Fuck LED headlights
Fuck LED headlights
Driving is always a very stressful experience for me and lately it has gotten so much worse
please for the love of god can this country please get any kind of public safety measures passed. literally just stick a railing on somewhere that someone might fall off of. pass some toothless legislation. literally anything please
Afaik there are regs that make those lights illegal and require specific alignment of headlights so they don't blind people, but there's no enforcement, and people constantly misalign the lights with shoddy installs. idk, I hate it, driving is dangerous enough as it is.
It'd be easy as shit to have a pubic initiative drive for free light adjustment. Pigs could do something useful for once and pull these things over for referral to an adjustment center. But no, we can't have reasonable things that improve safety. I learned today that Tennessee apparently doesn't have driver's training, kids just have an adult sign off that they can drive.
California has you do a smog check every other year, I think a safety inspection would be nice too (and make it for the whole country). People who are really dedicated to being assholes will work around it, but most people who just don't realize that they're blinding everyone else will get their headlights angled downward and then never touch them again.
We have the regulation in the Europe.
But high intensity LEDs suck here too. Especially on the freaking SUVs.
Too much blue light, too much light from a small area.
A classic halogen headlights, of course, have disadvantages. But they are more pleasant for the eyes. If only aligned correctly..
Bring back mandatory annual vehicle inspections nation wide.
I was borrowing a short car and a truck pulled up behind me with it's ultra-bright while lights directly at eye level. Unbidden my mind conjured the image of a man very like me stepping out of the car with a sledge and smashing the truck's headlights.
I drive a tiny vehicle and this shit happens to me all the fucking time. I just want to kneecap every single person that has the suburban assault vehicles for this singular reason alone.
I drive a civic in an area full of lifted trucks and oversized SUVs, it’s miserable at night.
Electric side mirror adjusters can sometimes be used to angle to light back into their eyes.
I also think to myself, "Self, if ever I did some crazy cosmetic thing to my car, it would be to have some highly polished chrome panel with a series of electric motors that could adjust the angle to be used when somebody behind me has headlights that are too bright."
I dig it. I love it. I want it.
The only times where I felt genuine desire to shoot at the driver behind is whenever they drive a truck that blinds me
It's not just that they're horribly, unnecessarily bright--but the drivers never adjust their angle because it's not common knowledge that you're supposed to do that when you get a car. It's right there in the manual. LED headlights even have an attempted safety measure where they have a hard line stop instead of a gradual drop-off, to avoid blinding people--so when they're correctly angled they're... Okay, I guess. Not great, but better. So when it feels like they're beaming directly into your eyeballs, that's because they are.
That, and idiots putting LED headlights into their old cars without switching the housing, which essentially eliminates the safety measures and turns them into million lumen lasers.
LED headlights even have an attempted safety measure where they have a hard line stop instead of a gradual drop-off, to avoid blinding people
Whoever thought this was a sufficient safety feature had only ever driven on a Minecraft superflat map. Even looking past people having them badly aligned, this breaks down if the road has the slightest change in elevation. Oops, that truck ahead of you is actually climbing a 4 degree incline so now instead of being above that hard cutoff the lights are right in your eyes.
They need to be less bright, and more importantly they need to be less blue. There needs to be a very small range of acceptable headlight hues.
yea those are bright but folk needs new wipers too
people really never clean the insides of their windows.
yea that too, since i'm a little vape goblin i have to do that once every few months cuz the residue is gross.
edit: if you have trouble defrosting your windshield, clean the inside of it
modern LED headlights are extremely terrible for everybody else on the road and I hate them so much
PSA: For anyone experience this all the time at night, but especially when it's rainy/wet. it is most likely their dipshit headlights... buuuuut you should also get an eye exam if you've got the opportunity to do so. I know that's extremely out of reach for a lot of folks but if you can, you should.
