I feel the same way in America, I think there should be stricter regulations on how bright a car's headlights are allowed to be for it to be street legal. Wouldn't mind having a cap on blue-light levels in addition.
There are a two things contributing to "headlights too bright" in the US...
First, SUVs are really tall... If you're in a sedan (or worse, a Miata) and get close enough to an oncoming SUV, even well-aimed, legal lights are going to feel bright because they're pointed down at you.
Second, there's a decent sized market for cheap, unapproved HID/LED kits for older cars. They're often not aimed correctly.
Well, and the fact they're just way brighter than ever. When I was younger you could stare at the yellowish glow of a car with headlights on and just not be blinded. We even used to park several cars around a basketball court behind the goals with headlights on at times to play at night.
Maybe I just got old or my eyes are peculiar, but that's no longer the case. I cannot stare directly into the new white/blue/whatever lights cars use at all without an immediate reaction of being blinded.
In my opinion, we just don't need this level of lighting at night. My vehicle lights up giant swaths of the fields next to the road and I can see for a hundred+ feet in either direction. I just don't need this level of HD quality night vision, only just enough to see down the road a ways and immediate side of it to check for objects/deer/people.
So now we have these retina scorching lights that are generally fine if the road is 100% flat and the car brand new. Any other situation ends up feeling like everyone is pointing lasers into your eyes.
> When I was younger you could stare at the yellowish glow of a car with headlights on and just not be blinded.
The older incandescent bulbs were a different color temperature (more on the yellow side of the color spectrum) and were not a point source (filament instead). Both contributed to them not seeming quite so bright, even if the net lumens was the same.
The newer LED's are much more on the blue end of the color spectrum (automatically making the same lumen level appear much brighter) and the LED's are much closer to point sources, which further makes the result appear significantly brighter even if the lumen level was the same.
Couple the "harsh blue light" and "point source" with "significantly more lumens" as well and you get modern headlights that are painful to look towards, much less to look directly at.
It would be fantastic if it were possible to dictate a headlight height for standard lights. just because your SUV is twelve feet off the ground doesn't mean the lights need to be positioned there.
> Second, there's a decent sized market for cheap, unapproved HID/LED kits for older cars. They're often not aimed correctly.
This is the biggest problem. Even talk SUV headlights from the factory must meet standards for masking off light and the angles at which they can illuminate.
But when people buy LED retrofit kits and jam them into reflectors not designed for those bulbs, the reflectors don’t mask properly. Light spills everywhere.
I would bet that nearly all of the “headlights are too bright” complaints are coming from people seeing LED retrofit kits.
Those are some of the most offensive lights but I wouldn't say it's the biggest problem. SUVs and trucks often have their headlights at the absolute highest point allowed and it's not uncommon for drivers to install lift kits which raise the lights even higher. If you're in a standard sedan, headlights pointing into your eyes is pretty unavoidable. Even a small vehicle that's oncoming and on a steeper incline than you may shine their bright headlights into your eyes.
There are no government agents going around inspecting all the vehicles coming off the factory line. Anecdotally, my friends Tesla has completely horizontal headlights from new. I could see oncoming drivers faces illuminate and wince in pain. A quick adjustment in the settings fixed that, however the majority of drivers are ignorant of the fact that headlights are usually adjustable.
Not sure there is any real solution other than going back to halogen lights or requiring sophisticated anti-dazzle systems.
> I would bet that nearly all of the “headlights are too bright” complaints are coming from people seeing LED retrofit kits.
Disagree. The "too bright" headlights are new cars. And sedans as well as trucks SUVs.
Another big problem is that the lights are much closer to "point source" than older headlights which were 4-6" in diameter. A modern headlight is more like a 2" or smaller diameter projector lens, which is even more blinding.
How many people are really getting after market headlights installed on their SUVs? There's too many vehicles with blindingly bright lights for that to be the cause.
I used to think it was a lot of people doing it. I drive an older car with what I call "normal" brightness headlights, and the warm color too instead of the annoying blue/white.
But then I had to rent a newer car, and it came stock with super bright blue/white headlights. They were so bright to what I was used to I had to double check the high beams weren't on. The standard lights were as bright as my old car's high beams.
Lights in newer cars are literally just that bright, and I think it's a result of car safety culture being a matter of "I only care of the car protects me" instead of "the car should also be safe for others on the road as well"
> Lights in newer cars are literally just that bright, and I think it's a result of car safety culture being a matter of "I only care of the car protects me" instead of "the car should also be safe for others on the road as well"
This theory can't work on its own terms. It'd be hard to make the car less safe for the driver than by automatically blinding oncoming traffic. Brighter headlights aren't a safety improvement for anyone.
They represent car manufacturers unilaterally making the product worse for the sake of having a worse product, just like the replacement of physical buttons with touchscreens.
