Post-Corona cars are all much brighter. Its gotten so bad that I'm frequently left wondering if people are driving with high beams or just regular new-age lights. Got to wait to see if the person on the other side drops the lights to be sure. SUVs in particular are bad especially during acceleration which points the lights higher and on inclined road. I also regularly "switch" rear-view mirror to dim mode otherwise I'm literally 3-way blinded also from side mirrors. I didn't do any of these things regularly 5y ago. I'm still wondering if this is just automotive industry incompetence of making safe vehicles or an "incentive" to buy a SUV yourself so you don't get blinded all the time.
There are definitely people who don't care to switch between high and low beams when oncoming traffic appears. I was riding in the passenger seat with an ex-coworker the other night, and I noticed he just kept the high beams on the entire time. After a while I asked him, "Why don't you turn the headlights down when there's oncoming traffic?" He looked at me like I just asked the most ridiculous question and said "What do you mean? The high beams are brighter and make it easier for me to see." I reminded him that high beams blind other drivers and he basically said "Fuck them, I don't care and that's their problem if they don't like it." --that seems to be pretty much America's slogan right now. Fuck everyone else, I'm doing what I want.
Maybe mention that head on accidents sometimes happen because a driver target fixates on oncoming headlights. I can't imagine that high beams help with that.
I have a 2021 model vehicle and it has an “auto” setting for headlights, where it turns them on or off automatically depending on if it detects a car in front of them. It’s better latency then I have as a human remembering I have them on and turning them off so I use the feature but it’s definitely not instant and I’ve noticed it fail to detect a few times when there’s obstructions over the sensor like snow or rain.
I assume this wasn’t unique to my $30k model of car and is a common feature now, so might be the cause of the extra brightness
I drove a car with this feature and retroreflective road signs or markers would set it off at night. In the dark of night on a country road, approaching a tight curve and your lights go dim. I've been turning it off ever since.
I like the concept but it's one of those things I struggle to see working practically.
Ive a ford maverick (smallest hybrid truck i could get in the states), and was very skeptical of this feature. Im surprised about how correctly responsive it is. I drive something like 60/20/20 suburban/urban/rural. Im always ready to turn it off, for fear of imperfect performance or incorrect toggling, but i cant point to a single instance where it did the wrong thing. It’s a little bit amazing!
I think it’s decent in some use cases but it’s not a silver bullet and any lack of maintenance on the sensor equipment used to control it causes bad experiences.
As my vehicle ages I might consider turning it off as it gets worse performance but I also live with a few car people who constantly rail against the performance of the feature so I’m primed for this more than the median user
- brighter headlights are falsely perceived to be of better quality, or,
- they are but more prevalent because of COVID economic downturn necessitating upsells, or,
- 2019 is simply 5 years ago, or,
- undocumented neurological long-COVID effect is affecting engineers?
> SUVs in particular are bad especially during acceleration which points the lights higher
Aren't self-leveling headlights standard by now? I think in the EU it was mandatory for Xenon lights, but I don't know whether LED lights are considered differently. My dad's almost 20 yo Citroën had such headlights, even though, thanks to the funky suspension, the car never had dramatic changes in level.
> Aren't self-leveling headlights standard by now?
I don't know, but as a pedestrian & cyclist in the EU, not a day goes by where I don't get blinded by headlights. SUVs are by far the worst offenders, but it's not just SUVs. Most newer cars seem to have the same problem.
Heck, many newer bicycles have a headlight that's offensively bright and often seems aimed directly at my face. It's a sad state of affairs.
Self-leveling usually "one time", or "slowly", as in changes based on the weight on the rear axle. It doesn't work on the timescale of acceleration, braking, cornering, etc.
Actually, it did it "all the time". I found out about this while being stuck in traffic, and seeing the lights move slightly up and down while inching forward and stopping. It was visible because it moved in discrete steps, compared to the continuous movement of the car.
I hadn't known it was a thing before, and went looking in the owner's manual for confirmation.
They might be, but that does not help much, as roads are neither level nor pitched at a constant grade. The attribution of the effect to acceleration might (at least in some cases) be a misdiagnosis of a problem actually caused by a slight longitudinal convexity of the road.
Here in the UK I can't say that we have the same issue - BUT we have far fewer SUVs and lights are regulated far more. You'll fail your yearly MOT (car roadworthiness test) if you have lights that are too bright or misaligned, and I have seen people pulled over in London for having non-standard/too bright lights.
