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One of the main reasons people want/need brighter headlights is that there is much more light inside the car from screens. These don't let your eyes adjust to t
by njarboe 11mo ago
One of the main reasons people want/need brighter headlights is that there is much more light inside the car from screens. These don't let your eyes adjust to the dark properly. Older cars had dim green lighting for the gauges and even had a knob to adjust the brightness up and down. You could create a very dim interior instead of the huge amount of white light you get with modern cars and the multiple screens.
I'm happy my Tesla does a decent job of having the screen be quite dark at night but the headlights are quite bad with the horizontal cutoff style that only lights the first few feet of horizontal ahead of the car. I need to see those deer and elk on the side of the road, damn it.
- bob1029 11mo ago> Older cars had dim green lighting for the gauges and even had a knob to adjust the brightness up and down. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xgh2zbifn7E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xgh2zbifn7E
- marcosdumay 11mo agoThat's a nice feature, but the driver actively operating that camera at 70 mph is quite unsettling.
- boldlybold 11mo agoI knew before clicking this was going to be a Saab, I miss mine!
- jjtheblunt 11mo agoi miss mine too!
- potato3732842 11mo agoMany if not most cars had green gauges in the 80s and 90s. They all had some sort of knob, wheel or other adjustment.
- procaryote 11mo agoSaab went further though and just light up the relevant instruments. If you're good on fuel, it remains dark etc.
- calvinmorrison 11mo agoSaab also had a battery warning light, like most cars. However, if the battery was not charging, the light would not come on. Also if the bulb burned out, your alternator wouldn't work. My saabs, of the 5 I own, only have working lights in about 2 of them. One has no tacho (from factory), one no speedo (broken) Turns out you pretty much dont need any of that stuff anyway.
- Sparkle-san 11mo agoSaab also had a feature where it would turn off all the lights in the instrument panel, but you could turn them back on by hitting the top of the dash. Might be a Swedish thing as Volvo had it too.
- calvinmorrison 11mo agonight mode!
- wildzzz 11mo agoSaab loved to talk about their fighter jets in their car marketing.
- njarboe 11mo agoThe low green glow in the 65 mustang I drove in high school was divine.
- haspok 11mo ago> huge amount of white light you get with modern cars Maybe this is missing from your Tesla, but in my poor VW the "screen" has a dark mode which is automatically turned on when the lights are turned on - including Android Auto and Google Maps, which is pretty much the only thing I ever use it for. Previously I had a rusty Toyota with a very pale orange display, it was always either too dim or too bright, terrible contrast, and changing brightness on it was a pain. I hated that with a passion.
- thebruce87m 11mo ago> Maybe this is missing from your Tesla, but in my poor VW the "screen" has a dark mode which is automatically turned on when the lights are turned on - including Android Auto and Google Maps, which is pretty much the only thing I ever use it for. Tesla seems to do dark mode on sun rise / sun set. Doing it with the lights seems like a strange decision - sometimes I want my lights on when it’s bright - e.g. fog, rain or when the sun is low and I want others to see me.
- njarboe 11mo agoMy Tesla does a good job with its screen and since it is a model 3, no bright gages in front of the wheel. Most other modern cars have this problem though.
- _will_ 11mo agoIt's worse than that ... It has an "auto dark mode", but in my opinion, doesn't get dark enough by default. I like my screens very dark at night. Admittedly darker than most. When using the "self driving" mode, my former model 3 thought the screen was too dark and any time it was engaged, actually INCREASED the screen brightness from my setting to a level I felt was uncomfortable and inhibiting night vision. I'd manually crank it back down again (via several distracting menus and steps) and it would stay at that level until the next time self driving was activated. I made a complaint about it to the service department and was told that it was intentional so that the internal camera could see me better to ensure compliance with my eyes looking at the road. That might be true, but since I could still manually turn the brightness down after starting self drive and self drive would continue, it's obviously not required and there should be some way to disable it.
- Marsymars 11mo agoMy 2025 car (Ford) still has buttons for adjusting the brightness up/down.