I mean, I have those types of lights on my car, but I am VIGILANT about checking that they have a slight DOWNWARDS slope (and I'm in a relatively low sedan to begin with). There's a T-intersection near my house with a retaining wall at the end - very convenient for checking the angle.
Even when I upgraded my old car to HIDs (because I could barely see anything over the other cars), I checked over and over to make sure I was low enough. Also, I ensure I never light up the TOP crease of the trunk of any sedan behind me. If I light up anything inside another car, it's bad.
When my taillight burned out, I went to the local autoparts store to get a replacement. The first light I picked up had printed on the packaging, in not-terribly-visible writing, "For Off-Road Use Only." I had to go back and hunt longer for the light that was legal for road use.
There's probably a decent contingent of people replacing their lights with out-of-spec lights not realizing that the lights are not actually road-legal.
That's not how it works. They can write whatever they want on the packaging. It's the final assembly that's compliant. They're covering their ass in case you put their 5W bulb in some application they've never heard of where it technically fits but a 2.5W bulb was supposed to be used or something.
It's like how aftermarket brake hoses all say "off road use only" despite pretty much all of them vastly exceeding the FMVSS for brake hoses.
The correct bulb will not say that, aftermarket LEDs do. The light reflector housings are designed and tested for specific bulb standards. There are LEDs which try to output light from the same place as the filament in the bulb they are mimicking. But there is no guarantee they function properly, hence the warning and illegality.
If you swap one side and walk around your car, you may see that they are significantly dimmer than the stock bulbs from some or all angles. Or it may work fine. Often times the aftermarket LED dual intensity tail/stop lights have barely any difference between the two brightnesses which is egregiously unsafe
Most Teslas come mis-aimed from the factory and expect their owners to "calibrate" them - they just never tell them that.. Guess how many owners actually figure it out? A vanishingly small percentage.. (or they're all assholes who want to blind others on purpose)
In EU most DMV equivalents check headlights yearly to catch illegal illumination envelopes (along with other safety-related aspects, brakes and whatnot).
Most US states don't have an inspection regime. Of those that do, it's often just for emissions (and with 2001+ cars, it's increasingly just confirm the check engine light shows up in the light test and turns off when the engine is started, plus check that the emissions computer says ready for test). The driving public does not want to pay for safety inspections.
But yes, if there was a safety inspection, it should include verifying that lights function and that headlights are aimed appropriately. A brightness test might be too complex, but safety inspection would be the place to do it.
In theory, yes. But, it's state-by-state, enforcement at drive-time is next to zero (unless the cop just wants to hassle you), leaving it to either annual or time-of-sale inspections that are easily gamed (slip the mechanic a $20).
Heck, people will reinstall stock parts for inspection then swap back to the illegal parts. Common with emissions stuff as well.
The only one I've experienced (Massachusetts) wouldn't catch any of what we're discussing in this thread. They put it on the emission testing machine, walked once around the car, maybe checked the brakes, and that was it. It was in no way comparable to the UK's MOT test, which is a proper inspection.
Maine also requires headlight aiming to be checked and compliant.
It's just not done though. There's a list of like 10 items to check, and you are only allowed to charge like $12-$18 for the check, so corners are cut, and your average 18 year old who was given the job of doing the inspection does not care, and enforcement is more concerned with the shops willing to give you a sticker for stuff that is outright criminal, like not really working brakes.
My 2024 outback has no 'high beams'. My low beams are the same brightness as high beams. The only difference is the field of view. I switch on the high beams on and height of the beam increases, but intensity stays the same.
I feel awful about essentially high-beaming everyone unless the road is flat.
High also refers to the lack of beam cut-off or masking[1], not only the intensity. In UK English, the terms are "full beam" and "dipped beam" to reflect this.
[1] For older US cars, it was more about intensity as the masking sucked. I don't think it's that relevant to this discussion but you can look up "DOT vs Euro headlights" if it interests you.
This is how almost all cars with HID bulbs work, because HID bulbs can't be toggled on and off - they need time to warm up and have a limited number of arc initiation cycles before they wear out. So there's a mechanical shutter which changes the cut-off distance. Generally, there is also a leveling sensor which adjusts the cutoff when the car starts up, to account for suspension sag differences and load.
That's normal. Low beams are aimed low and often have a illumination pattern reducing light over the median, high beams are aimed high and uniform illumination. Very often, they're the same intensity.
Thanks, previously the only other car I had was a 1995 volvo which used additional bulbs when the high beams were engaged. Intensity and field of view were increased. The outback's headlights were very confusing to me since I leapt through like 3 generations of cars
I wonder if it became normal around the time everyone started complaining headlights were too bright
Most vehicles with dual-filament bulbs will turn off the low beams while the high beams are on, but looking around, I see it's mixed for vehicles with dual bulbs; US standards don't require it one way or the other --- you can meet the high beam requirement with separate bulbs or with both bulbs in concert.
