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Lately, 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

by Wistar 11mo ago

Lately, 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 ago
I 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.
- xxpor 11mo ago
  At least in NA, if you only have the DRLs on, it means your rear lights aren't on.
  - LoganDark 11mo ago
    That's not true for my vehicle, I've checked.
    - SoftTalker 11mo ago
      Not sure why people are not believing you. I have a Volvo and the headlights and taillights are illuminated at all times, even when the headlight switch is "off." The only thing that turning the headlights "on" does differently is enable high beams.
    - hn_acc1 11mo ago
      Thanks - I'm ok with that. As also mentioned, I'm NOT when it's a dark car at night with ONLY DRL and no rear lights at all - which I've seen a LOT of lately..
  - snerbles 11mo ago
    Anecdata around SV: I've seen an uptick in urban night drivers with only their DRLs and no tail lights.
- akersten 11mo ago
  Are you aware of what the D in DRL stands for? Your vision may be good enough to see ahead of you by candlelight, but other drivers are not going to expect a nearly invisible car approaching at night. Turn on your headlights.
  - BenjiWiebe 11mo ago
    DRL's aren't dim enough to make your car "nearly invisible". If it's enough light for the driver to see the road via reflection, it's more than enough for the oncoming driver to see via line of sight transmission.
    - hn_acc1 11mo ago
      True - but the problem is at night, from behind, on many models, the ARE invisible because no lights are on.
  - LoganDark 11mo ago
    I don't know what's invisible about the outside edge of my headlights, and my taillights, being illuminated. The car is very visible. If it were invisible, and I do a LOT of nighttime driving, I would've gotten pulled over for it already (and I haven't been).
- sokoloff 11mo ago
  On many cars, the beam of the DRLs are more offensive to oncoming drivers when used at night. Properly repairing your car might make it less distracting/infuriating.
  - saltcured 11mo ago
    Yeah, the DRL lamps are omnidirectional while proper headlights are much more directional. Typically the DRL lamps switch off or go to a dimmer setting when the headlights are on. That omnidirectional nature makes them pure glare at night.
    - LoganDark 11mo ago
      My vehicle does not dim the DRLs with the beams on. The brightness of the DRLs is also inoffensive enough that I don't think they're worse than the beams at all. They're also essentially evenly-lit light bars, and not point sources like the beams, which further helps.
- buildsjets 11mo ago
  Username checks.
- officeplant 11mo ago
  > headlight beams have been misaligned and that's extremely distracting/infuriating so I hate using them anyway One might consider taking the 5 minutes to align your headlights? Even if you're alone and don't have a helping friend with a tape measure it's not difficult to just make them a little more properly adjusted.
- mmmlinux 11mo ago
  Sounds like you had a bad repair then. take it back and get it fixed properly.
hughes 11mo ago
Can confirm, my Model 3 had its lights angled too high from the factory. Only realized after a few people flashed their high beams at me during my first week driving. Thankfully it was easy to adjust.
- compass_copium 11mo ago
  What a quality car manufacturer!
- desolate_muffin 11mo ago
  Thank you for your service
- nehal3m 11mo ago
  I had the exact same issue, and Tesla sent out a service rep to my home to complete the adjustment to spec for free. You can request it through the service menu. Haven't had anyone flash me in the year since.
- hn_acc1 11mo ago
  Thank you for being part of the 0.01% of Tesla drivers who figured this out. I think by default they set them to "maximum height" or something. As someone in a sedan, they are infuriatingly blinding at night by default. I'm sure they're illegal, but obviously Tesla doesn't care. Source: live within a few miles of the Tesla factory, so I get more than my fair share of them. MOST of the drivers seem completely oblivious to this.
shit_game 11mo ago
>This is a change in behavior. >I am not sure what the solution is but the situation is getting worse and quickly. The solution is legislation and enforcement. Driving at night now makes me afraid for my safety because I'm literally blinded by oncoming traffic, and I'm sure that many other people share the same sentiment. I would happily argue that driving with lights bright enough to impair other drivers counts as wreckless driving and ought to be treated as such, but as far as I can tell, there are no legislative limits on directional lumen output or directional calibration for front-facing lights on cars, which leaves "wreckless" open to interpretation. This issue requires legislation that affects car manufacturers to prevent them from putting dangerous lights in their cars, and legislation that requires regular inspection of cars regarding their lumen output and headlight calibration. Most US states already require yearly inspections for emissions for most cars in order to re-register them; there are already means and methods in place for this to happen, it just needs to be done. I'm sick of feeling like im going to die every time I drive home because some asshole wants to see everything a mile in front of him.
