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The Headlight of the Future Is a Laser

62 points by adventured 8y ago

cimmanom 8y ago
Because LED headlights aren’t blinding enough?
- nickcotter 8y ago
  It’s ridiculous. I find driving at night really treacherous now. I essentially slow down to a crawl if another car is coming, I just can’t see. Why do we need this?
- ceejayoz 8y ago
  The subheadline literally includes "but won’t blind oncoming traffic"... > All of this luminosity leads to an obvious question: How are these devices, which have the approximate wattage of the klieg spotlights commonly found outside world premieres, supposed to be safely installed in the front of a car without inadvertently blinding oncoming traffic? > “Because of the point source nature of the beam, you can pinpoint the light,” said Nakamura. “You can even shape it dynamically on the fly, so the beam will go down, or to the right, away from the eyes of motorists.”
  - gambiting 8y ago
    >>You can even shape it dynamically on the fly, so the beam will go down, or to the right, away from the eyes of motorists.” So, cyclists and pedestrians just have to deal with it, as always. Just like current "automatic" high-beam, which does an "ok" job at detecting other cars but fails completely at detecting other non-vehicular road users.
    - ceejayoz 8y ago
      On the other hand, a directed beam highlighting "hey, there's a deer/bike/walker over there getting ready to walk into the street" has potentially positive safety benefits. Perhaps it can be coded to light up the torso and legs and leave the face in darkness.
      - gambiting 8y ago
        That is already done with IR cameras and flashing the object on the dash. We can have a discussion whether that is better or worse than trying to shine light directly on the object in the real world. Look at 1:50 for demonstration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5fl7r-E9WY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5fl7r-E9WY (it looks like this system can actually "flash" at the object in real life, it can be seen a bit further in that video)
    - falcolas 8y ago
      Or when you're parked facing a restaurant with glass windows. Or when it's snowing and all that directed laser light is being reflected right back at you (not mentioning reflectors which are already absurdly bright with LED and halogen bulbs). Or when you hit a bump in the road and the redirection of light doesn't occur fast enough. Or when the vibration of fifty-thousand miles impairs the aiming mirrors. Can you imagine the pathological case of a partially broken DLP chip? There's too many corner cases and (literally) moving pieces for this to really be practical.
      - imeron 8y ago
        You can already have this in a BMW. The new 3 series and I think the i8 has the option for laser headlights.
      - pluma 8y ago
        As someone who doesn't trust his car's automatic high-beam, 100% this. Are the lasers bright enough to be a health risk? You wouldn't attach a high power laser pointer to a moving vehicle either.
        semi-extrinsic 8y ago
        AFAICT these things don't actually emit laser light, they use a high power laser to stimulate some sort of phosphorus-like material that then emits incoherent white light. The point is then that this secondary light source is very small (compared e.g. to LED with similar lumens), so the light can be much more easily focused by optics.
  - RankingMember 8y ago
    The thing is, when this tech hits, the aftermarket will eventually offer it too, and as anyone who's been around a vehicle with an aftermarket HID setup with no cutoff/a poor pattern/a poor install, the results can be blinding.
  - gwern 8y ago
    I don't really understand what he means. Just point it down at an angle? Or will it be motorized? How is it supposed to know where to point, some sort of fancy machine learning?
  - cimmanom 8y ago
    That’s still no help to pedestrians.
- RankingMember 8y ago
  If you're in the US, the situation of being blinded by low-beam headlights (I agree, it's a real problem) should hopefully be on its way to being addressed: https://www.autonews.com/article/20181029/OEM03/181029812/nhtsa-s-proposed-rule-change-should-help-tame-headlights https://www.autonews.com/article/20181029/OEM03/181029812/nh...
  - FidelCashflow 8y ago
    I'm in a rural area with literally zero street illumination. I cannot begin to describe my frustration with the blue tint, ultra bright lights, and off-road LED light bars. Install those on every other lifted truck (redneck's a plenty) and night time driving is hazardous. I don't care who installed the lights, whether it was the factory, the current or previous driver/owner. If I can't see because of your lights, they're too damn bright.
    - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
