none of those things have any life or death consequences. People want to regulate internet content, the height of fences, the width of doorways, the capacity of private toilets — even if those toilets connect to a septic system and don’t connect to the sewer mains. Even fucking lightbulbs are subject to the agenda of unelected officials in Brussels. People, especially left wing people, just LOVE regulation. They like forcing by people to abide their opinions on how things ought to be. Considering most regulation is by executive agencies and not actually written by accountable elected officials, excessive regulation could be argued as being contrary to the ideas of a representative republic. We need less overall regulation, but that doesn’t mean NO regulation.
    - isostatic 9y ago
      Sounds like you've been reading the usual trash from the Daily Express or Breitbart or whatever. If the price of a product included all externalities, then yes regulation isn't needed, however it doesn't and can't, and this is where the usual anarcho-libertarian views fall down.
jgh 9y ago
My wife and I moved back to Canada last summer and for a while we were living in small towns several hours from where our families/the airport/etc are. So I would, fairly regularly, be making late-night trips through the backroads of Gray County and it definitely made me a little nervous anytime I passed someone with bright/incorrectly configured headlights. It is DARK out there and there are deer and other things that wander onto the road.
- mratzloff 9y ago
  Lasy year I had occasion to drive across western Colorado at night in a 22-foot diesel truck. No lights whatsoever except my headlights and those of the rare passerby. Pitch black. When it's that dark, you lose your spatial sense. A single light approached me, and I realized a motorcycle was driving at me head on. I swerved to avoid it, and the motorcycle changed direction to continue heading for me. When I swerved again, it was too much, and the truck began fishtailing and rocking back and forth laterally. I was sure I was going to tip it. It would have been an utter disaster, especially since I had no cell service out in the middle of nowhere. As I brought it to a stop, it teetered one last time and almost tipped—then finally, dramatically, landed safely on all wheels. There was no motorcycle. The lights from the occasional car way off in the distance had merged together into a single light that appeared brighter, and therefore closer. The cars weren't even on the same road; as they rode around a bend the headlights had, in the utter void that I found myself in on these Colorado backroads, created an optical illusion. After that night I resolved never to drive in darkness like that again.
numbsafari 9y ago
Personally I’ve found that the new police lights that use LEDs are the worst. They’re blindingly bright. So you get to the scene of an accident, or where there’s some construction work or other hazard and the police are trying to direct you... except you can’t see a damn thing because of their lights.
- notacoward 9y ago
  I bitched at my town PD about this once. Their new cars have bright white "takedown lights" that are intended to keep a target from looking at them directly. I don't think much of the idea in general, but these ones were aimed so high that they overshot the vehicle being stopped and blinded oncoming drivers instead. So I emailed the chief. I probably wasn't the only one. In any case, they both adjusted them more downwards and stopped using them so much, so it hasn't been a problem since. If you encounter the same problem, I suggest at least trying to find the right contact to let them know. You might be surprised by the result.
  - yorby 9y ago
    They do something about blinding lights, but not about shooting unarmed citizens? I'm a bit skeptic...
jesusthatsgreat 9y ago
If self-driving cars are the norm, this problem will disappear over time.. .
- Spooky23 9y ago
  Unlikely. Your per trip cost at peak commuting periods will 10x, so people will probably adopt more bike and other forms of commuting as long as they can use the roads.
  - emiliobumachar 9y ago
    Maybe. But... maybe not. Per trip costs, including cost of time, already peaks very sharply at rush hour. Bike adoption is what it is.
gwbas1c 9y ago
We also need to address people who drive with their high beams on at oncoming traffic.
rsp1984 9y ago
I find this is mostly a problem with SUVs as their lights are naturally higher. I nearly always get blinded through my rear mirror when an SUV drives behind me at night. I can't imagine I'm the only one with this problem and it's hard to believe that there are no regulations to fix the problem.
- paultopia 9y ago