- Wistar 11mo ago
  Adaptive headlights that actively shield oncoming drivers were finally made legal in the US in 2022 but complicated bureaucratic hoops make them hard to implement. BMW seems to have them working as I find their higher-end lighting (ex: ICON Adaptive w/ Laser Light) to be among the best to oncoming drivers—at least to my eyes. CNN writes about why headlight brightness is worse in the US than in other countries: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/15/cars/headlights-tech-adaptable-high-beams-cars https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/15/cars/headlights-tech-adap...
  - Zak 11mo ago
    The USA seems to suffer from a not-invented-here problem when it comes to automotive regulations. Most of the world adopted the European standard for adaptive headlights, but the USA had to spend years coming up with its own incompatible standard.
    - gmueckl 11mo ago
0xfeba 11mo ago
> Lately, 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. This is one of my pet peeves. I've categorized it into what I believe are the main causes: 1. People just don't know as well today that the blue indicator means you're blinding people 2. People with newer cars which will automatically turn off the headlights, including the brights, when you turn off and leave the car. 3. People with older cars where the low-beams are burned out or broken I've been tempted to purchase digital billboard space to raise awareness. Eg., "If this blue indicator is on, you're blinding everyone". And/or, get a mirror on my trunk that I can adjust the angle of from inside the cabin to reflect back high-beams at the driver. Mostly I'm hoping that automatic high-beams, like some Ford trucks I've seen do well, proliferate more!
- pksebben 11mo ago
  I have become an aggressive counter-flasher. This has yielded in some cases new knowledge - that the low beams of a lot of cars these days look like high beams (indicated when they flash back, and it's the brightness of a thousand suns). For those behind me, I've discovered that my side mirror has an angle where it reliably bounces the beams back. I've gotten more than a couple of drivers to turn their beams down with this method (but they have to be tailgating for it to work, which usually means we're already in an adversarial situation).
  - aceazzameen 11mo ago
    Haha I've also angled my side mirror out of my eyes, which incidentally is back towards the car behind me. I of course angle it back if I need to change lanes, but it's such an annoying thing I have to do just to see the road ahead of me. At this point I put full blame on car manufacturers and lack of government regulation and enforcement. Lights will keep getting brighter because lights are getting brighter. It's a death spiral.
    - radlad 11mo ago
      My 2017 Ford Fusion has an auto-dimming driver side mirror. I hate driving a car at night without this.
kulahan 11mo ago
I remember, when shopping for a car, the salesman told me about an Alpina model he had with laser headlights so intense they weren't even legal for new builds anymore. It's a selling point in some vehicles. Still, the idea that you should give headlight illumination control to the idiot behind the wheel is insane to me. Is it not a regulated height? Maybe that explains why it's a nightmare to drive at night anymore.
- sokoloff 11mo ago
  Back when sensors, electronics, and servos were unaffordable or unavailable, it made sense to have a low beam height control as the resting pitch of your car could vary by several degrees based on passenger/cargo load, trailer tongue weight, etc. It seems vastly less necessary now to have that control in the hands of the driver.
  - mulmen 11mo ago
    My dad’s 1966 Oldsmobile has auto-dimming headlights. There are manual overrides of course.
    - sokoloff 11mo ago
      Does that relate to driver-controlled height adjustment of the headlights?
      - mulmen 11mo ago
        No, the level is fixed for the high and low beams. I guess the driver can adjust them with a screwdriver but not while driving. I’m just mentioning that headlight automation was being done back in the 1960s with simple electronics. Just a photo cell and a lens. The driver can adjust sensitivity.
- trinix912 11mo ago
  Older cars have the height adjustment control too. Either as a physical dial or a menu entry. It's useful when transporting something heavy or when you're driving on totally wrecked roads so you can spot potholes faster etc. But most people don't know that, dial it all the way up and just leave it there.