I think complaints about headlights really started when different bulb types came out. HID, projector, and LED bulbs all cast qualitatively different light than the ubiquitous tungsten halogen bulbs that preceded them. A lot of these put out a lot of blue, especially in the fringes that I find very objectionable, and the lumen output seems to have increased quite a bit, as well as the spread.
Halogen bulbs were tightly constrained by power limits and output requirements; but the other types can hit the output requirements at well under the power limits, so they can cast a wider field of view (which is nice), but may need to be brighter in more of the the wider field of view to hit the output requirements in the central portion, and that additional brightness is more likely to cause glare. Of course, all of our eyes have aged as well which makes night vision more difficult, especially with light variance. I remember my parents sometimes complaining about other vehicle's lights when I was young and thought everything was fine, but everyone was using halogen lights back then.
> Second, there's a decent sized market for cheap, unapproved HID/LED kits for older cars. They're often not aimed correctly.
This, so much this. I'm having no issue with new cars and their LEDs. The aftermarket kits that are installed on 1994 Swifts and Passat B5s are not at all configured properly. They just throw it on the car and "yay i can see more" and sometimes I even think that they are using their high beams. But no, it's just their incorrectly set up lights.
Aiming and beam restriction is not enough and cannot ever be enough to prevent bright headlights from blinding people. It only works when the road is flat. You introduce a hill or even a speed bump and suddenly the headlight angle is zero. Brightness has to be managed directly.
This isn’t the whole story. I’ve been driving the same Prius compact since 2015, and only I the last few years have I suddenly started experiencing these insanely bright headlights. The giant cars have been around the whole time. The brightest lights seem like they are on specific brands of new cars, although I’m terrible at recognizing car brands and obviously only experience this issue at night when I’m being blinded by headlights, so it’s not easy to figure out exactly which brands cause the issue.
a third thing is some people drive with brights on all the time, particularly in snow-bird seasonal communities, I've noticed. when the seasonal people, many geriatric, are in town, the vehicles driving day and night with bright lights activated is noticable.
Might be some mistaken confirmation bias there. Canadian registered vehicles are required to have "daytime running lights" while American cars are not. You might be seeing low beams vs no beams, as opposed to high beams vs low beams.
We've got daytime running lights for years here south of Canada, almost everyone has them enabled by default, but they seem not mandated still.
Anyway, occasionally F150 / Silverado lights are mis-aimed, so low beams seem bright, but more commonly (here) German and American cars with distinct fixtures for brights vs low beans are driving in daylight with both sets activated. Not sure why, but it's not unusual.
The rising height of headlights in North America is compounding the issue as well. At this point a good proportion of vehicles have headlights even or higher than the roof on a sedan.
At least in my state, there is a law that restricts the location of headlights to between 22 and 54 inches from the ground. 54 inches is quite tall, though, I think that a lot of cars have roofs that are shorter than 4.5 feet. I'd love to see a much lower upper limit.
I don't think there's a limit to how bright they can be. The law limits the lights to "70 watts", which I believe is intended to limit brightness but misses the mark. I bet the law was passed back when headlights were incandescent.
LEDs are around 10x more efficient than incandescent bulbs. A 100W incandescent equivalent LED bulb typically consumes 10-12W. A 70W LED would put out as much light as 700W of incandescent.
Traditional automotive headlamps are halogens and much more efficient than conventional incandescents. It was only in the last decade that LEDs beat halogens on lumens per watt.
I'd go as far as to say that the height is the issue, and it's becoming global (although, yes, US is the leader).
It's ridiculous that an average SUV has headlights higher than an average semi (my own experience) given the latter's breaking distance is much greater.
The maximum brightness is already regulated in US and Europe. US allows a lower brightness level.
Some car manufacturer (Ford?) recalled their cars to fix their cars' headlight settings to match US regulations in the last 6-8 months IIRC.
Also, light temperature has limits. I believe >4000K lights are already road illegal in UK and EU. They are also recently outlawed in my country, but there are many cars with after market 5000K+ bulbs installed. They also don't conform to the geometry of the bulbs these headlights designed to accommodate. They are painful to look at.
What needs to be done is a) Stricter regulation in retrofitting older headlights with newer bulbs b) Regulating the amount of light hitting the oncoming driver somehow. c) Stricter CRI and light temperature regulations for the LED headlights.
I don't want to be blinded from light coming from behind and front constantly at night, too.
It isn't just retrofits that are a problem, it's brand new cars.
It's not just about not wanting to be uncomfortably blinded by lasers shooting into your eyes at night. (Lasers well under 3000 lumens!). It's that this kills people. Frequently. It's a form of assault with hundreds of dead victims and thousands of injured victims a year.
The regulations for manufacturers are enforced. There have even been recalls for it.