It's extremely common for halos, streaky/blurry lights, etc. at night to be early or uncaught indicators of eyesight conditions like:
- Astigmatism
- Glaucoma
- Cataracts
- Keratoconus
- Etc.
The good thing is pretty much all of those are extremely treatable and not a big deal especially when caught early. There's also the possibility that it's literally none of that shit, but if it's been more than a year, get your eyes checked anyway. You need to be able to see to aim at fascists.
Again, there's almost a 100% chance it's the headlights and just rain and lights being shit at night, but, as has happened to two of my friends, you can also maybe find out it's your eyes being weird shapes and they fix it real easy and it's literally the difference between not being able to drive at night and being fine but occasionally struggling.
Plus on the off chance it's Glaucoma, you really wanna catch it early.
Yeah that shit sucks. I drive a 90s Japanese economy car and it's pretty much guaranteed that this time of the year, I'm going to have some 6,000+ pound bro-dozer behind me flooding my entire cabin with light on the way home from work. They aren't even modified. That's just how annoyingly big cars have gotten.
"well guess we're both driving half the limit now dumbass"
Driving should be made as unpleasant, stressful, and inconvenient as possible.
Dictatorship of the pedestrariate.
It already is for me. My anxiety skyrockets when I drive
I ran into a lot of those today. At a point I just kinda snapped and popped my brights on briefly while waiting for a left turn, just to spite the fucker with a death ray facing me. I wish the public transport here was better. I already should minimize driving at night, but then fuckers with LED lamps come out. In the middle of a rainstorm I'll find it a miracle I don't wind up crashing or accidentally hitting some pedestrian while momentarily blinded.
I fucking hate driving, it's so scary to me. Idk how people can enjoy it, it must be carbrain
I think if you live in a rural area it's not so bad. Going on drives wasn't an uncommon activity for my family to do
i just KNOW banning LED headlights would turn into a stupid culture war too
I have this friend who definitely defines himself by his consumption. One of the things he has wasted money in the last few years was getting expensive and expensive to repair cars. His latest was a truck that broke the first week he got it. It has an incredibly loud exhaust, probably gets 15mpg hwy and he has a 45 mile commute.
I actually just think he’s a bit of a dumb guy.
Then he tells me he wants to swap the headlight bulbs for LEDs and I said to absolutely not do that because of how the housings would scatter the light into the eyes of other drivers. I don’t know if he ever did it but he was really adamant about installing once they arrived in the mail.
Sitting at a stop light in a more rural part of town with little street light coverage and one of these assholes pulls up behind you and your rear view mirrors become DBZ Solar Flares.
Happened to me last night. Sitting in my little human sized car and a fuck in a giant truck with these LEDs at directly head height rolls up behind me. Truly a painful experience
I been awake for 34 hours and the red lights make this look like a shadow monster with glowing eyes shining its flashlight at me
Bicyclists have started getting LED lights and I fucking hate them. We're on a bike path in a big city, you're not more safe for spitting out 1000 lumens, actually the opposite, I am now blind and am going to crash into you, my fellow bicyclist, but at least the path that was illuminated by streetlights is also slightly brighter for having tye power of a cold sun aimed at it
LED lights revolutionised cycling here in the UK. Back when I started you'd go through 4 D cells a week. And the incandescent bulb was shit. Utter, utter shit.
Then about 20 years ago LEDs came on the scene and suddenly drivers could see you. And I know they saw me because they'd lose their marbles over the light (I always checked my angle/brightness with my brother sat over the bike - if Icouldnt see his body/arms I knew I'd be in trouble). Hilarious that drivers here moan about unlit riders (still many) yet they crawl over the line into the bike box to shout at the lit riders..
USB recharging as made bike lights even better. The LEDs made the light last 10-20 hours. The lithium gave you 2-3 weeks of riding in some cases with no loss of light.
If you're on an unlit bike path (most around heredont have street lights) then yeah, you do need those lumens. But the issue isnt the lumens, its those with helmet lights shining them into others eyes. Or badly positioned lights. Or buying Magic Shine off-road lights from ebay/amazon etc and expecting those to be suitable.