We have a wattage maximum for headlights too. I am under the impression that roadworthiness test and regulations are very different in the states - is that the case?
It certainly seems like headlights are far brighter in the UK right now, given that they're all LEDs.
Of course it could just be confirmation bias, as I'm getting older and I suppose my eyes gradually deteriorate. I do a lot of night time driving and oncoming traffic is definitely brighter, for me at least, than 20 years ago.
Then there's the fact that old headlights were one bulb, and the mirrored surface behind them was simpler.
Another problem is white light is harsh, and the old incandescent bulbs had a yellow/off white tinge which is easier (the redder the light, the less likely it is to destroy your night vision).
But when I'm driving at night and there's a line of cars with sleepy old halogen incandescent headlights in my view, those seem about the same to me as they always did.
Some are brighter, some are dimmer -- sometimes due to differences of voltages or aging, or sometimes due to differences in aiming or beam shape -- but they still appear to average about the same as ~all headlights did 20 years ago.
Sometimes, they're uncomfortable. They very seldom hurt. I can almost always still see where I'm going without any particular trouble unless they're particularly, acutely bright for whatever reason. Just as before, when my eyes were younger.
And unilaterally, they're easier to ignore than when modern bright-white (what are they, 5000k?) LEDs are shining my way. Those are uncomfortable more often than not. They're very often painful. I often can't see where I'm going when they're particularly bad.
Same eyes. Same road. Same weather. Same night. Different headlights, different results.
Yes. The US has excellent national standards (low beams can be 15,000 to 20,000 candela per side), however nearly everything is administered by the states, and only 14 of 50 states have annual safety inspections. It used to be most states, but it was hijacked and used as a racket to steal from customers. Accessory LED lighting (off road) is illegal, but only required to be covered on road in California and Pennsylvania. Additionally, the US also bumper height restrictions that are mostly ignored (except California). Many lifted SUVs and trucks are illegal. That means if your car is t-boned by a lifted SUV you could be struck in the head by the bumper.
Thanks for detailed explanation. I wasn’t able to believe in YouTube videos, that many extremely tuned cars were legal in US. In Germany they would be immediately towed away as not roadworthy. The lifted trucks leave me always speechless. Why!?..
I live in a rural area of Scotland and I don't really have a problem with headlights - 99.9% of drivers dip their full beams when they are aware of you. Now if we could only get people to indicate correctly on roundabouts.... - that's a far bigger peeve of mine than headlights!
I was curious about this too so had a look. The brightness is regulated by The Road Vehicle Lighting Regulations 1989 and does specify a minimum wattage in some cases but not for modern cars (“A motor vehicle with four or more wheels first used on or after 1st April 1986: no requirement”). As far as I can tell there are no legal maximums.
While this check exists on paper it is not enforced in any meaningful way and hasn't caught up to modern headlights which to me are simply too bright even when original from the factory.
If I look directly at any headlight they burn into my vision. It makes driving difficult.
Really? I think we have exactly the same problem in the UK. Granted, my eyes are more susceptible post laser surgery, but headlights are definitely getting brighter and higher as the years go by.
Its not your eyes getting old, it's just that are just more inconsiderate assholes out there now, enabled by newer car models that have a uncomfortably bright high-beams with the worst color temperature for night vision (for both the drivers and their victims).
I wonder if Teslas should be recalled too: all of them are seem too bright, particularly Model Ys.
I have often wondered if my eyes have become more sensitive to car headlights since covid, but it seems I'm not alone in this feeling. I frequently wear glasses with a blue light protective coating while driving on busy roads at night. Interestingly, I find that I don’t need them when the road is empty or when it’s a bright night.
The default 'height' of the Tesla Model Y headlights make it appear to be bright lights by default. I live in the DC metro area, and buses (who are typically folks that drive a lot) would constantly flash me to let me know they thought my brights were on.
You can go into the car's settings and lower the headlights, but because of where it is by default, it presents a dangerous situation for other cars. How many non-tech folks would know to even search for this option?
I had to do the same with my 3 when I got it years back. Now people also get confused when I have my fog lights on (but that’s rare given how annoying difficult it is to find the setting on a touchscreen while driving). Actually calibrating the lights angle should be done at the factory (or prior to delivery), but mine were definitely too high.
But I think in general (and with other cars too), the problem isn’t the brightness of lights, but their angle. Bit even with my lights lowered, if I’m at a stop light that is on a slight hill, that still can cause the angle of my lights to appear to someone on the other side as too bright.