dbg31415 11mo ago
> Lately, 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. Something has changed in how we use headlights, and not for the better. Historically, drivers behaved very differently. When "brights" were actually rare and reserved for dark stretches of highway, you'd dim them the moment you saw another car approaching. Often that meant switching to low beams when the other vehicle was more than a thousand feet away. Courtesy and safety were the norm. The technology has come a long way. Early headlights in the 1880s burned oil or kerosene. Acetylene gas lamps followed, and electric lighting appeared in the early 1900s. For decades after 1940, U.S. regulations froze headlight design into a two-lamp, 7-inch sealed-beam configuration. That rule unintentionally limited improvements in beam shape and brightness. Only in the 1970s and 1980s did halogens and replaceable-bulb designs become widely permitted, which opened the door to much brighter and more varied systems. Then came the xenon era in the late 1990s and early 2000s. High-Intensity Discharge (HID) lamps felt futuristic at the time, but they were also infamous for their glare, especially when installed into housings not designed for them. This is where "riced-out" aftermarket kits made things worse. People would drop cheap HID or later LED bulbs into reflector housings built for halogen. The result was scattered, unfocused light that looked bright from the driver's seat but created a wall of glare for everyone else. That trend never fully went away. Today, Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 108 (FMVSS 108) governs headlamps. It sets minimum performance requirements and basic definitions for high and low beams, but it does not impose strict limits on maximum brightness or color temperature. The old "300 candlepower requires a dimmer switch" phrasing still floats around, but there is no tight federal cap on lumens or color warmth. States can enforce aiming requirements, but in practice they rarely do. Nobody is pulling cars over with a light meter. Modern LEDs changed the equation again. They're efficient, crisp, and extremely "white" (actually "blue") which makes them appear even brighter to human eyes at night. Complaints about perceived glare have been climbing for years, and there's no shortage of real-world examples of it in the wild. https://old.reddit.com/r/fuckyourheadlights/ https://old.reddit.com/r/fuckyourheadlights/ Automakers tried to help with automatic high-beam systems, but these were designed to detect oncoming headlamps, not pedestrians. If you're walking your dogs at night, the system may not dim because it "sees" nothing to react to. Many drivers rely on auto mode and never manually intervene, so they cruise around blasting full brightness without realizing it. My workaround is simple. I carry a high-power flashlight and give a quick shine toward cars running high beams. The auto-dimmer interprets it as another vehicle and drops to low beam. It also alerts the driver that something is off. Plenty of neighbors have told me they had no idea their headlights weren't dimming. (Teslas are by far the worst offenders.) This is the flashlight I use: https://www.costco.ca/infinity-x1-7000-lumen-flashlight.product.4000368630.html https://www.costco.ca/infinity-x1-7000-lumen-flashlight.prod...
SJC_Hacker 11mo ago
> I am not sure what the solution is but the situation is getting worse and quickly. Maybe Corey Hart had the right idea … sunglasses at night
- ToucanLoucan 11mo ago
  As someone who's undergone LASIK correction, I have to do this semi-regularly for night highway driving. (For those unaware, the procedure gives you a mild halo effect basically for life, if you've had your eyes dilated before, imagine that, at like 25%). LED headlights are BRUTAL for this, oftentimes I can't even see the car they're attached to because of the insane amount of glare.
lukeschlather 11mo ago
My parents' new Chevy Bolt automatically turns off the brights when appropriate. At first I was doing it manually but then I started trusting it, it just works, it does it at exactly the moment I would do it (actually it's better at it than me.) I'm surprised Teslas don't do it.
- woods42 11mo ago
  ours does - and it does it very reliably as you describe the bolt above.
- Wistar 11mo ago
  I am not sure that the incredibly bright Tesla Model 3 (and sometimes Model X) lights are on brights but are just stupidly bright at low-beam settings.
- giobox 11mo ago
  All Teslas can do this too, as can a huge range of modern cars with so called "auto dipping headlights". Virtually all cars with this option allow you to turn it off though... The quality of the auto-dip implementation varies enormously as well.
  - scotty79 11mo ago
    Yeah, and the ones that auto dip usually don't have auto off mode. To bad they didn't leave it in as an option.
- MetaWhirledPeas 11mo ago