- the__alchemist 11mo agoThe car I'm driving now (2016 BMW) is the only car I've driven or been in that has appropriate interior lighting. E.g. You can really crank the brightness down, and the display lights are all red.
- moogly 11mo agoSame with the brightness in my MY2025 BMW iX1. You can even turn the main screen completely off from the swipe-down menu.
- hurricanepootis 11mo agoI love this era of BMW interiors. The warm glow of the red lights from the dash cluster is really cool and nostalgic.
- Wistar 11mo agoLately, I see a lot of drivers who turn on their brights and just leave them on and this includes cars with the older halogen and even incandescents. This is a change in behavior. As for LEDs, to me, the Tesla Model 3 headlights are the worst offender, but not all of them, just the majority. I can look down a column of oncoming cars and pick out the Model 3s from a few blocks distance. I suspect that the Model 3 headlights are often maladjusted as they have a user/driver-accessible headlight aiming menu and it looks to me like a lot of Tesla owners get in to that menu and do some freelance aiming. Plus, a lot of Model 3 drivers around here—and there are a lot of them here (Seattle area)—seem to turn on everything, brights, DRLs, fog lights, every lamp. Another egregious offender is the Acura Jewel-Eye headlights although I am seeing ever more cars with headlights set to stun. The worst situation is waiting at an intersection where the pavement is crowned to drain the intersection, making the headlights on the cars opposite just miserable to contend with. Sometimes so bad I can’t see the traffic lights. I am not sure what the solution is but the situation is getting worse and quickly.
- LoganDark 11mo agoI usually drive with only the DRLs even at night. My vision is good enough that there's no reason to blind other drivers. I only use the beams at all when there's bad weather that fucks with visibility, or when the road has no retroreflectors. Also ever since a collision repair the headlight beams have been misaligned and that's extremely distracting/infuriating so I hate using them anyway.
- 1970-01-01 11mo agoYou're cherry-picking here. Analog gauges were lit with both filtered and unfiltered incandescent bulbs. There was no standard.
- ErroneousBosh 11mo agoThere was a mix of technologies. Up to about the early 80s, instruments were lit by an "unfiltered" incandescent lamp at the back of the instrument housing, that reflected off a band of white paint around the top of the housing and screened by the bezel, like old Smiths gauges. After about that point they moved over to edge-lit screen-printed perspex backings, and continued that way until the current trend for glarey and unpleasant LCDs everywhere.
- paradox460 11mo agoMy old Ford Windstar used electroluminescent panels behind the dash cluster. Gave everything a beautiful soft green hue
- shevy-java 11mo ago> I'm happy my Tesla I'd never give my money to the mass-fire-people-at-DOGE billionaire. What I did, however had, notice, is that people are a LOT more easily distracted these days. Smartphones play a big role, but I also think something changed in the brain. This may be better or worse, but it definitely is very different now from, say, the 1980s. It almost feels as if humans are now +100 years different from the people in the 1980s rather than +40 or +50.
- zzyzxd 11mo agoTeslas are the worst offenders in my area. I don't own one but I looked up online out of curiosity, and saw many owners complained because they got flashed a lot. Turned out the factory settings for the headlight angle was too high. They went to the menu and adjust the angle down by "2-3 clicks" and they reported never got flashed again.
- hn_acc1 11mo agoThis 100x. I get blinded by Teslas more often than all other brands combined.
- thallium205 11mo agoTeslas always want the road to be as bright as possible for their self driving tech to work well.
- apparent 11mo agoMy car's screen switches to night mode when it's dark, but if you want to make it the darkest setting, you have to manually adjust it, every single time. I don't know why there isn't a persistent setting for [when the car is in night mode]. I frequently have to adjust this because I want my eyes to adjust to the exterior darkness for safety reasons.
- ratdragon 11mo agothey definitely were persistent before edit spelling
- wildzzz 11mo agoMy 2006, 2017, and 2023 cars all will autodim the screens at night. Except for the 2006 model, the brightness knob adjusts both the instrument cluster and the screen brightness and stays where you leave it. The 2006 car had a separate up/down button for the screen.