It's bad with cars but even worse with bikes that have flashing or even strobing lights. Busy cycle lanes in London can be horrible on dark winter evenings with all the LED lights that can be incredibly bright and are very often not installed/adjusted/aimed correctly.
I appreciate that cyclists want to make sure they're seen by car drivers, but beaming ultra-bright flashing lights straight into the eyes of oncoming cyclists on a cycle lane surely creates a hazard that outweighs any benefits?!
Blinking lights makes the bicycle driver more visible. When sharing the dark road with cars, this compensates slightly against not being inside a steel cocoon with airbags.
If cities actually invested in safe infrastructure the need for such lights would go away.
Blinking lights stand out more but also makes it near impossible to accurately judge speed and direction, especially with multiple cyclists on the road. That's why it's illegal to use blinking bike lights* here in the Netherlands.
*: technically, you're allowed to use blinking bike lights during the day, but what's the point
> Blinking lights makes the bicycle driver more visible.
[citation needed]. They sure are annoying to look at, but I doubt about the improved visibility. Drivers are used to tracking positions and velocities of steady light sources - like those from cars, traffic lights, barriers, reflected lights, etc. Blinking lights are harder to track and are unusual; they seemingly should draw attention, but other than bicycles, they tend to show up on stuff like ads, Christmas lights, broken light fixtures, etc. - that is, things safe to ignore.
This is related to inattentional blindness, where car drives dont notice motorbikes since drivers are used to looking for two lights - not one: https://motolight.com/inattentional-blindness/
In the same manner, a single bicycle light might not register as a vehicle in the minds of car drivers. By blinking the light the short-circuit is broken - or so the theory goes.
Can confirm this anecdotally. When I use my bike light in blinking mode, drivers are more careful around me every time. When I use the non-blinking mode, there have been times when drivers have clearly ignored my presence and I’ve had to wave my hand in front of the light to simulate blinking to get their attention.
I actually agree, they work great for drawing attention. The problem is, they're so distracting that they cause other problems. As a cyclist myself, I consider them a lot more selfish than bringing a steel cocoon with airbags with you.
Recently I met one of these idiots on a dark cycle path and I veered away from them instinctively (partly because I could see they were present but couldn't judge where they were) and then overcompensated and swerved behind them - very nearly hitting their child on a kid's bike behind! I hadn't seen their child because I was blinded by the adult's light. They probably thought they were keeping their child safe but they were really putting them in danger.
Blinking / flashing bike lights were kind of OK when they were in the 10-20 lumen range. But nowadays even the cheap ones are on the order of several hundred lumens, which is a completely different game. It is possible to buy a 1000 lumen light for around 50 EUR (Magicshine), now consider that a single car headlight is around 1500 lumens... These lights have no cutoff beam.
The problem is not even cars though, but other cyclists. Even with a cutoff beam it is easy to blind oncoming traffic if the light is not setup correctly. Flashing, it should be illegal.
Stroboscopes are creating hazardous situations. Everyone will start escalating their visibility until you can't see shit. Bikers need to wear reflective clothing, especially in London. I fucking hate those dudes all black on a black bicycle at night strobing their way through traffic.
There is quite a lot of discussion about this on the London cycling subreddit.
The consensus amongst the cyclists there generally is that flashing front lights are a bad idea. The can be confusing and disorienting and are pretty unpleasant for other oncoming cyclists and pedestrians, not just other car drivers.
actually for drawing attention it is better to have lights mounted at the ankle as the pedaling movement attract attention, makes the cyclist recognizable, all the while without blinking annoyingly.
>Blinking lights makes the bicycle driver more visible.
Blinking lights are not legal according to road code in Germany and I assume many other EU countries nor do they necessary improve your safety.
Yes, strobing lights do draw more attention at a glance (which is why they are reserved for emergency vehicles and signaling an emergency) making you think you'd be safer, but actually not since it makes it very difficult for the human eye to determine the distance to/from that object in motion on the road if it's always blinking, making the use of only strobing lights on the road unsafe and therefore banned for non emergency purposes.
That's why your front and tail lights must be in a constant state. It's for your own safety too, hence why emergency vehicles don't strobe their running lights/brake lights but have additional strobes for that.
I agree with the underlying logic here. However, when street maintenance trucks are driving around normally with their extremely bright orange strobes enabled (mind you, not parked in the street doing repairs, I'd totally understand that! Oftentimes they are just driving normally with the strobes on) I fail to see the logic applied consistently. In my opinion a good compromise for cyclists would be to allow strobing rear lights that only have power cycle of at least 90% and power periods of at least 2500ms, meaning they are on for 2500ms and then off for ~280ms, creating a strobing effect that is not as overpowering as normal strobing rear lights, which I'd agree are overbearing in commute traffic.
