Chrome’s century-long reign as that added bit of flash and glamour on new cars may be coming to an end. At least at one major auto maker, environmental and serious health concerns are outweighing its aesthetic appeal.
As much as I appreciate that added bit of flash and glamour of chrome, the health problems from dealing with that shit are nassssssty. I also feel like the younger generations of purchasers are looking less for chrome than my generation.
The US feds recently approved automatically adjusting headlamps that point down at the road, so hopefully the current nonsense will get better. Europe has had these for a while.
I’m in Europe and I still get blinded by modern SUVs with LED headlights constantly, having auto levelling headlights is nice and all but when the headlights themselves are at eye level for drivers in anything lower than a landrover it doesn’t change much
That's usually from misaligned headlights. Most often people swapping their headlight bulb and not adjusting them. You can't simply pop an HID bulb into the existing reflector housing without adjusting the headlight to compensate.
To quibble, you can't pop a HID into a reflector housing at all, usually. Halogen and drop in replacement LED have a different focal point than HID bulbs do.
This means if switching to HIDs you also need to replace the entire housing so it will focus the light correctly. No amount of adjustment will be correct if the beam isn't focused properly.
Also last time I checked most drop in LED bulbs aren't really intended for on-road use.
The headlights in my wife's old car were a real pain in the ass to replace, you either had to take practically the whole front bumper apart or grope around blind from the wheel well. I debated on getting her LED bulbs to hopefully never have to do that again, but I noticed that they were marked as something like "for off-road or motor sports use only"
And is it a problem? How many accidents are caused by glares? And maybe wear sunglasses if it’s sunny out…… take a little personal accountability when driving something dangerous if a fraction of a second glare might affect your ability to control a vehicle. Or move your head? Is it immobile? I usually shift my whole body if I’m parked and it’s consistent for a few seconds.