      Lights should block out your night time vision no matter what, that is unavoidable. It is only a matter of how much goes. When driving in rural areas, I sometimes flip off the lights to see much more in my periphery than I could with the lights on. This is dangerous of course, as the lights are meant more to be seen than to see.
      - kbutler 8y ago
        > the lights are meant more to be seen than to see. That's definitely false for headlights, fog lights, and for the extra light bars (well, maybe those are often installed as stylistic choices rather than utility). Tail lights, running lights, turn signals are all more to be seen than to help the driver see.
        seanmcdirmid 8y ago
        Try it, it actually works, especially when there is a full moon.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- martin_a 8y ago
  I know people who have had their headlights "tuned" to have them raised higher. Purpose was to "blind"/"warn" traffic on the German Autobahn when they wanted to clear the lane for themselves and the car to look more aggressive. Works as easy as removing the battery, pushing the back of the car down, therefore lifting the headlights up. Reconnect the battery and that lifted state will be memorized as 0-level by the headlights. Now remove the weight from the back, the car will come back into it's normal position but the lights think they are too low, so they will level themselves higher and therefore blind oncoming traffic...
  - raducu 8y ago
    Where I live, if you blind me with your long distance headlights, I will blind you with my long distance headlights, isn't that universal?
    - kevinherron 8y ago
      In the situation he's describing one driver is behind the other. Unless you have headlights that point backwards you won't be able to return the favor.
      - lightedman 8y ago
        I keep a 100w LED cannon pointing out my rear window for EXACTLY that reason. Come up on me with your brights on? I've got something bright for you.
      - raducu 8y ago
        Sure I can, I can turn on the high beam just as they overtake me, not always in bad faith, but maybe they just forgot theirs accidentally and need a reminder; just as I will flash and then completely turn off my headlights when I see a car running without headlights at night in the city, sometimes people just forget. I once turned off my headlights in a hill traffic jam while completely stopped as I was blinding the guy in front of me on my lowest setting and to my surprise everyone did the same in a domino-fashion. Tit for tat is pretty good.
_salmon 8y ago
> It’s another reflection of how the increasingly... I see what you did there.
ignorant 8y ago
As a pedestrian in NYC, I hate this. And don’t even talk about the impact to wildlife. Régressive technology. If anything, provide cheap lidar one détection, etc to help driver.
linsomniac 8y ago
Lasers are amazingly versatile! They can do everything from vaporizing a bulldozer from 2000 feet away to delicate surgery on eyes, as long as the doctor remembers to change the setting from "Bulldozer" to "Delicate". (Dave Barry)
- King-Aaron 8y ago
  Anecdotally, I was at a recent dental tech expo in Sydney and was allowed a chance to play with one of the dental lasers on display. The guy running the stand showed us how to peel the shell away from the membrane of an uncooked egg, before then winding the dial right up and letting me saw a lamb jaw bone in half with it. They really are pretty impressive devices.
  - linsomniac 8y ago
    A decade or more I had a dentist that stayed towards the front of the technology curve, and he had an argon laser that he used for some fillings. My memory is that they were small fillings and he did it without pain killers, there was no whine from the drill, etc. I think he needed to "rough up" the hole that the laser made, which was done with the drill thing at low speed. I really liked him, but there was a combination of his location being inconvenient, and one of his dental techs was terrible, so I switched.
PaulHoule 8y ago
I wish my headlights were brighter almost any time I turn them on. How do they avoid laser speckle?
- astazangasta 8y ago
  Clean them. Modern plastic headlights oxidize and grow dimmer over time, but can be cleaned (from the inside) to restore brightness. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4QwzHOO-3lk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4QwzHOO-3lk
  - burfog 8y ago
    Are there any cars with non-plastic headlights? Do any have a crystalline front surface to maintain polish? Example: fused-silica glass with a sapphire coating.
  - Retra 8y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speckle_pattern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speckle_pattern Laser speckle has nothing to do with your headlight plastic.
- ttul 8y ago
  Wild ass guess? Multiple separate lasers. The interference patterns from each laser will overlap and additively smudge each other out.
- jloughry 8y ago