  > I'm surprised Teslas don't do it. They do. Also, the ones with matrix LEDs (most newer Models other than the Cybertruck) automatically create a circle of darkness around anything they detect to be another vehicle.
  - LanceJones 11mo ago
    Why the downvotes? Jesus, I have a new Model 3 Performance and the matrix lights do exactly as stated.
vkou 11mo ago
> Lately, 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. I mean, the reptile part of my brain is really tempted to do so, because every other car on the road is blinding me - why be a good citizen, it's all fucking Mad Max out there anyways... (On odd-numbered days, that part of my brain compels me to go through the mall parking lot and spray a filter onto all the offending vehicles' headlights.) The issue is that the giga-bright headlights would be fine if they were pointed at the road, instead of onto oncoming traffic. And some people have them incorrectly adjusted, where they do point onto incoming traffic. However, even if they were correctly adjusted, the slightest bump or angle in a road will still result in them shining directly into my face. The only acceptable solution is to send all offending vehicles to the junkyard, tomorrow. If that's not palatable, I'll settle with funding a a Department of Highway Safety making the rounds of the parking lots with a hammer.
supportengineer 11mo ago
To raise awareness I've started turning on my high beams when I encounter one of those drivers.
gleenn 11mo ago
I found out recently that you can adjust your Tesla headlights electronically from the computer screen inside and it was quite easy. I was regularly getting high-beam flashed by people because I think the stock Tesla settings have the lights too high.
dreamcompiler 11mo ago
The Tesla Model Y automatic dimmer is quite stupid. It dims whenever my lights reflect off a street sign and no other cars are nearby. I have to keep it turned off and dim my lights manually, which is a PITA because sometimes I forget and blind oncoming drivers. The automatic wipers are even worse: They frequently come on when it's not raining and they don't come on when it is. Yet somehow the automatic wipers on my 2011 Audi work perfectly. WTF?
- jfim 11mo ago
  The automatic wipers on non Tesla cars use infrared sensors that have existed for decades, so they're a well known quantity. The Tesla wipers use the front cameras to detect rain, and those cameras are focused at a distance that's far enough to be able to see other vehicles, so they're not focused on the windshield, which is why they're unreliable.
amy_petrik 11mo ago
> This is a change in behavior. I agree with this and believe it due to something parallel to the India litter crisis. In india people may freely throw garbage anywhere. Because garbage is everywhere. They did studies "clean up ALL garbage on this street" and now people are more respectful. So there is a sense "garbage is everywhere, who cares if I add to it" The same thing with headlights, "everyone seems to be blasting their headlights, might as well" - it's a slippery slope. Kind of like if a workplace reaches a crucial saturation of assholes, everyone is tempted to become an asshole and it becomes toxic. All of this, some facet of human nature I suppose. My suggestion would be steep fines for excessively bright headlights with some significant portion of those fines funding police departments. This would yield rapid and effective enforcement.
- BonoboIO 11mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory Classic
kevin_thibedeau 11mo ago
I would bet that many of these are illegal LED mods without the required cutoff line in approved lighting.
- Wistar 11mo ago
  5 years ago, I would have agreed with you but not today. Just too many of them to all be user-modified/augmented lights.
SlightlyLeftPad 11mo ago
It’s not that people are doing this intentionally, it’s that the aiming is that bad out of the factory.
ishtanbul 11mo ago
What do you expect to happen with self driving cars? Do they need bright headlights? Do they need high beams?
janaagaard 11mo ago
> Lately, 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. I suspect this is because more and more people don’t know how to turn it off and/or don’t know what the blue indicator on the dashboard means. As you mention, Tesla model 3 seems to be the worst offender. Could this be caused by a bad interface in that car? How does the brights indicator look in a model 3 and you turn off the brights?
rconti 11mo ago
> 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. There's just no way that more than 0.5% of drivers of any model are going to this level of tinkering. I have a Model 3, and I've never seen that menu. And I post here! One contributing factor to people noticing "the blue light means you're blinding people" is that it's just a blue light outline on an already blinding white dash screen (and in the case of the tesla, an OFFSET dash screen). "Back in my day", the blue high beam light was the brightest damn thing on the cluster, so you KNEW when your brights were on. Now you have to _look_ for the indicator.