I'm not against LED lights on unlit roads out in the sticks, I'm against using them in the middle of a big city. It's be like taking those big outdoor lights that some trucks have and mounting them on a Volkswagen Beetle that the owner uses to go to the shops a few times a week. It's not what they're meant for and using them like this actively endangers you and everyone around. My issue is with people buying these off-road/country road lights for their inner city bike.
i have always hated driving but now every time i do it at night it feels like 1000% more of a gamble
I feel like I rarely notice anyone turning off their high beams anymore too.
I drove my mum's car at night once and it auto toggled high beams, and it kept them on at really short distances (I pulled over safely found how to turn it off thankfully)
this picture finally showed me what the difference in hdr is. i was like 'man thats fucking bright' and turned that shit off.
Used to drive a car with a stun gun: grill and roof lightbars. Would do a quick half-second flip to tell transports and big pickups that their lights were too bright. Definitely made people running with high beams think twice.
Is this something to do with LEDs inherently, or are they just being set too bright and blue coloured?
Angled too high, mostly.
personally I think a lot of it is just the height arms race. I see a lot of Jeeps in the city; their headlights are physically taller than my rear view mirror. Angle won't help that
I always hear this excuse but I think it’s bullshit. It definitely makes it worse but the lights themselves are the problem. They’re too bright, too blue, and the “safety feature” that IF they’re properly aligned the light has a hard cutoff doesn’t help if the car coming at you is going slightly uphill
Angle isn’t that important when the angle cars face you changes all the time
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there's inherent problems too.
- Except for where they screw into the socket, incandescent bulbs are point sources that emit light in all directions. About half of it comes out "backwards" and then is reflected out with a parabolic reflector. So oncoming traffic sees a large but relatively low-intensity light source. Power LEDs are bound to a flat substrate and the light comes basically straight out. This means that manufacturers are able to dispense with the reflectors. When you're behind a car with LED taillights, you see a bunch of little bright points instead of a big soft one. Total lumens might be the same, but the small high-intensity points are more likely to dazzle you.
- LEDs are much bluer than incandescents; making them warmer comes with its own downsides. Idk if this really matters though
Polarized glasses help to some degree (as long as they dont darken) However if your windscreen is like that you a) need new wiper blades and b) also need to clean the damn screen inside and out. Also check out the German lighting standards. They're prolly the best in the world. All headlights need to have reflector/diffuser fittings to limit glare.
It's probably not as bad as the US but tbh with how cheap and ubiquotous Xenon replacement kits are and how little people give a fuck about setting their headlights right all the technical prowess in the world does not stop people from flashbanging oncoming traffic permanently because they can't be arsed to do some simple adjustments
kafka esq. is very good.
Found a pair of cheapo yellow tinted "night driving" glasses at a Walmart that my wife says actually does a little bit to reduce the glare while driving a car. Shit still blinds you but slightly less so the edge of the road is still mostly visible.
Not sure how effective they are outside of a car's windshield though.
Halogen gang
I can see the image clearly though? It's just a picture of a pickup truck. I don't know what y'all are going on about.
are you joking
Yeah. But you know I'm right tho
I've considered strategically placing a few strips of retro-reflective marine tape on my car just to start counter-blinding people who get too close with poorly aimed headlights.
My RETVRN take is we need to go back to the days where there were like 2 types of headlight and it was the whole housing and car manufacturers just had to figure out where to put in one of the two types of standard headlight
Reject modernity, return to tradition
Also ban cars for most people
That picture isn't even as bad as really is.
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I got a car that came with HID bulbs once. The car was low to the ground and the lights were shrouded and angled properly. They illuminated just the ground in front of you (like 50-100 feet) but came up to the right so things on the shoulder were visible. If you wanted to see everything in front of you that was far away on an unlit road you turned on the high-beams.