  The laser doesn't illuminate the road directly; it excites a phosphor puck that lights up white and is then focused and aimed like a regular incandescent filament or gas discharge arc. Just like white LEDs, only much more efficient.
  - csours 8y ago
    Cool! Any reference for this?
skywhopper 8y ago
I've seen a few off-road-capable vehicles lately with something that looks like the bumper-mounted light bar shown in the pictures here. I don't know if it's this same product, but I can say with confidence that it is blindingly bright to oncoming drivers, unlike the claims made in this article. I sit very high in my vehicle and have been painfully dazzled by these every time I encounter them. But this strikes me as a very lazy piece anyway. There's no skepticism about the claims, or the reasons why the US might have its current headlight standards. It's basically a PR piece for this product. The opening line clued me in to how bad it was going to be, though: "Most people don’t turn on their car’s headlights and think, I wish they were brighter." Sure I do! But on the other hand, I also don't want to blind the cars I'm about to pass within six feet of that are coming towards me at an effective 140mph when I'm driving on a dark back country road after dark, which I do hundreds of miles of every week. That's why we have dimmable headlights in the first place.
- rootusrootus 8y ago
  Those light bars are usually producing a ridiculous amount of light, though. All else being equal, the way to reduce glare to oncoming drivers is to increase the area of the emitter. It's not really HIDs that have made glare a problem in modern cars, it's everybody switching to projectors. Even halogens are terrible for glare when used in a projector.
  - saltcured 8y ago
    Why do you say that? Good projectors have very little glare because they actually focus a beam in the right direction. Of course they are bright if shining straight at you but that is not glare. That's just over illumination. Here in California, the worst glare comes from people who have put high intensity bulbs into non-projector housings, people with oxidized/hazy lenses on older cars, and people who misuse fog and other auxilliary lights. The common factor is the ominidirectional emissions which are far outside the regulated light pattern.
    - rootusrootus 8y ago
csours 8y ago
For reference, here are the IIHS headlight test criteria: https://www.iihs.org/iihs/ratings/ratings-info/headlight-evaluation https://www.iihs.org/iihs/ratings/ratings-info/headlight-eva...
Cthulhu_ 8y ago
Ok so bright headlights are annoying. Why are there no more HUD like systems to improve night-time visibility? Project an IR overlay over the windscreen, tune the lights back to normal, enough for visibility and the road right in front of you.
- arbie 8y ago
  We're just getting to replacing the rear-view mirror with a camera. It will be a while before the windshield becomes (augmented) display.
  - cptskippy 8y ago
    Most backup cameras are rubbish. 320x480 CMOS sensors with very poor low light performance and several hundred millisecond latency. Even the Model 3, whose backup camera is amazing the first time you see it, isn't that great in low light conditions. I'll be really sad to see cameras replace mirror on cars.
    - wil421 8y ago
      Are you sure it’s the sensors and not the infotainment display? I had a 2016 model of a car and just got the 2019. The display was significantly updated for 2019 and it has a noticeable improvement over the older model. I am almost positive they are the same backup camera. The higher resolution screen shows better detail and light. I’ll look up the part number on Mopar when I get home but I’m sure the sensor is the same.
      - cptskippy 8y ago
        It's entirely possible that the poor image quality is the display but the poor low light performance is definitely the sensor.
    - randyrand 8y ago
      My car has backup lights. They're white and illuminate really well. I can see way better on the camera than with my own vision surprisingly. Chevy Suburban ~2012
kwhitefoot 8y ago
Great, another nuisance.
otikik 8y ago
I always wondered what Data had done with all those golden coins. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLFiOV8l_lo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLFiOV8l_lo
yholio 8y ago
Great, so lasers are very directional and allow you to illuminate the exact area that you are interested in. What I don't agree with is that you can always exclude the eyes of the other drivers from that area. Roads are uneven, you have curves and bumps and ramps. Unless there is an inteligent system actively tracking incoming vehicles and avoiding them, there is always a chance that you will hit someone with the full force of 10x brighter lasers. I know of no such inteligent headlight system, that needs to have close to 100% demonstrated success rate. Blinding the driver of a single bike or tractor is enough to produce a major accident. The way the headlight arms race is going, I believe there is an opportunity for defensive technology to be invented: a liquid crystal layer in your windshield that, coupled with a camera that tracks your eyes location, is able to reduce the transparency of a very small spot in your field of view that covers the incoming vehicle. Seems like it could be implemented with 80s tech.