  Yes, THIS. I often have to hold a hand in front of my rear view mirror to not be blinded at night by SUV headlights.
  - jstanley 9y ago
    You know that little nub sticking out the bottom of the mirror? Flick that and your mirror will flip to another angle so the lights are no longer pointing at your face. Rear view mirrors actually contain 2 mirrors, so when you flick it you get the same image at the same angle, but only with 10% or so of the light actually being reflected towards your eyes.
    - paultopia 9y ago
      Is that why I'm getting all these downvotes on the comment above? Dudes and dudettes, that doesn't work on the side mirrors, which also have that effect.
    - cannonedhamster 9y ago
      Doesn't work when the high beams are on and tailgating you for going "only" 10 MPH over the speed limit. Also many newer cars are coming out with "auto dimming" mirrors without the switch but that don't quite seem to cut out as much light. The problem isn't just with lights either, it's with a lot of different features including mirrors that can't adequately capture blind spots and bumpers that cause more harm due to mismatched heights. The differences in vehicles sizes overall probably lead to quite a few avoidable traffic fatalities and accidents.
- jdmichal 9y ago
hashkb 9y ago
Not mentioned is the height issue. My car is pretty low to the ground. A pickup or large SUV with even 75th percentile brightness, "dipped" is still directly into my eyes. So there's the brightness wars, and also an arms race in the height of the beams.
burfog 9y ago
The lights are too small. Little pinpoints of light will interact badly with optical flaws in the eye, particularly for those who have had eye surgery. They also obviously need to be brighter per area to reach a given level of total brightness. Large flat panels are best. Note that this does not mean unfocused. A panel can be an array of tightly packed LEDs that are individually focused, and from a distance you couldn't tell that there were individual elements. Panels 24x18 inches would greatly reduce the problem of pinpoint brightness.
tomohawk 9y ago
Polarized lenses were initially conceived as being for car headlights to reduce glare, but ended up being used in glasses. Perhaps this should be looked into again. Depending on the situation, I wear polarized sun glasses or yellow tinted glasses at night while driving. The yellow tinted ones work really well to cut down on the ultra intense and blinding LED lights of police (blue) or work vehicles (yellow).
mindvirus 9y ago
CMU has a really neat research project on programmable automotive headlights to help solve some of this (and other problems): http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ILIM/projects/IL/smartHeadlight/ http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ILIM/projects/IL/smartHeadlight/ If this became commoditized, we could even standardize on invisible markers on cars to make the problem of identifying where the driver is even easier.
- lulzury 9y ago
  The technology behind this is very cool, but has been out since 2015. For example, one of their features is that it can illuminate pedestrians crossing the road. Some searching shows Mercedes is adding this technology to some of their upcoming cars [1]. I am so excited about tech that can make driving safer. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/6/17086792/mercedes-smart-digital-headlights-maybach-s-class-cars-daimler https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/6/17086792/mercedes-smart-di...
cbanek 9y ago
This has been a problem for me driving for years. Driving thru non-interstate highways in the middle of the desert, you're usually restricted to two lane roads, which have lots of dips and turns which block oncoming visibility. There are also people passing using the oncoming lane. At night this can be pretty dangerous, and you can easily be blinded, as many people run with the brights on and don't notice an oncoming car is there until too late. My personal technique for not getting blinded is to watch the yellow line on the right, lowering my vision and turning it away from the bright headlights of the oncoming vehicle, while still giving myself enough visual reference to hold my lane. Once the car passes in a couple of seconds, I can go back to looking at the road normally. Not looking directly at the headlights helps return my night vision much more quickly.
alphabettsy 9y ago
Poorly aimed headlights and mostly people driving with their high-beams on are my biggest annoyance.
forgotmypw 9y ago
Does anyone know if there is any type of glasses that will protect one's vision against these lights without cutting visibility too much? I have been seeing this type of headlights more and more often, and it can't be good.