>when street maintenance trucks are driving around normally with their extremely bright orange strobes enabled
Street maintenance trucks and all such vehicles, at least in Europe, don't strobe their running lights which are constant-ON as on all road vehicles and the strobes are additional warning lights. So they get the best of both worlds.
But for cycling, blinking lights are stupid because you're strobing your only running light you need to see and be seen.
Same thing for bicycles btw. Strobing rear lights are allowed as long as they are on your person (i.e. clothing/helmet or backpack), only on the bike itself they are not permitted.
Fixed mixed with flashing or pulsing is fine. It's the strobing lights that do 5 super-short staccato flashes and then nothing for a moment that are the bad ones.
Blinking lights are also banned in the Netherlands, which does a lot better in the statistics. Even then, the statistics are kind of useless; here bike deaths are mostly caused by old people on (electric) bikes falling over or getting into minor accidents, nothing to do with lights. The statistics are skewed in ways that cannot be compensated for easily, as on average UK cyclists are younger than Dutch cyclists and therefore less likely to die or get severely hurt in a traffic incident.
Great Britain has half the bike usage of Germany. Germany has 36 million bikers (43% of 84 million), Great Brittain about 12 million (19% of 68 million), so the stats line up more than you'd think at a first glance. The difference between Germany and Great Brittain becomes laugably obvious when you look at the statistics for how many people use bikes as a primary transport method (6% GB vs 21% DE).
That said, biking outside of large cities in Germany is kind of terrible, so I'm not at all surprised about how deadly cycling in Germany, though that may just be my spoilt Dutch take on things.
Such statistics without the full context are meaningless. How many people per capita cycle in the UK vs DE.
It's expected that if a lot more people cycle, you're gonna have more cycling deaths than in countries where fewer people cycle.
If nobody would cycle you'd have zero cycling deaths, hooray problem solved, you successfully gamed the metrics, if wining arbitrary metrics is the goal.
I mean, the numbers are the numbers. Sounds like the point you wanted to make, accidentally, is that cycling has a linear growth rate of death if more of the population cycles.
Random numbers alone mean nothing if they're meaningless and out of context. More people are killed every year by cows than by sharks. Does that make cows more dangerous than sharks or just that people are more likely to be around cows more often than around sharks?
If Germany has a higher population than UK, and also a higher percentage of people of that population cycle, then yeah you're gonna have more dead cyclists. D'uh!
Show me deaths per capita and cycling rates per capita, then we can talk about drawing a conclusion.
I'd rather have blinking lights than what seems to be a disturbingly common fashion here in Zürich — no lights at all, drivers with dark clothing, AND running red lights.
Can't really blame them for running red lights... if I were cycling at night with no lights and wearing dark clothes I would also be in a hurry to get home to safety!
On my bike lights, the "strobe" mode doesn't actually turn the lights on and off. It turns them on steadily at moderate brightness, with periodic very brief flashes of higher intensity. That seems to me like a really good compromise.
Yes, this is a huge problem as well. The lights are so bright, randomly mounted, and as you say, the user can just strobe them if they like. Imagine if car lights were as unregulated.
They are effectively unregulated. Most drivers have no clue how to adjust them, and the "modders" replace them randomly with whatever they find is the brightest/coolest. Yeah, you _could_ fine them and claim that the cars are unroadworthy until fixed, but if a rule is not enforced, is it a rule? So, yeah, effectively unregulated, too.
I bicycle a lot and I tell other cyclist that they need to adjust their lights all the time. At least they seem to take feedback. Somehow, drivers think that they, in their multi-ton metal boxes are a band apart, and tend to take zero criticism from anyone outside of their metal boxes.
No, one is actually unregulated, and the other is imperfectly regulated.
> Somehow, drivers think that they, in their multi-ton metal boxes are a band apart, and tend to take zero criticism from anyone outside of their metal boxes.
I can't imagine, with such a homogenising, negative attitude towards a group comprising millions of people, why they might not listen to you.
strobing bike lights are also a horrific health/pain hazard for people who get migraines or have light-triggerable epilepsy. I really wish they'd be banned from sale :(
Yes, American bike lights are totally out of control. They almost all have circular flashlight beams, totally inappropriate for use on the road. If you try to show someone a proper cutoff optic light they will say it's dim because it doesn't blind them with useless near field light.