- cptskippy 8y ago
  Reading the article and looking at SLD Laser's website leads you to believe that they are shooting lasers out the front of the emitter. They also both implicate the BMW 5 series. BMW demoed a laser headlight system to Jalopnik and it doesn't work that way at all. The lasers are fired into a phosphorous element to excite it into emitting light which is then reflected down field. The advantages of this over LED and other tech is that it uses less power and produces less heat. https://jalopnik.com/how-bmws-new-laser-headlights-will-work-and-not-kill-y-1521586271 https://jalopnik.com/how-bmws-new-laser-headlights-will-work...
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - dekhn 8y ago
    I assume you know this, but most big leds used in headlights already have phosphorous elements. For example, https://www.amazon.com/Chanzon-6000K-6500K-Intensity-Components-Lighting/dp/B01DBZHUXA https://www.amazon.com/Chanzon-6000K-6500K-Intensity-Compone... is a 100W LED, the yellow is the phosphorous with the LEDs embedded within.
- 8y ago
acjohnson55 8y ago
I'm not so sure about this. Even if you can avoid directly blinding drivers, what about all the wasted light from reflection? Are roadways now 10X brighter than they were before?
jpm_sd 8y ago
Nope, the headlight of the future is a LIDAR on a self-driving vehicle.
Groxx 8y ago
>Laser headlights have about the same consumer costs as current LED headlamps, in the low four-figure range. Uh. What? Even recent model headlight assembly replacements that I can find are in the three-figure range, roughly $500 for a pair, and LED bulbs themselves are something like $125 for a pair. This is several times more expensive.
NikolaNovak 8y ago
>>"Most people don’t turn on their car’s headlights and think, I wish they were brighter." I guess I'm not "Most people" because I have desired more light since I got my license. I've installed 100w Hella Euro projector lights for straight-line distance (appropriately calibrated as to not blind incoming traffic); and replaced my foglights (not particularly useful in Toronto, Canada) with corner beams - short distance, wide spread, installed at 45 degree angle, so I can illuminate slow speed turns into dark abyss that many drivways, hwy off-ramps, or small city streets are. At night on country roads, I never ever think "well, that's enough, I don't need more light".
- ricardobeat 8y ago
  Many [newer] cars have 'adaptive headlights' that angle the light towards the corner you're turning into. Works pretty well.
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    Citroen had that on the DS back in the stone age. https://www.dreamstime.com/editorial-stock-photo-citroen-ds-detail-oldtimer-headlights-wheel-gray-image52551808 https://www.dreamstime.com/editorial-stock-photo-citroen-ds-...
  - TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
    Some old cars too. Here's a discussion which indicates 1904 as possibly the earliest implementation: https://forums.aaca.org/topic/288789-first-vehicle-with-adaptive-headlights/ https://forums.aaca.org/topic/288789-first-vehicle-with-adap... This comment gave me a chuckle: The Motor Cycle.....every one ever built has at least one.
  - Scoundreller 8y ago
    But one more thing to break. I’ll take one order of parent’s solution that turns on and off based on steering angle.
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ggm 8y ago
After the introduction of halogen headlights, I wrote to the queensland road safety authorities asking them to include glare as a risk factor alongside brightness for car headlight specs. I didn't get a very satisfactory response. I think glare is probably now a higher risk than lack of light, for normal road driving with lights, especially given the emergence of the SUV with higher beams and higher physical lamp placement. Off road? specialist/military? Sure. I can see that this kind of light would be hugely beneficial. for milspec usage, it might even have a dual function (ie deliberate dazzle) But for routine use, I need to see legislative control on bad effects of lights on cars, to match obligations to meet minimums in light levels (the article does talk about how lasers could be directed away from drivers, so there is hope this is a minimize dazzle thing)
- Aloha 8y ago
  I'd rather have the older dimmer headlights back, the projector lamps out now are absolutely blinding.
m-p-3 8y ago
Is it possible to buy those in flashlight form-factor? That would be a really nice flashlight to own