So are low duty cycle rear light LEDS. A constant light appears to be something people compensate for easily. The spackle of dots left in vision during night traffic, not so much.

isostatic 9y ago
I suspect the patterns are there because it forces the driver to be aware there's a cyclist, rather than yet another Red light.
- ddingus 9y ago
  No. I'm talking about low refresh rate LED lights, not bikes. Car rear lights.
  - isostatic 9y ago
    "low duty cycle rear light LEDS" You can see my confusion (low duty) (cycle rear light LEDS) (low duty cycle) (rear light LEDS) :D

codebeaker 9y ago

Maladjusted headlights are worse, my own car has a dial for adjusting headlight pitch for when towing, and my wife constantly adjusts them "up" because she can "see better", I think this is also endemic.

Gustomaximus 9y ago
Shouldn't towing increase the light angle upwards? So adjustment should only allow you to drop the headlights from their safe level? Seems a manufacturer error or lack of regulation that people can choose to angle them past a standard safe level.
- dariota 9y ago
  There are a number of factors that can affect the beam angle. If you're not towing and you've only got passengers in the front and nothing in the boot or in the back, the headlights will point lower than normal and you'll need to adjust them up.
briandear 9y ago
Does it help her see better? If so, then how is that the incorrect setting? Perhaps the real problem is the failure of roads to be properly lit. Obviously in rural areas, that’s a challenge and not always necessary, but most people here seem to not be talking about rural areas. In France, it seems that they obsess so much over global warming that the streetlights are pretty much worthless. Which makes the need to “see better” so much more acute. Brighter or better positioned street lights would solve a lot of these issues.

askvictor 9y ago

Slightly related; I'm finding the bicycle headlights (and to a lesser extent, rear lights) are becoming a blinding hazard for other cyclists on darker bike paths. Bike lights have certainly gotten brighter and cheaper over the past couple of years, and more people have them. Certainly, this is a good thing for visibility on the roads, where you're competing to be seen against all manner of light sources, and there is high ambient light. But on a darker off-road bike path, there is little ambient light, and it completely blinds a passer by. For a pedestrian, this is an annoyance; for a passing cyclist, this means you cannot see the path in front of you for a few seconds. I regularly have to shield my eyes from passing bikes in the evening. I don't think there's any real solution to this problem; no-one's going to regulate and police this, and people don't seem give enough cares about (or just don't think about) anyone other than themselves.

iforgotpassword 9y ago
this so much. i guess we have LEDs to tjank for that. then people just slap them onto their bikes without giving it any thought or even being like 'yeah I'm gonna make it shine really high so i can see even further'. also bonus points to people who set them to blink because it saves 2$ a year in batteries but is even more irritating in the dark as it's much harder to extrapolate the path of movement.
- mkj 9y ago
  Yep, the problem with LEDs is it's such a tiny point source. Lights like Busch & Müller's are better - the LED isn't directly visible out the front, it shines off a reflector. Problems solved by German regulation (StVZO)!
- angrygoat 9y ago
  This problem actually stopped me bike commuting; one of the paths I need to ride on after dark is along a river wall, and the temporary blindness just felt too dangerous. It should be a matter of courtesy to use quality lights, aimed appropriately. I'm sure a lot of people who personally use these lights are also annoyed by other users of them.

nielsbot 9y ago

Definitely true for me. Thought it was because I was getting older, but maybe headlights have changed too...

aynsof 9y ago

A real problem I've found in Australia is the overuse of fog lights. People will drive around the suburbs with four lights blasting from the fronts of their SUVs. It's widespread, it's dangerous, and it's illegal, but it's apparently not enforced.

jazoom 9y ago
I really don't like super bright LED lights on SUVs. They are at eye height and very dangerous.

polskibus 9y ago

I found that it the worst when the other car is a fairly new SUV. Headlights are higher than in a regular car. Even if calibrated, straight out of factory, part of the light is going the wrong direction(ie up)

sokoloff 9y ago
Part of the light is supposed to be going up and to the right (for right hand drive countries) to illuminate road signs that are higher than the light centerline.
- usrusr 9y ago
  And yet they still build counterflow/bidirectional bike paths. Riding them at night is a permanent slap in the face.
- polskibus 9y ago
  From the right lamp yes, from left much less. I am blinded much more see when a SUV is driving from the other direction then when it's a standard car.

mavhc 9y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitz%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitz%27s_law Every decade, the cost per lumen (unit of useful light emitted) falls by a factor of 10, and the amount of light generated per LED package increases by a factor of 20, for a given wavelength (color) of light.

y4mi 9y ago

i drive a bike to work, in any weather. the last ~200m of my commute is at the "wrong" side of the road, so the cars are driving into my direction. I generally drive especially slow there. The sidewalk is pretty broad and its incredibly rare that even a single person walks there, but it just want to be careful. when it rains, i need to dismount from my bike, as i'm unable to see anything on the sidewalk/cycle lane. seriously dangerous.

Someone 9y ago

High tech may come to the rescue. Mercedes already sells cars with multi-beam headlights that try to prevent blinding others (https://www.mercedes-benz.com/en/mercedes-benz/innovation/multibeam-led-brings-light-into-the-darkness/ https://www.mercedes-benz.com/en/mercedes-benz/innovation/mu...), and has announced what essentially are powerful DLP video projectors that would go much farther (https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/mercedes-benz-digital-light-geneva-auto-show/ https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/mercedes-benz-digital-lig...)

usrusr 9y ago
They will use that technology as an excuse with regulators to further increase brightness on the high setting and then everybody who doesn't get detected will get their eyes completely toasted. Still beats getting run over by an Uber, but it will make life hell for everybody who isn't sitting in a car. On a dark night road, you can already get dangerously blinded even from an overtaking car with the high beam on (please don't do that, always use the low beam when approaching humans, from any side), without ever having a direct sight line to the lights. The technology you are referring to could be awesome if used with caution, but it will inevitably be used for dazzling regulators into allowing even brighter headlights, and as an excuse to recklessly running the high beam all the time.