- LTL_FTC 11mo agoAbsolutely. People just crank up the brightness on the inside lights because "blinky lights" but I have also noticed that, modern cars typically include fog lights which used to be a luxury or premium option, many people just drive around with these lights on as well. Fog lights are illuminating the area closer to the vehicle and therefore inhibit one's visibility further down the road. So now we get super bright vehicles coming at us, inhibiting our ability to see. Don't get me started on lifted vehicles and their lights...Dept. of transportation needs to figure out a way to enforce a standard height for headlights from all vehicle shapes and heights. Driving after dark is getting more and more dangerous, not less.
- cogman10 11mo agoTrucks are the absolute worst vehicles on the road. Their giant ass lights blind anyone near their vehicles. A number of truck owners, especially the ones that lift their vehicles, will additionally add light bars to the exterior which are so incredibly dangerous. We don't just need DOTs to set regulations on these things, we need cops to actually write tickets for this behavior and for judges to get confirmation that these after market modifications are removed.
- gopher2000 11mo agoHave a truck with a light bar. But it's for offroad use only. I'd never drive with it on regular roads with traffic around me.
- cogman10 11mo agoI just got done with a trip. Unfortunately there's a number of numb-nuts who don't see the problem with driving on regular roads with their lightbars on.
- mrguyorama 11mo agoThe problem is largely that the same Cops who should be writing the tickets are the very people putting criminal light bars on their lifted pavement princess trucks.
- giancarlostoro 11mo agoI miss my 99 Ford Explorer Sport.
- creer 11mo agoIn my past few rentals, the dial still acts on the driver's gauges - but not on the "entertainment / navigation" screen which remains too bright no matter what! In one, the automatic "night mode" was still crazy bright and independant from the dashboard brightness dial. Absurd indeed.
- mikkupikku 11mo agoIn my Mazda, turning on the headlights enables a night mode in the both the instrument panel and stereo/etc screen, dimming everything. Which seems like a nice touch, but if I want to run with my headlights on during the day, as seems to be fairly customary these days, that means I can't read my clock. Not great.
- wildzzz 11mo agoMy 2006 car had an independent brightness setting for the infotainment screen but that's likely because the infotainment system just wasn't as fully integrated into the car as it is today. It wasn't a touchscreen so since everything had a button, you could have easily designed it to use a VFD or similar.
- hexbin010 11mo agoExactly the same with my Ford. It seemed explicitly designed to be too bright and hard to adjust It's another example of a company not considering the effects of their actions
- jiveturkey 11mo agoYou're retconning. Brighter headlights (xenon) were invented in '61 and first appeared in '91. By 2000 the tech made its way to less premium cars. Tesla didn't have the big screen (which heralded the current stupid trend) until 2012, and of course it took a number of years for Tesla and the giant omni screen to be popular. Thumb in the air I'd say 2018-2020. You want brighter headlights so you can see better and drive more safely. The interior brightness is a separate independently evolved problem. The horizontal cutoff is a tradeoff that comes with the bright lights (Xenon tech anyway). And there is plenty of low light leakage to reflect off of animal eyes. The problem IMO isn't pure brightness but rather these intensely bright lights (itself a benefit) coupled with poor aiming or poor maintenance of aim. Some states in the US have a mandatory annual vehicle inspection which includes headlight aim checks.
- RajT88 11mo agoYES! I rented a Prius once, and this was my biggest complaint. That big stupid bright-ass LCD screen which smugly ruined my night blindness by trumpeting constantly how fuel efficient it was made me feel less confident driving at night. Toyota is a smart and good company, and seems to have addressed this in newer Priuses (Prii?) by putting smaller, less bright LCD's and moving them further out of the way of your field of vision.
- omnee 11mo agoI have an older car with the low light gauges, and so my eyes are more adjusted the darkness. Which makes the poorly calibrated bright lights of newer cars the bane of my life at night.