62 points by adventured 8y ago

cimmanom 8y ago

Because LED headlights aren’t blinding enough?

nickcotter 8y ago
It’s ridiculous. I find driving at night really treacherous now. I essentially slow down to a crawl if another car is coming, I just can’t see. Why do we need this?
ceejayoz 8y ago
The subheadline literally includes "but won’t blind oncoming traffic"... > All of this luminosity leads to an obvious question: How are these devices, which have the approximate wattage of the klieg spotlights commonly found outside world premieres, supposed to be safely installed in the front of a car without inadvertently blinding oncoming traffic? > “Because of the point source nature of the beam, you can pinpoint the light,” said Nakamura. “You can even shape it dynamically on the fly, so the beam will go down, or to the right, away from the eyes of motorists.”
- gambiting 8y ago
  >>You can even shape it dynamically on the fly, so the beam will go down, or to the right, away from the eyes of motorists.” So, cyclists and pedestrians just have to deal with it, as always. Just like current "automatic" high-beam, which does an "ok" job at detecting other cars but fails completely at detecting other non-vehicular road users.
  - ceejayoz 8y ago
    On the other hand, a directed beam highlighting "hey, there's a deer/bike/walker over there getting ready to walk into the street" has potentially positive safety benefits. Perhaps it can be coded to light up the torso and legs and leave the face in darkness.
    - gambiting 8y ago
      That is already done with IR cameras and flashing the object on the dash. We can have a discussion whether that is better or worse than trying to shine light directly on the object in the real world. Look at 1:50 for demonstration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5fl7r-E9WY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5fl7r-E9WY (it looks like this system can actually "flash" at the object in real life, it can be seen a bit further in that video)
  - falcolas 8y ago
    Or when you're parked facing a restaurant with glass windows. Or when it's snowing and all that directed laser light is being reflected right back at you (not mentioning reflectors which are already absurdly bright with LED and halogen bulbs). Or when you hit a bump in the road and the redirection of light doesn't occur fast enough. Or when the vibration of fifty-thousand miles impairs the aiming mirrors. Can you imagine the pathological case of a partially broken DLP chip? There's too many corner cases and (literally) moving pieces for this to really be practical.
    - imeron 8y ago
      You can already have this in a BMW. The new 3 series and I think the i8 has the option for laser headlights.
    - pluma 8y ago
      As someone who doesn't trust his car's automatic high-beam, 100% this. Are the lasers bright enough to be a health risk? You wouldn't attach a high power laser pointer to a moving vehicle either.
      - semi-extrinsic 8y ago
        AFAICT these things don't actually emit laser light, they use a high power laser to stimulate some sort of phosphorus-like material that then emits incoherent white light. The point is then that this secondary light source is very small (compared e.g. to LED with similar lumens), so the light can be much more easily focused by optics.
- RankingMember 8y ago
  The thing is, when this tech hits, the aftermarket will eventually offer it too, and as anyone who's been around a vehicle with an aftermarket HID setup with no cutoff/a poor pattern/a poor install, the results can be blinding.
- gwern 8y ago
  I don't really understand what he means. Just point it down at an angle? Or will it be motorized? How is it supposed to know where to point, some sort of fancy machine learning?
- cimmanom 8y ago
  That’s still no help to pedestrians.
RankingMember 8y ago
If you're in the US, the situation of being blinded by low-beam headlights (I agree, it's a real problem) should hopefully be on its way to being addressed: https://www.autonews.com/article/20181029/OEM03/181029812/nhtsa-s-proposed-rule-change-should-help-tame-headlights https://www.autonews.com/article/20181029/OEM03/181029812/nh...
- FidelCashflow 8y ago
  I'm in a rural area with literally zero street illumination. I cannot begin to describe my frustration with the blue tint, ultra bright lights, and off-road LED light bars. Install those on every other lifted truck (redneck's a plenty) and night time driving is hazardous. I don't care who installed the lights, whether it was the factory, the current or previous driver/owner. If I can't see because of your lights, they're too damn bright.
  - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
    Lights should block out your night time vision no matter what, that is unavoidable. It is only a matter of how much goes. When driving in rural areas, I sometimes flip off the lights to see much more in my periphery than I could with the lights on. This is dangerous of course, as the lights are meant more to be seen than to see.
    - kbutler 8y ago
      > the lights are meant more to be seen than to see. That's definitely false for headlights, fog lights, and for the extra light bars (well, maybe those are often installed as stylistic choices rather than utility). Tail lights, running lights, turn signals are all more to be seen than to help the driver see.
      - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
        Try it, it actually works, especially when there is a full moon.
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martin_a 8y ago
I know people who have had their headlights "tuned" to have them raised higher. Purpose was to "blind"/"warn" traffic on the German Autobahn when they wanted to clear the lane for themselves and the car to look more aggressive. Works as easy as removing the battery, pushing the back of the car down, therefore lifting the headlights up. Reconnect the battery and that lifted state will be memorized as 0-level by the headlights. Now remove the weight from the back, the car will come back into it's normal position but the lights think they are too low, so they will level themselves higher and therefore blind oncoming traffic...
- raducu 8y ago
  Where I live, if you blind me with your long distance headlights, I will blind you with my long distance headlights, isn't that universal?
  - kevinherron 8y ago
    In the situation he's describing one driver is behind the other. Unless you have headlights that point backwards you won't be able to return the favor.
    - lightedman 8y ago
      I keep a 100w LED cannon pointing out my rear window for EXACTLY that reason. Come up on me with your brights on? I've got something bright for you.
    - raducu 8y ago
      Sure I can, I can turn on the high beam just as they overtake me, not always in bad faith, but maybe they just forgot theirs accidentally and need a reminder; just as I will flash and then completely turn off my headlights when I see a car running without headlights at night in the city, sometimes people just forget. I once turned off my headlights in a hill traffic jam while completely stopped as I was blinding the guy in front of me on my lowest setting and to my surprise everyone did the same in a domino-fashion. Tit for tat is pretty good.