The only ones I've been able to find are imports from Europe like B+M or Supernova, and a few expensive domestic ones like Outbound Lighting. If you walk into almost any bike shop in America they will have only circular optics that blind everyone.
It's really hard to find non-blinding lights for bikes here in the States.
The Germans seem to have a standard (with TUV certification) for it, as of course they do. But we don't get much of that kit here.
(And because search engines are absolutely ruined: Searching for less, like "dim bike light" or "non-blinding" or whatever always winds up with finding more, instead.
"Oh, you're searching for a nice pleasant light that just illuminates the path in front of you at a warm color temperature without blinding anyone? Let me show you the MEGAFUCKER 9000! Powered by 48VDC and over 9000K, this light is guaranteed appear brighter than the sun and to ABSOLUTELY FUCK anyone within a kilometer! /r/fuckcars approved! You always knew you were an asshole, and with the MEGAFUCKER 9000 everyone else will know it too!"
Every single time.
(It's the same with anything else. Want a small, diminutive spatula so a small egg pan can actually be used for cooking instead of wall art? The more specific the search terms are, the bigger the fucking spatulas in the search results become.
Or even industrial or craft materials. Want rigid, open-cell, large-pore foam that doesn't sponge up water for a project? Good luck. Unless you already know exactly what product you need down to the SKU (which one can only glean via telepathy), the search results will consist entirely of opposite-world SUPER-SOFT EXTRA ABSORBENT foam.)
LLMs are absolutely terrible at finding specific, detailed facts that have any consistent element of truth to them, and the well from which they draw their knowledge was deliberately poisoned from the beginning.
When I grew up we had a heap of rules for bicycle lighting drilled into us (ok not that badly but I remember them for the most part), one of them was the angle of your headlight should be at xyz to not blind other traffic. And that was in the time of bulb lights and dynamos so the lights would've been a lot more gentle anyway. Since then they've slacked the rules by a lot due to the sheer amount of decrepit and new/modern bikes on the road that didn't conform, so now instead of a red rear light and a white section on your rear fender, a shitty 1 euro LED light strapped to the back of your backpack or package carrier is apparently enough. And LED front lights are a thing, often aimed straight ahead for visibility / being able to see further than three meters ahead of you.
I mean I'm guilty myself, got myself a new bike a few years back that has a headlight built into the frame etc.
German StVZO rules are not helping when the users are not directing the beam towards the road but horizontally. The current bicycles lights are very strong and I am sometimes nearly blinded from them in day light!
> I have yet to see a single bike light that actually lets you direct the light just to the road
My 1975 vintage Peugeot bike already has a front light with a lens that directs the beam downwards, can be adjusted to point even further downwards with a screw, and even has a small shield on top of the lens to stop the beam from travelling upwards.
It works perfectly with the original dynamo and a cheap LED light bulb from Amazon.
> What the hell, are your lights welded/glued in place to the bike frame or what?
You have misunderstood. Obviously I can angle the light, but it still has a circular beam pattern like a torch. Dipped car headlights are not like that. They have a sharp cut-off at the horizon so you can light the road brightly without blinding oncoming traffic. Very few bike lights have a beam pattern like that.
The comment mentions "affordable lights" so I think they're talking about lights like [1] that are mounted on the handlebar and where you can only adjust the vertical angle.
Speaking for my German bubble, there are roughly two types of bike riders: those who invest 1k+ on their gear and those that buy a flea market bike for 100€ and then fit the cheapest light they can find (that is, the ones I mention). Most students I know fall in the second category, making those lights quite popular.
>I think they're talking about lights like [1] that are mounted on the handlebar and where you can only adjust the vertical angle
It can't be that what he meant, since if you can adjust the vertical angle, you can stop blinding people.
>Most students I know fall in the second category, making those lights quite popular.
I know. I nearly ran over one who had no good lights, dark hoodie with no reflective gear, when I was reversing on a dark street, at night. Nearly shat myself after the close call.
I know students are poor, but God damn man, your life is worth more than a couple of Euros you're saving by running a crappy light who's battery died 2 years ago. Skip on a pizza/few beers in town one time and get a proper light.
You don't need to spend thousands of euros on gear to have a safe and visible cycling experience.
People are just stupid and lazy about their own safety, that's all. You only realize it when you switch from a cyclist to a driver, how dangerous these cyclists with no good lights are at night.