arkades 9y ago

In the US, at least, there’s also an issue of wider tolerances in headlight design. When lumens were expensive you’d need tightly focused light cones to reach regulation-mandated light intensities at given distances. The new LEDs are cheaper than manufacturing to those tolerances, so... As a result we not only have brighter lights, but also bigger light cones. Engineers and businessmen are just doing their jobs. This will only be corrected by regulatory action.

usrusr 9y ago
Even if the beam shapes are perfect: old anti-glare regulations limit the intensity of light that goes above the horizon and with the technology of the time that implied a certain limit to below-horizon intensity. Which was still tolerable when the car hit the occasional bump, peeked over a hilltop and so on. But with LED and improved mirror designs, we can make the contrast at the cutoff line much bigger and now technically regulation-adhering cars can be devastatingly blinding whenever the road surface is not perfectly horizontal.

BuildTheRobots 9y ago

Super-Bright headlights are a massive problem - especially as nearly everyone has their lights adjusted wrong (too high). Seeing as we're talking about lights on vehicles though, why in the world isn't the use of PWM dimming on a vehicle illegal? The first thing you teach kids when programming arduinos is to dim an LED using PWM and then move the LED through space; oh look, it's not a dim light, it's a strobing light! Why in the world it's acceptable to put a strobe light onto a vehicle which by definition moves though space, is entirely beyond me. If you're stuck either behind, or worse, watching one go laterally in your peripheral then it's massively distracting :(

mkj 9y ago
PWM is fine. Just needs to be fast enough.
- yeutterg 9y ago
  Yep, usually if you are above 3 kHz or so you are good! Unfortunately, a lot of today's LEDs PWM just outside the frequency we could detect flicker without moving, around 100-200 Hz. IEEE 1789 has something to say about this.
  - mkj 9y ago
    I don't think 3khz is enough. Say you can scan your eyes 180deg in 0.1s, and at 3m distance you can discern 1mm features. If it's 8bit PWM at lowest output (1/256 on-rate) you need about 3(m) x 3.14(pi) / 0.1(s) / 0.001(m) x 256 so you don't see gaps between dots, 24mhz PWM. That does seem high...
    - yeutterg 9y ago
      You're right that it's probably still detectable. But IEEE considers ~3+ kHz as "no risk." My interpretation is that it could be annoying but unlikely to cause an accident, etc. Some of the really good LED dimming solutions I've seen that employ PWM are in the 30+ kHz range. Of course, constant current dimming is the best, but it tends to be expensive.

jonhendry18 9y ago

Lights get brighter, irises narrow letting less light in, so your own headlights are less effective and you miss details in the shadows. So get brighter lights. Repeat.

cmrdporcupine 9y ago

Living rural it's amazing how many urban drivers leave their high beams on the moment they get on a rural road, not understanding the right protocol for turning them on and off depending on oncoming traffic, etc. I don't know how you get through a driver's test like that, but it happens. That, and it's getting hard to differentiate between high beams and regular lights on trucks and SUVs. On a dark rural road it can be downright dangerous.

beloch 9y ago

There's a bit of a feedback loop in play here too (i.e. Brightness wars). If you have dim headlights and are the only driver on the road, your eyes will adjust and you'll see pretty well. If you pass a driver traveling in the opposite direction with dim headlights you'll lose a bit of vision for a little while. Blindingly bright headlights won't necessarily let you see a lot more than dimmer headlights and fully adjusted eyes would. However, if you run into another driver with dim headlights, your eyes won't have to adjust nearly as much and your vision will recover more quickly. The guy with dim lights is going to be blind for a while though. If you want to minimize the time you spend readjusting to your own headlights after passing oncoming traffic, you want brighter lights than anyone else on the road. Not just bright, but brighter. Thus, there's an incentive for headlights to just keep getting brighter and brighter as technology enables this. Solution? Regulate maximum headlight brightness.

thunfischbrot 9y ago
Solution is correct, but you'll never outshine others' headlights shining into your eyes. It's more important that others' bright headlights adjust quickly enough that they do not shine into your eyes. Since the advent on Xenon lights headlights need to automatically adjust so they don't blind drivers. They are just not fast enough or smart enough (shining over a hill crest).
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theluketaylor 9y ago
In the US maximum headlight brightness is regulated, but the rules and tests are written extremly poorly. The test is in a specific place at a specific angle, so there are a ton of headlights that can pass the test, but are far brighter everywhere else. Obeying the letter of the law while flaunting the spirit. To make matters worse, due to the way the rules are written advanced systems that dim LED headlights specifically in the path of oncoming cars are not legal in the US. It's becoming common on high end European cars to not just auto dim but isolate oncoming vehicles from illumination while maintaining brightness elsewhere. The key to good regulation here is to write rules about how much light can be experienced by oncoming vehicles of various height and driver positions and let engineers figure out how to meet it.