_salmon 8y ago

> It’s another reflection of how the increasingly... I see what you did there.

ignorant 8y ago

As a pedestrian in NYC, I hate this. And don’t even talk about the impact to wildlife. Régressive technology. If anything, provide cheap lidar one détection, etc to help driver.

linsomniac 8y ago

Lasers are amazingly versatile! They can do everything from vaporizing a bulldozer from 2000 feet away to delicate surgery on eyes, as long as the doctor remembers to change the setting from "Bulldozer" to "Delicate". (Dave Barry)

King-Aaron 8y ago
Anecdotally, I was at a recent dental tech expo in Sydney and was allowed a chance to play with one of the dental lasers on display. The guy running the stand showed us how to peel the shell away from the membrane of an uncooked egg, before then winding the dial right up and letting me saw a lamb jaw bone in half with it. They really are pretty impressive devices.
- linsomniac 8y ago
  A decade or more I had a dentist that stayed towards the front of the technology curve, and he had an argon laser that he used for some fillings. My memory is that they were small fillings and he did it without pain killers, there was no whine from the drill, etc. I think he needed to "rough up" the hole that the laser made, which was done with the drill thing at low speed. I really liked him, but there was a combination of his location being inconvenient, and one of his dental techs was terrible, so I switched.

PaulHoule 8y ago

I wish my headlights were brighter almost any time I turn them on. How do they avoid laser speckle?

astazangasta 8y ago
Clean them. Modern plastic headlights oxidize and grow dimmer over time, but can be cleaned (from the inside) to restore brightness. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4QwzHOO-3lk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4QwzHOO-3lk
- burfog 8y ago
  Are there any cars with non-plastic headlights? Do any have a crystalline front surface to maintain polish? Example: fused-silica glass with a sapphire coating.
- Retra 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speckle_pattern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speckle_pattern Laser speckle has nothing to do with your headlight plastic.
ttul 8y ago
Wild ass guess? Multiple separate lasers. The interference patterns from each laser will overlap and additively smudge each other out.
jloughry 8y ago
The laser doesn't illuminate the road directly; it excites a phosphor puck that lights up white and is then focused and aimed like a regular incandescent filament or gas discharge arc. Just like white LEDs, only much more efficient.
- csours 8y ago
  Cool! Any reference for this?