by Wistar 11mo ago

LoganDark 11mo ago

I 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.

xxpor 11mo ago
At least in NA, if you only have the DRLs on, it means your rear lights aren't on.
- LoganDark 11mo ago
  That's not true for my vehicle, I've checked.
  - SoftTalker 11mo ago
    Not sure why people are not believing you. I have a Volvo and the headlights and taillights are illuminated at all times, even when the headlight switch is "off." The only thing that turning the headlights "on" does differently is enable high beams.
  - hn_acc1 11mo ago
    Thanks - I'm ok with that. As also mentioned, I'm NOT when it's a dark car at night with ONLY DRL and no rear lights at all - which I've seen a LOT of lately..
- snerbles 11mo ago
  Anecdata around SV: I've seen an uptick in urban night drivers with only their DRLs and no tail lights.
akersten 11mo ago
Are you aware of what the D in DRL stands for? Your vision may be good enough to see ahead of you by candlelight, but other drivers are not going to expect a nearly invisible car approaching at night. Turn on your headlights.
- BenjiWiebe 11mo ago
  DRL's aren't dim enough to make your car "nearly invisible". If it's enough light for the driver to see the road via reflection, it's more than enough for the oncoming driver to see via line of sight transmission.
  - hn_acc1 11mo ago
    True - but the problem is at night, from behind, on many models, the ARE invisible because no lights are on.
- LoganDark 11mo ago
  I don't know what's invisible about the outside edge of my headlights, and my taillights, being illuminated. The car is very visible. If it were invisible, and I do a LOT of nighttime driving, I would've gotten pulled over for it already (and I haven't been).
sokoloff 11mo ago
On many cars, the beam of the DRLs are more offensive to oncoming drivers when used at night. Properly repairing your car might make it less distracting/infuriating.
- saltcured 11mo ago
  Yeah, the DRL lamps are omnidirectional while proper headlights are much more directional. Typically the DRL lamps switch off or go to a dimmer setting when the headlights are on. That omnidirectional nature makes them pure glare at night.
  - LoganDark 11mo ago
    My vehicle does not dim the DRLs with the beams on. The brightness of the DRLs is also inoffensive enough that I don't think they're worse than the beams at all. They're also essentially evenly-lit light bars, and not point sources like the beams, which further helps.
buildsjets 11mo ago
Username checks.
officeplant 11mo ago
> headlight beams have been misaligned and that's extremely distracting/infuriating so I hate using them anyway One might consider taking the 5 minutes to align your headlights? Even if you're alone and don't have a helping friend with a tape measure it's not difficult to just make them a little more properly adjusted.
mmmlinux 11mo ago
Sounds like you had a bad repair then. take it back and get it fixed properly.

hughes 11mo ago

Can confirm, my Model 3 had its lights angled too high from the factory. Only realized after a few people flashed their high beams at me during my first week driving. Thankfully it was easy to adjust.

compass_copium 11mo ago
What a quality car manufacturer!
desolate_muffin 11mo ago
Thank you for your service
nehal3m 11mo ago
I had the exact same issue, and Tesla sent out a service rep to my home to complete the adjustment to spec for free. You can request it through the service menu. Haven't had anyone flash me in the year since.
hn_acc1 11mo ago
Thank you for being part of the 0.01% of Tesla drivers who figured this out. I think by default they set them to "maximum height" or something. As someone in a sedan, they are infuriatingly blinding at night by default. I'm sure they're illegal, but obviously Tesla doesn't care. Source: live within a few miles of the Tesla factory, so I get more than my fair share of them. MOST of the drivers seem completely oblivious to this.

shit_game 11mo ago

>This is a change in behavior. >I am not sure what the solution is but the situation is getting worse and quickly. The solution is legislation and enforcement. Driving at night now makes me afraid for my safety because I'm literally blinded by oncoming traffic, and I'm sure that many other people share the same sentiment. I would happily argue that driving with lights bright enough to impair other drivers counts as wreckless driving and ought to be treated as such, but as far as I can tell, there are no legislative limits on directional lumen output or directional calibration for front-facing lights on cars, which leaves "wreckless" open to interpretation. This issue requires legislation that affects car manufacturers to prevent them from putting dangerous lights in their cars, and legislation that requires regular inspection of cars regarding their lumen output and headlight calibration. Most US states already require yearly inspections for emissions for most cars in order to re-register them; there are already means and methods in place for this to happen, it just needs to be done. I'm sick of feeling like im going to die every time I drive home because some asshole wants to see everything a mile in front of him.