> the cheapest light they can find (that is, the ones I mention
It's not exactly cheap (and probably can be found cheaper elsewhere), but then it's superbright 2400 lumen with 2 sets of leds (headlights and meeting/dipped lights) and a powerbank. You can switch with the buttons. I own a slightly different version (2200 lumen, same casing) and it's great.
I don't know about Germany, but here in Belgium front hub dynamos are very common. They're never discharged and always work, so I don't see a reason not to use that.
In Germany, hub dynamos are far from the norm, they're much more expensive than the usual wheel-side dynamos and as (as usual) the German market is much more price sensitive it's rare to see hub dynamos.
The problem with wheel-side dynamos is that they barely work when it's raining (which is often correlated with the moments you actually need light) and they add so much drag (and noise).
Hub dynamos are indeed more expensive (around 50€ as a starting price) but since bikes are the primary means of transportation for many people, I think they usually see this as an acceptable price for the convenience it brings (I know I do).
Also, quite a few bikes here are leased (for around 20€/month, including all maintenance) and those always have a hub dynamo I think.
There are many good LED light bulbs for vintage bikes on Amazon which can be directly used with a dynamo. I have been a happy user for years now. Replacing / recharging bike light batteries is a life overhead I don't need.
Would that be the country that has the highest number of cyclist deaths in the EU, twice as many as the next highest country, four times as many as in the UK which has 3/4 the population?
Here's a hint: Germany is extremely car-centric and makes regulations that cater to drivers, not road safety.
Germans cycle more than 4 times as much per capita than Brits.
Absolute numbers are meaningless, you have to look at deaths per km.
Germanies bike infrastructure is not great and there is lots to criticize, but that's true for most places in Europe.
Here's a paper that attempts to do it right: Castro, A., S. Kahlmeier and T. Gotschi (2018), “Exposure-adjusted Road Fatality Rates for Cycling and Walking in European Countries”, Discussion Paper, International Transport Forum, Paris.
Germany does rather well. Though the paper is 6 years old (and based on numbers even older) and the number of bike accidents in Germany have gone up since then.
This data is from 15 to 20 years ago. I think the usage of bike has probably increased in the UK in the meantime. That may not change your point, but this 4 times figure is probably inacurate now.
You failed to establish a causal connection between regulating bike lights and whatever you are on about. Yes Germany is mostly car-centric (I'm not German and don't live there) and the UK is car-centric too, but I'm mostly a biker and get blinded by bike lights all the time. StVZO lights help with that.
This irritates me as well. Every vehicle on the road is supposed to have solid white front light and solid red back light, no reason why bicycles should be different. Strobing bright white light directed at the eye sight level is just aggressive and extremely selfish. The manuals usually state that in blinking or strobing mode the lights work longer on one battery charge.
The reason they're so bright and annoying is that you, dear motoring public, love complaining we're "not visible enough" in the comments of newspaper articles about people killed while riding a bicycle. Or in letters to the editor. Or to your legislators. Or at hearings about road infrastructure. Or hearings about road safety legislation. Or after you've plowed into one of us.
If you all would like to work on the whole "not killing large numbers of vulnerable road users", we can certainly look into the whole "make our bike lights not blink."
My state requires, at night:
* a rear light visible more than 500 feet
* a rear reflector
* pedal reflectors or ankle reflectors (both ankles)
* front reflector (+500 ft)
* front light (+500 ft)
* wheel reflectors
Our state used to only require a rear light, but a state legislator refused to let a road safety bill pass unless he got put his paws all over it and increase equipment requirements for cyclists to "balance" out requiring drivers must give cyclists a minimum of three feet passing distance.
And yes, sometimes it is necessary to use a blinking mode to assure that we won't run out of battery (and thus have NO light) before we get home. On a long ride, for example, or in wintertime when lithium ion battery capacity plummets.
Where this kind of road rage attitude comes from, "we against you", "you get what you are asking for"? I commute within city both with car and on a bicycle. When there is need to use bicycle lights I simply switch them on in constant light mode. During darker season of the year I have another constant light attachable to clothes or saddlebags as a backup. What is the even the problem here?
Yes, agreed. Not the only us-vs-them-cyclist in this comment thread either, which is a shame. I also cycle and drive, and this is clearly something we cyclists need to fix for us drivers. The tribalism is vomit-inducing.
Bike LED lights tend to strobe when pushing the bike manually, which is very annoying. This is due to technical reasons with the dynamo and LED rather that programmed behavior afaik. But do LED bike lights that attempt to fix this issue (either be off or dim rather that flicker at low speed) exist? It's not a feature typically listed on their product descriptions...