skywhopper 8y ago

I've seen a few off-road-capable vehicles lately with something that looks like the bumper-mounted light bar shown in the pictures here. I don't know if it's this same product, but I can say with confidence that it is blindingly bright to oncoming drivers, unlike the claims made in this article. I sit very high in my vehicle and have been painfully dazzled by these every time I encounter them. But this strikes me as a very lazy piece anyway. There's no skepticism about the claims, or the reasons why the US might have its current headlight standards. It's basically a PR piece for this product. The opening line clued me in to how bad it was going to be, though: "Most people don’t turn on their car’s headlights and think, I wish they were brighter." Sure I do! But on the other hand, I also don't want to blind the cars I'm about to pass within six feet of that are coming towards me at an effective 140mph when I'm driving on a dark back country road after dark, which I do hundreds of miles of every week. That's why we have dimmable headlights in the first place.

rootusrootus 8y ago
Those light bars are usually producing a ridiculous amount of light, though. All else being equal, the way to reduce glare to oncoming drivers is to increase the area of the emitter. It's not really HIDs that have made glare a problem in modern cars, it's everybody switching to projectors. Even halogens are terrible for glare when used in a projector.
- saltcured 8y ago
  Why do you say that? Good projectors have very little glare because they actually focus a beam in the right direction. Of course they are bright if shining straight at you but that is not glare. That's just over illumination. Here in California, the worst glare comes from people who have put high intensity bulbs into non-projector housings, people with oxidized/hazy lenses on older cars, and people who misuse fog and other auxilliary lights. The common factor is the ominidirectional emissions which are far outside the regulated light pattern.
  - rootusrootus 8y ago

csours 8y ago

For reference, here are the IIHS headlight test criteria: https://www.iihs.org/iihs/ratings/ratings-info/headlight-evaluation https://www.iihs.org/iihs/ratings/ratings-info/headlight-eva...

Cthulhu_ 8y ago

Ok so bright headlights are annoying. Why are there no more HUD like systems to improve night-time visibility? Project an IR overlay over the windscreen, tune the lights back to normal, enough for visibility and the road right in front of you.

arbie 8y ago
We're just getting to replacing the rear-view mirror with a camera. It will be a while before the windshield becomes (augmented) display.
- cptskippy 8y ago
  Most backup cameras are rubbish. 320x480 CMOS sensors with very poor low light performance and several hundred millisecond latency. Even the Model 3, whose backup camera is amazing the first time you see it, isn't that great in low light conditions. I'll be really sad to see cameras replace mirror on cars.
  - wil421 8y ago
    Are you sure it’s the sensors and not the infotainment display? I had a 2016 model of a car and just got the 2019. The display was significantly updated for 2019 and it has a noticeable improvement over the older model. I am almost positive they are the same backup camera. The higher resolution screen shows better detail and light. I’ll look up the part number on Mopar when I get home but I’m sure the sensor is the same.
    - cptskippy 8y ago
      It's entirely possible that the poor image quality is the display but the poor low light performance is definitely the sensor.
  - randyrand 8y ago
    My car has backup lights. They're white and illuminate really well. I can see way better on the camera than with my own vision surprisingly. Chevy Suburban ~2012

kwhitefoot 8y ago

Great, another nuisance.

otikik 8y ago

I always wondered what Data had done with all those golden coins. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLFiOV8l_lo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLFiOV8l_lo

yholio 8y ago

Great, so lasers are very directional and allow you to illuminate the exact area that you are interested in. What I don't agree with is that you can always exclude the eyes of the other drivers from that area. Roads are uneven, you have curves and bumps and ramps. Unless there is an inteligent system actively tracking incoming vehicles and avoiding them, there is always a chance that you will hit someone with the full force of 10x brighter lasers. I know of no such inteligent headlight system, that needs to have close to 100% demonstrated success rate. Blinding the driver of a single bike or tractor is enough to produce a major accident. The way the headlight arms race is going, I believe there is an opportunity for defensive technology to be invented: a liquid crystal layer in your windshield that, coupled with a camera that tracks your eyes location, is able to reduce the transparency of a very small spot in your field of view that covers the incoming vehicle. Seems like it could be implemented with 80s tech.