Wistar 11mo ago
Adaptive headlights that actively shield oncoming drivers were finally made legal in the US in 2022 but complicated bureaucratic hoops make them hard to implement. BMW seems to have them working as I find their higher-end lighting (ex: ICON Adaptive w/ Laser Light) to be among the best to oncoming drivers—at least to my eyes. CNN writes about why headlight brightness is worse in the US than in other countries: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/15/cars/headlights-tech-adaptable-high-beams-cars https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/15/cars/headlights-tech-adap...
- Zak 11mo ago
  The USA seems to suffer from a not-invented-here problem when it comes to automotive regulations. Most of the world adopted the European standard for adaptive headlights, but the USA had to spend years coming up with its own incompatible standard.
  - gmueckl 11mo ago

0xfeba 11mo ago

> Lately, 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. This is one of my pet peeves. I've categorized it into what I believe are the main causes: 1. People just don't know as well today that the blue indicator means you're blinding people 2. People with newer cars which will automatically turn off the headlights, including the brights, when you turn off and leave the car. 3. People with older cars where the low-beams are burned out or broken I've been tempted to purchase digital billboard space to raise awareness. Eg., "If this blue indicator is on, you're blinding everyone". And/or, get a mirror on my trunk that I can adjust the angle of from inside the cabin to reflect back high-beams at the driver. Mostly I'm hoping that automatic high-beams, like some Ford trucks I've seen do well, proliferate more!

pksebben 11mo ago
I have become an aggressive counter-flasher. This has yielded in some cases new knowledge - that the low beams of a lot of cars these days look like high beams (indicated when they flash back, and it's the brightness of a thousand suns). For those behind me, I've discovered that my side mirror has an angle where it reliably bounces the beams back. I've gotten more than a couple of drivers to turn their beams down with this method (but they have to be tailgating for it to work, which usually means we're already in an adversarial situation).
- aceazzameen 11mo ago
  Haha I've also angled my side mirror out of my eyes, which incidentally is back towards the car behind me. I of course angle it back if I need to change lanes, but it's such an annoying thing I have to do just to see the road ahead of me. At this point I put full blame on car manufacturers and lack of government regulation and enforcement. Lights will keep getting brighter because lights are getting brighter. It's a death spiral.
  - radlad 11mo ago
    My 2017 Ford Fusion has an auto-dimming driver side mirror. I hate driving a car at night without this.

kulahan 11mo ago

I remember, when shopping for a car, the salesman told me about an Alpina model he had with laser headlights so intense they weren't even legal for new builds anymore. It's a selling point in some vehicles. Still, the idea that you should give headlight illumination control to the idiot behind the wheel is insane to me. Is it not a regulated height? Maybe that explains why it's a nightmare to drive at night anymore.

sokoloff 11mo ago
Back when sensors, electronics, and servos were unaffordable or unavailable, it made sense to have a low beam height control as the resting pitch of your car could vary by several degrees based on passenger/cargo load, trailer tongue weight, etc. It seems vastly less necessary now to have that control in the hands of the driver.
- mulmen 11mo ago
  My dad’s 1966 Oldsmobile has auto-dimming headlights. There are manual overrides of course.
  - sokoloff 11mo ago
    Does that relate to driver-controlled height adjustment of the headlights?
    - mulmen 11mo ago
      No, the level is fixed for the high and low beams. I guess the driver can adjust them with a screwdriver but not while driving. I’m just mentioning that headlight automation was being done back in the 1960s with simple electronics. Just a photo cell and a lens. The driver can adjust sensitivity.
trinix912 11mo ago
Older cars have the height adjustment control too. Either as a physical dial or a menu entry. It's useful when transporting something heavy or when you're driving on totally wrecked roads so you can spot potholes faster etc. But most people don't know that, dial it all the way up and just leave it there.