There are plenty battery-based lights that simply have multiple operating modes, some of them being strobe. This is by far the majority of the issue. I haven't seen someone using a dynamo for more than a decade.
People choose the strobe, presumably because they feel more visible and therefore safer. I understand it, but it's annoying as hell.
I'm talking about a hub dynamo in a bike in Europe. This is not uncommon at all.
Maybe these are not common in other locales but I don't understand why that seems to have offended some :/ I'm talking about rapidly flashing lights in narrow streets in cities from people pushing their bikes (and me having such bike too, and trying to remember to switch of the light when pushing bike manually to not annoy others)
I had a driver yell at me that they only look for bicycles that have strobing lights, not bikes like mine that used a steady light. I don't know how common that specific mentality is, though.
Another option, if the headlights are at eye level, is to move the rear-view mirror so that you see the passenger seat headrest. That makes it the perfect angle to make their headlights reflect right back at them.
We don't need automatic adjustment. The lights never needed to be this bright. Ultra-bright lights are not solving a real problem. People think brighter == better, but it really doesn't help whatsoever. It's an emotional salve.
If there was one invention that made its way into every car - I wish it would be some kind of oncoming active light dimming / compensation system. Maybe in the glass, or glasses / goggles a driver wears.
What I do now on the highways is point my side mirrors all the way out and flip the rearview mirror. I already have deeply tinted windows.
Of course this doesn't help with oncoming traffic.
Some cars have matrix LED headlights, where the car can turn off the LEDs pointing at oncoming cars, as well as turn the lights when driving around corners.
Here [1] is the VW ID.3. It's subtle, but notice how the area around the other cars is much darker. In real life it's kind of amazing to watch, as you see the LEDs follow the other cars on the road and "erase" them from the light.
Surely the inhabitants inside the houses being flashed on, drivers in front of this car, and drivers from the opposite direction just finishing the curve are ecstatic about this "brilliant technology". Nothing excites people more than being flashed on with blinding white light especially in bad weather during the night.
Maybe you misunderstood. What you say is already true for the type of regular high beams that all cars have. What matrix LEDs do is "blot out" areas they should not shine. That is an improvement over high beams, not worse.
I believe the ID.3 does blot out drivers in the opposite direction even in a curve.
> High beams are currently turned on, and Adaptive Headlights is ready to turn off the high beams if light is detected in front of Model 3.
The description makes it sound like the Tesla implementation of "Adaptive headlights" is actually just "automatic high beams". The most common extra feature of adaptive headlights is corner-adaptive, the ability to pivot into the direction of travel. For the past years adaptive headlights could even mean "smart headlights" with selective dimming. Does Tesla include these features as well?
Anecdotally I can say that what stands out with (some?) Tesla headlights is that they keep the high beams shining for way too long and even the low beams seem to be overly bright. I can't say if this is down to the driver manually controlling the high beams or the general calibration of the incoming light sensor and the auto leveling of the headlight.
> ... I wish it would be some kind of oncoming active light dimming / compensation system.
I think fancy Mercedes models have very advanced stuff like that. IIRC it's even crazier: in addition to compensate in the mirrors/rear-view mirror, they can also detect where another car or pedestrian is and adapt, constantly, precisely how their own beams are projected as to not blind anyone.
EDIT: other manufacturer do it too, it is called "Matrix headlights".
I find these a bit annoying, as I think the side effect is that they are basically main beam all the time otherwise, and only dim selectively.
Which is great and all, but means things like they are projecting FRICKIN' LASERS into people's homes (especially when turning) or if you are a pedestrian that it doesn't detect properly (e.g. at some distance down a cluttered urban road etc) you get someone driving at you with really very uncomfortably bright lights shining in your face (I get this a lot when running at night - perhaps the models detect a pedestrian walking but not jogging?).
I am sure it works great in controlled conditions (and I have seen YouTube videos out on the clear open road where it detects oncoming vehicles nicely) but it feels pretty ineffective and anti-social in an urban/suburban environment, at least to me.
I agree. I've got a Porsche Panamera and the headlights are too bright. At times people flash their headlights at me, thinking I've got my high-beams on: I then cannot do much else then quickly flash back the real high-beams to mean "sorry mate, no, these were the regular beams, THAT is the high-beams so stop flashing at me".
Now even the regular beams they sure do work fine (the car even does fancy stuff as lighting the interior of a turn when you take a sharp turn at night) but honestly I find many cars, including mine, have headlights to bright.