LED retrofit regulations are not enforced. We should equip safety inspection stations with ways to measure this, but it’s an expensive change to demand they do safety inspections in a dark room when most safety inspection businesses are small shops that don’t have the room or buildings to do it.
I believe so, but I need more evidence in either direction to give it a definitive answer, but why companies recall cars to fix their brightness levels if they are not enforced?
> It's not just about not wanting to be uncomfortably blinded by lasers shooting into your eyes at night.
I mean, being uncomfortably blinded creates the risk of being dead already. I believe I made it clear that it's dangerous.
> They measure at a certain point. Jason Cammisa points it out pretty clearly in an episode of Carmudgeon, with the money quote either here[0] or in the link direct to YouTube here[1]:
> On a recent episode of the Carmudgeon Show podcast, auto journalist Jason Cammisa described a phenomenon occurring with some LED headlights in which there are observable minor spots of dimness among an otherwise bright field of light. “With complex arrays of LEDs and of optics,” he said, “car companies realized they can engineer in a dark spot where it’s being measured, but the rest of the field is vastly over-illuminated. And I’ve had now two car companies’ engineers, when I played stupid and said, ‘What’s the dark spot?’ … And the lighting engineers are all fucking proud of themselves: ‘That’s where they measure the fucking thing!’ And I’m like, ‘You assholes, you’re the reason that every fucking new car is blinding the shit out of everyone.’”
You mean the same companies that measured the testing benches used for emissions regulations and cheated on them? It's not like there isn't a history of the car companies doing foul shit here.
He tells the stories, interviews with the people who built these cars (if possible), gets and drives a copy of the said car.
We're talking about a person who painstakingly perfects the pronunciation of the brand and model names just because he feels doing otherwise is not respectful for the brand, model and people involved with the car.
---
Let's talk about specs. The spec[0] (pg 4) states that:
Photometers are placed at fixed locations on the test track to record the visibility and glare illumination of
the test vehicle on each approach. To correct for changes in illumination that are due to changes in
vehicle pitch, multiple photometers are used at each measurement location to capture illuminance
readings at different heights. The illuminance readings are synchronized to the vehicle position and pitch
using a common GPS time signal. The synchronized data are used to produce pitch-corrected illuminance
versus distance curves that are used for the headlight rating. All data are processed using the DIAdem
software package distributed by National Instruments. The processing scripts are available at
https://github.com/iihs-hldi.
This is a fixed receptor, fixed path, multiple approach test and is susceptible to optimization of the illumination map designed by the car manufacturers.
Moreover, test document states that:
Illuminance data are collected with Gamma Scientific photometers (Part # U68401). The photometric
sensors provide a very close match to the spectral response of the human eye. They are fitted with
diffusers to reduce the illuminance measurements for off-axis incidence angles in accordance with
Lambert’s cosine law. The sensors match the targeted cosine response to within 3 percent at angles up to
25 degrees, which is the maximum angle between the test vehicle and sensors on the sharpest curve (at
distances greater than 10 m). The sensor signals are passed through a low-pass filter with a cutoff
frequency of 35 Hz to allow for accurate measurements of pulse width modulated light sources such as
LEDs. Each sensor is connected to its own transimpedance amplifier board that has fixed gains to yield a
fast response while still minimizing linearity errors in the range of illuminance values for which the
headlight ratings are assigned.
Again more places to optimize the headlight.
If the test finds the lights are "in-spec", and people are increasingly unhappy/uncomfortable, then something is wrong.
An entertainer who's keenly aware of what his audience demographics are, what they want to hear, what'll piss them off, and what he ought to be doing if he wants the money to keep coming?
I'm not saying he's lying, but all these guys have an incentive to say whatever it is they're gonna say in the way that makes their audience as hysterical as possible.
Camissa is not as unhinged as Clarkson, their most common trait is their appreciation and knowledge of cars and how they treat their histories.
Listening to Camissa makes me feel like I’m listening to someone who appreciates all cars for being cars. He has no biases and preferences like Clarkson (German cars being cold, Italian cars being awesome, etc.).
It's much worse in America, in my experience. Much more deviation in cars/sedans/trucks on the road, with different road heights each, and MUCH more custom stuff on top.
I'm in Belgium and headlights don't generally bother me too much, but a month in California recently had me going "no wonder everyone has tints here."
I'm in the Netherlands and I DO find it bad. Probably also has to do with my age (early fifties) - your eyes adjust with more difficulty the older you get, it seems.
We also need to be far more strict about enforcing properly alignment, so many are pointed too high especially on larger vehicles and pretty much always on anything that's been lifted
This is false. Light trucks are definitely regulated. Emissions regs do soften a bit for 3/4 ton and up trucks (think F250 and up), but the ubiquitous F150 as well as other half-tons, as well as mid-size trucks, are all very much regulated.
