Car headlights don't have to be this blinding

41% of vehicle deaths are people not even in a car[1]. Yet car safety regulation is heavily focused on the 59% that are, nothing to regulate the ridiculous gender-affirming hood heights or aftermarket lifts that turn a survivable collision into a deadly collision.

[1] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/... Table 1, paragraph above

In the old days, reflectors and diffractors were rather crude and light distribution wasn't even at all. Regulation was setting a light intensity limit for the arc above the cutoff, assuming that the brightest spots would be just that, unintended brightness outliers. And when those would comply with the limit, the typical brightness hitting the eyes of oncoming traffic would be much lower.

Now reflector design is SO much better manufacturers striving to make their buyers happy can make lights pushing out photons exactly at that old regulatory limit over the entire cutoff area, and with a precise jump where the cuttoff stops. That's awesome for the person behind the wheel ("best lights I ever had!"), technically within the old limits and a terribly blinding for everybody else.

Styling works against us too. The ability to control the geometry of the light beam improves with the size of the optics relative to the emitter, but people want a car with sexy little lights.

I designed optics for lighting in a past life, though never for an automotive application. This issue is actually on my radar because of the blinding brightness of bike lights on the local bike paths.

Yeah, since they started to introduce super duper led headlights and 144 Hz animations on turn signals it's been more and more blinding to drive at night even across the ocean.

Since the late 90s I think, no matter what setting is used, everyone is blinded when by people in back of you and people coming towards you.

There are headlights that are illegal in the US but legal in Europe. Opposite world of what we normally have.

Boomers need cataract operations! A huge part of the car dependent population are elderly. These folks need ten times the light to see anything when compared to the seventeen year old learner driver (that doesn't go out at night, because their driving instructor clocked off hours ago).

My thoughts regarding this are somewhat anecdotal, however, I have heard a mystery boomer rant and rave about the headlights on his 'Italian car' (they make them in Eastern Europe and slap an Italian flag on). My observation from being in the offending car, shouting here because aforementioned elderly person had hearing issues too: I CAN SEE EVERYTHING FOR MILES!!!

Next: state of the roads

As a pesky cyclist, I used to prefer roads to cycle paths because of the smoother riding experience and improved speed. Not nowadays. In the UK, and dare I say it, the West, we have a problem with potholes. Cars also come with low profile tyres and they weigh 50%+ more than the cars we had before airbags and electronic safety systems came along. This is a combination that results in frequent flat tyres.

What was something that rarely happened is now practically inevitable. As a pesky cyclist, I should be the one getting punctures and fixing tyres, not the motorist. To compound the misery, few cars come with a genuine spare wheel, partly because of the weight problem with today's cars. My bicycle with kit and caboodle weighs far less than that spare wheel, so this nobbling of the spare wheel makes sense to me, but still, a normal car is two orders of magnitude heavier than what I roll with.

Back to the headlights, the elderly cohort with money for new cars, the boomers, don't live in cities, they have nice places in the countryside that require car dependency. With this, and the usage of B-roads, there is a genuine requirement for super-bright lights. Some brands, such as Audi, sell into the market for those that want innovative lights, where the primary innovation is yet more light.

As for built up areas, the lighting situation has also changed. Even as a cyclist, I am running what amounts to 'daytime running lights' because of the light pollution. I put my lights on well before sundown, whereas I never used to. The law is 'after sundown' and I used to be okay with that, but if it is four in the afternoon, mid-summer, I am putting the rear light on, at least.

It does not seem that I am alone in this, many cars have full lighting rather than what we used to call 'sidelights' on.

It is no longer pitch black inside a car, SAAB style. There is so much lighting going on, with a glowing iPad style screen at the minimum, ambient lighting strips on the deluxe cars. The headlights have to compete with this. So more brightness, please!

As I see it, we are caught in a cycle of degrading roads, heavier cars, brighter lights and an elderly cohort that actually needs massive amount of light to see anything. Sure there is clever tech so nobody has to dim their lights, and we have it on posh AUDIs and the like, but this is the spiral we are in, and the good old USA shows where it is going, what the end game looks like.

Into the mix we also have cyclists playing the stupid-lights game. Nowadays cycling is conspicuous leisure, not transport, and plenty of the carbon fibre crew spend hundreds on these stupid lights. Obviously I am somewhat 'shadow fleet' so I don't do that, I just have what heavy goods drivers 'want' from the well-behaved cyclist, which is standard issue, basic flashing lights, a complement of reflectors, high viz and manners.

I yearn for being able to see the Milky Way and the moon providing variable amounts of light throughout the night, with anything moving at night having modest levels of lighting. The situation as it stands means that, along with pedestrians, pets and other animals, I am as good as invisible at night on my bicycle.

Fortunately it looks like we will be losing cheap oil thanks to the tangerine person, unfortunately many millions will starve, but a lot of lights will be getting turned off soonly and the age of car dependency will be over.

Regardless I keep my auto dim off and just down. I don’t usually need the headlamps in high beam mode.

What would be useful is a taller median between both sides on a highway since often the blinding is because of a difference in the direction facing due to the grade of the highway. Facing people who are looking up a hill is awful.

It is true, that many drivers drive with the high beam on. My cabin is frequently illuminated by their lamps. My lamps never illuminate the cabin of a car I follow by comparison. This strange asymmetry does annoy me and I am certain I’m in the right but it’s usually resolvable by allowing them to pass.

Now most people are installing aftermarket LED kits. For the most part those are less blinding. I upgraded our old Impreza with some but chose the lowest lumen numbers I could find and they are also engineered to emit light in the same locations and angles that the halogen ones did. I did some tests with the garage door and standing in front of it where a car would be and it's non-blinding for oncoming traffic.

Barely perceptible flashing yet somehow gratingly and distractingly so.

- cresting a hill. Normal people can see the cone of light from the approaching car and often turn classic high beams down before it blinds fellow drivers. These do it only when it detects the actual light source, giving a 0.2-0.5 (about) flash of bright light.

- Wet and snowy ground. Even when they re-align themselves somewhat properly they can be blinding due to reflections which are not part of the angle-calculation algorithm.

- Failure to detect pedestrians and cyclists. Self-evident, but when I am not in a car I am impressed by how blinding it is.

Personally I consider them to decrease safety for everyone except the car with those headlights. I also feel like it is yet another badly designed automation which adds to the ability to slightly doze off and pay a little less attention to traffic.

The federal government took upon itself responsibility for things like this, because it's impractical at best for cities or states to regulate these. It's too bad that politics and bloat has made governance of this particular issue more or less impossible. Self regulation is obviously a joke, the standard suite of choices mean the default options for consumers are obnoxious as hell.

It'll have to become a big enough issue to warrant attention and action by the President, either this one or whoever comes next, or nothing will ever be done.

Maybe a convention of states that runs all current politicians, judges, and bureaucrats out of their jobs (in a sane, phased way) and establishes term limits and bans on careerism and bloat. Citizens can bypass the feds and kick their asses to the curb - imagine a total reset, in which we put forth competent, responsible people.

This problem will never be fixed. Gonna have to wear adaptive sunglasses at night for driving.

Truck headlights are already on a level with sedan drivers' eyes. There are far more F-150s on the road than there are Teslas.

And don't get me started on jackasses that put LED bulbs in old halogen housings.

Unless your car's design is particularly evil (a real possibility), changing a headlight bulb is usually easy to do yourself, and approved, incandescent headlight bulbs are easy to source most places.