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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 r

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.