dbg31415 11mo ago

> Lately, 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. Something has changed in how we use headlights, and not for the better. Historically, drivers behaved very differently. When "brights" were actually rare and reserved for dark stretches of highway, you'd dim them the moment you saw another car approaching. Often that meant switching to low beams when the other vehicle was more than a thousand feet away. Courtesy and safety were the norm. The technology has come a long way. Early headlights in the 1880s burned oil or kerosene. Acetylene gas lamps followed, and electric lighting appeared in the early 1900s. For decades after 1940, U.S. regulations froze headlight design into a two-lamp, 7-inch sealed-beam configuration. That rule unintentionally limited improvements in beam shape and brightness. Only in the 1970s and 1980s did halogens and replaceable-bulb designs become widely permitted, which opened the door to much brighter and more varied systems. Then came the xenon era in the late 1990s and early 2000s. High-Intensity Discharge (HID) lamps felt futuristic at the time, but they were also infamous for their glare, especially when installed into housings not designed for them. This is where "riced-out" aftermarket kits made things worse. People would drop cheap HID or later LED bulbs into reflector housings built for halogen. The result was scattered, unfocused light that looked bright from the driver's seat but created a wall of glare for everyone else. That trend never fully went away. Today, Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 108 (FMVSS 108) governs headlamps. It sets minimum performance requirements and basic definitions for high and low beams, but it does not impose strict limits on maximum brightness or color temperature. The old "300 candlepower requires a dimmer switch" phrasing still floats around, but there is no tight federal cap on lumens or color warmth. States can enforce aiming requirements, but in practice they rarely do. Nobody is pulling cars over with a light meter. Modern LEDs changed the equation again. They're efficient, crisp, and extremely "white" (actually "blue") which makes them appear even brighter to human eyes at night. Complaints about perceived glare have been climbing for years, and there's no shortage of real-world examples of it in the wild. https://old.reddit.com/r/fuckyourheadlights/ https://old.reddit.com/r/fuckyourheadlights/ Automakers tried to help with automatic high-beam systems, but these were designed to detect oncoming headlamps, not pedestrians. If you're walking your dogs at night, the system may not dim because it "sees" nothing to react to. Many drivers rely on auto mode and never manually intervene, so they cruise around blasting full brightness without realizing it. My workaround is simple. I carry a high-power flashlight and give a quick shine toward cars running high beams. The auto-dimmer interprets it as another vehicle and drops to low beam. It also alerts the driver that something is off. Plenty of neighbors have told me they had no idea their headlights weren't dimming. (Teslas are by far the worst offenders.) This is the flashlight I use: https://www.costco.ca/infinity-x1-7000-lumen-flashlight.product.4000368630.html https://www.costco.ca/infinity-x1-7000-lumen-flashlight.prod...

SJC_Hacker 11mo ago

> I am not sure what the solution is but the situation is getting worse and quickly. Maybe Corey Hart had the right idea … sunglasses at night

ToucanLoucan 11mo ago
As someone who's undergone LASIK correction, I have to do this semi-regularly for night highway driving. (For those unaware, the procedure gives you a mild halo effect basically for life, if you've had your eyes dilated before, imagine that, at like 25%). LED headlights are BRUTAL for this, oftentimes I can't even see the car they're attached to because of the insane amount of glare.

lukeschlather 11mo ago

My parents' new Chevy Bolt automatically turns off the brights when appropriate. At first I was doing it manually but then I started trusting it, it just works, it does it at exactly the moment I would do it (actually it's better at it than me.) I'm surprised Teslas don't do it.

woods42 11mo ago
ours does - and it does it very reliably as you describe the bolt above.
Wistar 11mo ago
I am not sure that the incredibly bright Tesla Model 3 (and sometimes Model X) lights are on brights but are just stupidly bright at low-beam settings.
giobox 11mo ago
All Teslas can do this too, as can a huge range of modern cars with so called "auto dipping headlights". Virtually all cars with this option allow you to turn it off though... The quality of the auto-dip implementation varies enormously as well.
- scotty79 11mo ago
  Yeah, and the ones that auto dip usually don't have auto off mode. To bad they didn't leave it in as an option.
MetaWhirledPeas 11mo ago
> I'm surprised Teslas don't do it. They do. Also, the ones with matrix LEDs (most newer Models other than the Cybertruck) automatically create a circle of darkness around anything they detect to be another vehicle.
- LanceJones 11mo ago
  Why the downvotes? Jesus, I have a new Model 3 Performance and the matrix lights do exactly as stated.