cptskippy 8y ago
Reading the article and looking at SLD Laser's website leads you to believe that they are shooting lasers out the front of the emitter. They also both implicate the BMW 5 series. BMW demoed a laser headlight system to Jalopnik and it doesn't work that way at all. The lasers are fired into a phosphorous element to excite it into emitting light which is then reflected down field. The advantages of this over LED and other tech is that it uses less power and produces less heat. https://jalopnik.com/how-bmws-new-laser-headlights-will-work-and-not-kill-y-1521586271 https://jalopnik.com/how-bmws-new-laser-headlights-will-work...
- deleted 8y ago
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- dekhn 8y ago
  I assume you know this, but most big leds used in headlights already have phosphorous elements. For example, https://www.amazon.com/Chanzon-6000K-6500K-Intensity-Components-Lighting/dp/B01DBZHUXA https://www.amazon.com/Chanzon-6000K-6500K-Intensity-Compone... is a 100W LED, the yellow is the phosphorous with the LEDs embedded within.
8y ago

acjohnson55 8y ago

I'm not so sure about this. Even if you can avoid directly blinding drivers, what about all the wasted light from reflection? Are roadways now 10X brighter than they were before?

jpm_sd 8y ago

Nope, the headlight of the future is a LIDAR on a self-driving vehicle.

Groxx 8y ago

>Laser headlights have about the same consumer costs as current LED headlamps, in the low four-figure range. Uh. What? Even recent model headlight assembly replacements that I can find are in the three-figure range, roughly $500 for a pair, and LED bulbs themselves are something like $125 for a pair. This is several times more expensive.

NikolaNovak 8y ago

>>"Most people don’t turn on their car’s headlights and think, I wish they were brighter." I guess I'm not "Most people" because I have desired more light since I got my license. I've installed 100w Hella Euro projector lights for straight-line distance (appropriately calibrated as to not blind incoming traffic); and replaced my foglights (not particularly useful in Toronto, Canada) with corner beams - short distance, wide spread, installed at 45 degree angle, so I can illuminate slow speed turns into dark abyss that many drivways, hwy off-ramps, or small city streets are. At night on country roads, I never ever think "well, that's enough, I don't need more light".

ricardobeat 8y ago
Many [newer] cars have 'adaptive headlights' that angle the light towards the corner you're turning into. Works pretty well.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  Citroen had that on the DS back in the stone age. https://www.dreamstime.com/editorial-stock-photo-citroen-ds-detail-oldtimer-headlights-wheel-gray-image52551808 https://www.dreamstime.com/editorial-stock-photo-citroen-ds-...
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
  Some old cars too. Here's a discussion which indicates 1904 as possibly the earliest implementation: https://forums.aaca.org/topic/288789-first-vehicle-with-adaptive-headlights/ https://forums.aaca.org/topic/288789-first-vehicle-with-adap... This comment gave me a chuckle: The Motor Cycle.....every one ever built has at least one.
- Scoundreller 8y ago
  But one more thing to break. I’ll take one order of parent’s solution that turns on and off based on steering angle.

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ggm 8y ago

After the introduction of halogen headlights, I wrote to the queensland road safety authorities asking them to include glare as a risk factor alongside brightness for car headlight specs. I didn't get a very satisfactory response. I think glare is probably now a higher risk than lack of light, for normal road driving with lights, especially given the emergence of the SUV with higher beams and higher physical lamp placement. Off road? specialist/military? Sure. I can see that this kind of light would be hugely beneficial. for milspec usage, it might even have a dual function (ie deliberate dazzle) But for routine use, I need to see legislative control on bad effects of lights on cars, to match obligations to meet minimums in light levels (the article does talk about how lasers could be directed away from drivers, so there is hope this is a minimize dazzle thing)

Aloha 8y ago
I'd rather have the older dimmer headlights back, the projector lamps out now are absolutely blinding.

m-p-3 8y ago

Is it possible to buy those in flashlight form-factor? That would be a really nice flashlight to own