FractalLP 9y ago

Agreed...it took me awhile to figure out that drivers didn't have their brights on...they're just that bright. This is dangerous and needs to be regulated (coming from someone who isn't very pro regulation)

isostatic 9y ago
"coming from someone who isn't very pro regulation" This affects me so it should be regulated. If it doesn't affect me it shouldn't be regulated.
- draw_down 9y ago
  Welcome to America!
- briandear 9y ago
  No. It could potentially kill someone so it might ought to be regulated. Some of the stuff the pro-regulation types want regulated is nonsensically stupid: in the EU, the shape of cucumbers, the brand names of cheese, the power output of a tea kettle, the strength of hair dryers — none of those things have any life or death consequences. People want to regulate internet content, the height of fences, the width of doorways, the capacity of private toilets — even if those toilets connect to a septic system and don’t connect to the sewer mains. Even fucking lightbulbs are subject to the agenda of unelected officials in Brussels. People, especially left wing people, just LOVE regulation. They like forcing by people to abide their opinions on how things ought to be. Considering most regulation is by executive agencies and not actually written by accountable elected officials, excessive regulation could be argued as being contrary to the ideas of a representative republic. We need less overall regulation, but that doesn’t mean NO regulation.
  - isostatic 9y ago
    Sounds like you've been reading the usual trash from the Daily Express or Breitbart or whatever. If the price of a product included all externalities, then yes regulation isn't needed, however it doesn't and can't, and this is where the usual anarcho-libertarian views fall down.

jgh 9y ago

My wife and I moved back to Canada last summer and for a while we were living in small towns several hours from where our families/the airport/etc are. So I would, fairly regularly, be making late-night trips through the backroads of Gray County and it definitely made me a little nervous anytime I passed someone with bright/incorrectly configured headlights. It is DARK out there and there are deer and other things that wander onto the road.

mratzloff 9y ago
Lasy year I had occasion to drive across western Colorado at night in a 22-foot diesel truck. No lights whatsoever except my headlights and those of the rare passerby. Pitch black. When it's that dark, you lose your spatial sense. A single light approached me, and I realized a motorcycle was driving at me head on. I swerved to avoid it, and the motorcycle changed direction to continue heading for me. When I swerved again, it was too much, and the truck began fishtailing and rocking back and forth laterally. I was sure I was going to tip it. It would have been an utter disaster, especially since I had no cell service out in the middle of nowhere. As I brought it to a stop, it teetered one last time and almost tipped—then finally, dramatically, landed safely on all wheels. There was no motorcycle. The lights from the occasional car way off in the distance had merged together into a single light that appeared brighter, and therefore closer. The cars weren't even on the same road; as they rode around a bend the headlights had, in the utter void that I found myself in on these Colorado backroads, created an optical illusion. After that night I resolved never to drive in darkness like that again.

numbsafari 9y ago

Personally I’ve found that the new police lights that use LEDs are the worst. They’re blindingly bright. So you get to the scene of an accident, or where there’s some construction work or other hazard and the police are trying to direct you... except you can’t see a damn thing because of their lights.

notacoward 9y ago
I bitched at my town PD about this once. Their new cars have bright white "takedown lights" that are intended to keep a target from looking at them directly. I don't think much of the idea in general, but these ones were aimed so high that they overshot the vehicle being stopped and blinded oncoming drivers instead. So I emailed the chief. I probably wasn't the only one. In any case, they both adjusted them more downwards and stopped using them so much, so it hasn't been a problem since. If you encounter the same problem, I suggest at least trying to find the right contact to let them know. You might be surprised by the result.
- yorby 9y ago
  They do something about blinding lights, but not about shooting unarmed citizens? I'm a bit skeptic...

jesusthatsgreat 9y ago

If self-driving cars are the norm, this problem will disappear over time.. .