vkou 11mo ago

> Lately, 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. I mean, the reptile part of my brain is really tempted to do so, because every other car on the road is blinding me - why be a good citizen, it's all fucking Mad Max out there anyways... (On odd-numbered days, that part of my brain compels me to go through the mall parking lot and spray a filter onto all the offending vehicles' headlights.) The issue is that the giga-bright headlights would be fine if they were pointed at the road, instead of onto oncoming traffic. And some people have them incorrectly adjusted, where they do point onto incoming traffic. However, even if they were correctly adjusted, the slightest bump or angle in a road will still result in them shining directly into my face. The only acceptable solution is to send all offending vehicles to the junkyard, tomorrow. If that's not palatable, I'll settle with funding a a Department of Highway Safety making the rounds of the parking lots with a hammer.

supportengineer 11mo ago

To raise awareness I've started turning on my high beams when I encounter one of those drivers.

gleenn 11mo ago

I found out recently that you can adjust your Tesla headlights electronically from the computer screen inside and it was quite easy. I was regularly getting high-beam flashed by people because I think the stock Tesla settings have the lights too high.

dreamcompiler 11mo ago

The Tesla Model Y automatic dimmer is quite stupid. It dims whenever my lights reflect off a street sign and no other cars are nearby. I have to keep it turned off and dim my lights manually, which is a PITA because sometimes I forget and blind oncoming drivers. The automatic wipers are even worse: They frequently come on when it's not raining and they don't come on when it is. Yet somehow the automatic wipers on my 2011 Audi work perfectly. WTF?

jfim 11mo ago
The automatic wipers on non Tesla cars use infrared sensors that have existed for decades, so they're a well known quantity. The Tesla wipers use the front cameras to detect rain, and those cameras are focused at a distance that's far enough to be able to see other vehicles, so they're not focused on the windshield, which is why they're unreliable.

amy_petrik 11mo ago

> This is a change in behavior. I agree with this and believe it due to something parallel to the India litter crisis. In india people may freely throw garbage anywhere. Because garbage is everywhere. They did studies "clean up ALL garbage on this street" and now people are more respectful. So there is a sense "garbage is everywhere, who cares if I add to it" The same thing with headlights, "everyone seems to be blasting their headlights, might as well" - it's a slippery slope. Kind of like if a workplace reaches a crucial saturation of assholes, everyone is tempted to become an asshole and it becomes toxic. All of this, some facet of human nature I suppose. My suggestion would be steep fines for excessively bright headlights with some significant portion of those fines funding police departments. This would yield rapid and effective enforcement.

BonoboIO 11mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory Classic

kevin_thibedeau 11mo ago

I would bet that many of these are illegal LED mods without the required cutoff line in approved lighting.

Wistar 11mo ago
5 years ago, I would have agreed with you but not today. Just too many of them to all be user-modified/augmented lights.

SlightlyLeftPad 11mo ago

It’s not that people are doing this intentionally, it’s that the aiming is that bad out of the factory.

ishtanbul 11mo ago

What do you expect to happen with self driving cars? Do they need bright headlights? Do they need high beams?

janaagaard 11mo ago

> Lately, 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. I suspect this is because more and more people don’t know how to turn it off and/or don’t know what the blue indicator on the dashboard means. As you mention, Tesla model 3 seems to be the worst offender. Could this be caused by a bad interface in that car? How does the brights indicator look in a model 3 and you turn off the brights?

rconti 11mo ago

> 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. There's just no way that more than 0.5% of drivers of any model are going to this level of tinkering. I have a Model 3, and I've never seen that menu. And I post here! One contributing factor to people noticing "the blue light means you're blinding people" is that it's just a blue light outline on an already blinding white dash screen (and in the case of the tesla, an OFFSET dash screen). "Back in my day", the blue high beam light was the brightest damn thing on the cluster, so you KNEW when your brights were on. Now you have to _look_ for the indicator.