- alentred 11mo agoExactly. Even if my eyes adjust well to the relative darkness with my lights, the effect is erased the instant I encounter a car coming on me on the opposite side of the road.
- njarboe 11mo agoOne thing that helps is to make sure you don't look at the headlights directly. It really helps to look at the white line on the side of the road when the other car is close to preserve your night vision.
- gehwartzen 11mo agoI physically desoldered and replaced the very bright 6500k interior overhead LEDs in my VW with much warmer units. It makes a huge difference when turning them on for a second and not killing my night vision. Also just much more pleasant and natural light in my opinion. https://www.reddit.com/r/Tiguan/comments/1hq2hae/changed_overhead_light_to_a_warm_white_3000k_led/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Tiguan/comments/1hq2hae/changed_ove...
- b112 11mo agoI actually keep an old tshirt in my car, to cover up the screen when on long rural drives. I can drive all night long with no strain or issue, unless I have a flashlight glaring in my eyes.
- NoSalt 11mo agoMy Subaru Outback lets me adjust the dashboard and display lights down, which I do whenever I am driving at night. It's amazing how much more you can see without a ton of lights in the cab.
- groos 11mo ago> I'm happy my Tesla does a decent job of having the screen be quite dark at night but the headlights are quite bad with the horizontal cutoff style that only lights the first few feet of horizontal ahead of the car. I need to see those deer and elk on the side of the road, damn it. Turn on your fog lights? At least in my 2018 M3, they illuminate the sides as well.
- DoomDestroyer 11mo agoI have an old Landrover and there is no lights except for the dials. Visibility to the outside is excellent. Some newer cars allow you to dim the info console and the some of the instruments but they cannot be seen in the day light. People say the headlamps on my model of Landrover is too low. But I had good visibility at night driving down country roads. The side lights are useless though.
- King-Aaron 11mo agoDo the Teslas use OLED etc screens that go to nearly complete darkness when the pixels are black? Or does it still have a constant LED glow?
- stinkbeetle 11mo agoI drive an old car with dull yellow headlights and a dull green glow from the analog instruments, just the way I like it. I was recently driving around a hire car that had this enormous screen that became blindingly bright after sunset on unlit carriageway. I couldn't believe how terrible it was. The whole thing was a pile of unintuitive garbage, but the screen brightness was egregious. I had to pull over and spend minutes navigating through a maze of menus to turn the thing down... I might have even had to google for how to do it. Then of course when I turned the car off later and started it again, the brightness setting was back to "surface of the sun".
- Ferret7446 11mo ago> horizontal cutoff style that only lights the first few feet of horizontal ahead of the car. I need to see those deer and elk on the side of the road, damn it. I believe this is intentional to avoid blinding oncoming traffic and pedestrians
- arghwhat 11mo agoI think the "horizontal cutoff style" you're referring to is the American DOT beam pattern (two horizontal lines at different height) as opposed to the European ECE beam pattern (which goes up towards the edge of the road to illuminate signs and such). I would assume this follows the normal regional model variations, although Tesla seems to have notoriously misaligned headlights - some suggest it's a bug causing it to reset occasionally? The screens are a good point, but nothing about LED headlights require a single bright point. That's done for style and cost saving - old reflector headlights had to be big, so small looks "modern", and small means less material. Cramming it all into one tiny spot just means cooking the LEDs, which are much better suited for either larger lens assemblies or multiple smaller lens assemblies to distribute the load, both of which increase the size of the light source and massively decrease the blinding and glare it causes. You could easily cut the glare to, idk, a quarter by just changing the geometry a bit while maintaining the same light output.
- BeFlatXIII 11mo agoAdding to this: on rainy nights, crazy amounts of glare off the wet pavement from streetlights. It would be safer if the lights were off for headlights only.
- egorfine 11mo agoDark knobs won't sell cars, while bright shiny screens will.
- sobjornstad 11mo agoDo people normally test-drive cars in the dark?