Spooky23 9y ago
Unlikely. Your per trip cost at peak commuting periods will 10x, so people will probably adopt more bike and other forms of commuting as long as they can use the roads.
- emiliobumachar 9y ago
  Maybe. But... maybe not. Per trip costs, including cost of time, already peaks very sharply at rush hour. Bike adoption is what it is.

gwbas1c 9y ago

We also need to address people who drive with their high beams on at oncoming traffic.

rsp1984 9y ago

I find this is mostly a problem with SUVs as their lights are naturally higher. I nearly always get blinded through my rear mirror when an SUV drives behind me at night. I can't imagine I'm the only one with this problem and it's hard to believe that there are no regulations to fix the problem.

paultopia 9y ago
Yes, THIS. I often have to hold a hand in front of my rear view mirror to not be blinded at night by SUV headlights.
- jstanley 9y ago
  You know that little nub sticking out the bottom of the mirror? Flick that and your mirror will flip to another angle so the lights are no longer pointing at your face. Rear view mirrors actually contain 2 mirrors, so when you flick it you get the same image at the same angle, but only with 10% or so of the light actually being reflected towards your eyes.
  - paultopia 9y ago
    Is that why I'm getting all these downvotes on the comment above? Dudes and dudettes, that doesn't work on the side mirrors, which also have that effect.
  - cannonedhamster 9y ago
    Doesn't work when the high beams are on and tailgating you for going "only" 10 MPH over the speed limit. Also many newer cars are coming out with "auto dimming" mirrors without the switch but that don't quite seem to cut out as much light. The problem isn't just with lights either, it's with a lot of different features including mirrors that can't adequately capture blind spots and bumpers that cause more harm due to mismatched heights. The differences in vehicles sizes overall probably lead to quite a few avoidable traffic fatalities and accidents.
jdmichal 9y ago

hashkb 9y ago

Not mentioned is the height issue. My car is pretty low to the ground. A pickup or large SUV with even 75th percentile brightness, "dipped" is still directly into my eyes. So there's the brightness wars, and also an arms race in the height of the beams.

burfog 9y ago

The lights are too small. Little pinpoints of light will interact badly with optical flaws in the eye, particularly for those who have had eye surgery. They also obviously need to be brighter per area to reach a given level of total brightness. Large flat panels are best. Note that this does not mean unfocused. A panel can be an array of tightly packed LEDs that are individually focused, and from a distance you couldn't tell that there were individual elements. Panels 24x18 inches would greatly reduce the problem of pinpoint brightness.

tomohawk 9y ago

Polarized lenses were initially conceived as being for car headlights to reduce glare, but ended up being used in glasses. Perhaps this should be looked into again. Depending on the situation, I wear polarized sun glasses or yellow tinted glasses at night while driving. The yellow tinted ones work really well to cut down on the ultra intense and blinding LED lights of police (blue) or work vehicles (yellow).

mindvirus 9y ago

CMU has a really neat research project on programmable automotive headlights to help solve some of this (and other problems): http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ILIM/projects/IL/smartHeadlight/ http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ILIM/projects/IL/smartHeadlight/ If this became commoditized, we could even standardize on invisible markers on cars to make the problem of identifying where the driver is even easier.

lulzury 9y ago
The technology behind this is very cool, but has been out since 2015. For example, one of their features is that it can illuminate pedestrians crossing the road. Some searching shows Mercedes is adding this technology to some of their upcoming cars [1]. I am so excited about tech that can make driving safer. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/6/17086792/mercedes-smart-digital-headlights-maybach-s-class-cars-daimler https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/6/17086792/mercedes-smart-di...

cbanek 9y ago

This has been a problem for me driving for years. Driving thru non-interstate highways in the middle of the desert, you're usually restricted to two lane roads, which have lots of dips and turns which block oncoming visibility. There are also people passing using the oncoming lane. At night this can be pretty dangerous, and you can easily be blinded, as many people run with the brights on and don't notice an oncoming car is there until too late. My personal technique for not getting blinded is to watch the yellow line on the right, lowering my vision and turning it away from the bright headlights of the oncoming vehicle, while still giving myself enough visual reference to hold my lane. Once the car passes in a couple of seconds, I can go back to looking at the road normally. Not looking directly at the headlights helps return my night vision much more quickly.

alphabettsy 9y ago

Poorly aimed headlights and mostly people driving with their high-beams on are my biggest annoyance.

forgotmypw 9y ago

Does anyone know if there is any type of glasses that will protect one's vision against these lights without cutting visibility too much? I have been seeing this type of headlights more and more often, and it can't be good.