Asleep at the Wheel in the Headlight Brightness Wars
theringer.com
The crusade against bright headlights has picked up speed in recent years, in large part due to a couple of Reddit nerds. Could they know what’s best for the auto industry better than the auto industry itself?
  • Eager Eagle@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    3 months ago

    Vehicle size is another issue that comes up regularly, since NHTSA regulations for headlights don’t include a standardized mounting height, even as cars have ballooned in size in recent years. This means a perfectly aligned headlight in a larger car can still wreak havoc on a smaller car: “Where the [midsize] Civic might not give you glare,” Trechter, the former lighting engineer, said, “that F-350 [truck], if you’re sitting in a [sport-size] Miata, is gonna absolutely wreck your eyeballs.”

    I drive a midsize sedan an I often have my rear-view and side mirrors lit by these trucks. It’s stupid they’re even allowed.

    Taller vehicles need two kinds of headlight: a higher intensity mounted low to illuminate the path, and a lower intensity mounted high to illuminate retro-reflective surfaces like traffic signs.

    • FireRetardant@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      3 months ago

      If a transport truck can have lights at a reasonable height and angle that don’t blind me, so can a standard pick up truck. Many transports actually have their lights mounted lower than pick up trucks and full size SUVs.

      • grue@lemmy.worldMEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        Transport trucks don’t “need” super-high ground clearance the way 4x4s do. In order to get a vehicle like this to have headlights at a reasonable height, they’d need to be mounted on the axle, LOL:

        (Or vehicles modified that extensively would have to stop being street legal; that would work too.)

        Edit: to be clear, this was never intended to be a defense of lifted 4x4s, only an example of just how incompatible their headlight heights can be and how difficult it could be to fix that.

        • halcyoncmdr@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          3 months ago

          Well then I guess a hot take… Those vehicles shouldn’t be street legal at night with those modifications unless you have some sort of alternative light system you can bolt on that brings the height down.

          • FireRetardant@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            2 months ago

            Plus theere are no fenders or mudflaps on that one. Which is illegal in some places as there is nothing to prevent rocks or other debris from being thrown around by the tires.

    • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      You don’t really need a second set of lights for signs. The light reflecting off the ground from your 9 trillion lumen headlights, and the efficiency of reflective signs are plenty.

      Most LED lights have a VERY sharp cutoff. Without the light reflecting off other things anything outside of the line of fire is almost pitch black.

      • Sconrad122@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        Reflective signs are specifically efficient at reflecting light back at their source and nowhere else (retroreflectivity). Obviously it’s not perfect, but the fact that that cone is so narrow is part of why it looks so bright (not dissimilar from the cutoff of the LED lights you are describing). Meaning that light reflected off the roadway before reaching the sign will generally be reflected back at the roadway. With how large some vehicle grills are being built nowadays, it may be possible for a low mounted headlight to be far enough away from the driver that retroreflective signs are no longer as effectively illuminated for the driver. Truckers probably already deal with this, I haven’t driven in one, but I suspect road signs are not as well illuminated for the driver as in other vehicles. We don’t rely solely on retroreflectivity to make our signs visible, so it’s not all or nothing, but it may be worth keeping some nominal illumination (could be like moderate flashlight levels of brightness) at driver level so we can continue to take advantage of retroreflective technology