Worse: on these new cars with super fancy headlights if I'm not mistaken you cannot even configure where they aim at anymore. It's all automated. It used to be the case on older cars where it was easy to configure and you could aim the regular beam moderately low as to be sure to not annoy anyone.
I don't bother flashing at people anymore because I figured out they may simply have a car where the regular beams are simply too bright too.
Just in case - have you tried directing the beams down a bit? Not sure what the situation is on that model but there is a dial to the right of my wheel (right hand drive) which controls for this. Maybe worth investigating if you have something similar
I think one of the points of these "smart" systems is to do the aiming themselves and adjust to the conditions, including the vehicle's load.
My dad's 20yo Citroën had self-leveling lights, which weren't user adjustable (at least not in an obvious way). However, even though the lights were relatively bright (Xenon), nobody ever "complained" about them, they somehow always found a way to not blind oncoming cars while lighting the road very well.
They were fixed pattern, with the high beam on a manual switch, though, so they never tried to guess whether there was someone in the oncoming lane.
> Due to a software data set error, the affected vehicles were programmed from the factory after the Economic Commission for Europe (ECE) specs, whereas U.S.-spec vehicles need to conform to the requirements of the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS).
Presumably, if there were a way for the headlights to comply with both US and EU regulations, they'd just have them be that way everywhere, rather than having to deal with multiple configurations at all. So are the US and EU both saying that each other's way is wrong and too dangerous?
There are some notable value judgements that are different between US and EU regulations.
I remember reading that the US car safety rules generally assume that the people in the car do not follow the rules, whereas EU regulations assume they follow the law and use seatbelts.
US crash safety tests don’t care about the damage the car does to pedestrians, but EU regulations do factor that in.
> US car safety rules generally assume that the people in the car do not follow the rules
> US crash safety tests don’t care about the damage the car does to pedestrians
As a EU citizen living in the US, this makes perfect sense.
The quality of driving here is far lower, I often see vehicles without plates or temp tags and it's not unusual to hear about uninsured drivers hitting people.
It's ironic that such a car centric country naturally ends up with terrible drivers because of the low barrier to entry.
Pacific Northwest also does not enforce any vehicle identification or registration laws. No license plates, different license plates, only one license plates, fake plates, expired car tax sticker, none of it is enforced.
IMHO, there’s diminishing returns in regulations that try to protect someone who actively doesn’t want to protect themselves. It just adds extra cost (R&D, complexity of design/manufacturing, different parts for different jurisdictions, different parts SKUs to stock, etc).
The upside? It probably saves the lives of some people so reckless they shouldn’t be driving.
Pedestrians are uncommon in most of the US, and where they are common people are supposed to be driving slow anyway. If somebody is flaunting the speed limit and hits a pedestrian and sends them flying fifty feet down the road, the value of their car being ostensibly built for pedestrian safety is very dubious.
Fewer people will walk when infrastructure prioritizes drivers and makes it uncomfortable and unsafe to walk. This isn’t the only option.
Cars being built for pedestrian safety is one piece of that picture. As you note, impact safety falls into this category and provides limited benefits for collisions at speed. There’s a lot more to that story though, as we can see in societies that value pedestrian lives. Automatic braking and avoidance, driver attention monitoring, and speed limiters are all options. Add in safe infrastructure, safety enforcement, etc.
There’s a broad range of tools available to reduce pedestrian deaths. None are perfect, none apply universally, but we should consider all of them.
For various reasons, Americans broadly opted to live in suburbs with car-centric lifestyles instead of dense urban areas where walking is viable. Where I live now I'm about 100x more likely to encounter a deer than a pedestrian. This is the context needed to understand why Americans generally aren't interested in prioritizing pedestrian safety. Making pedestrians safer so people can give up their cars is just a bizarre proposal to most Americans. The American anti-car niche is very small, comprising mostly of terminally online people with anxiety problems.
For what it's worth, I did personally live in a city and had a pedestrian lifestyle for about 15 years. I never felt particularly imperiled; the national statistic for pedestrian deaths may seem spooky but some very basic precautions, like making a habit of looking both ways even when you have the right of way, eliminates almost all of the risk.
Pedestrian safety is one of the reasons it will be hard to ever sell the Cybertruck in Europe without significant modification. People who have imported them themselves have had to fit rubber strips on all the sharp edges, and I'd imagine that if they were to sell them locally the rules would be even more strict. The shape is inherently dangerous to pedestrians, particularly children.
>> whereas EU regulations assume they follow the law
That isn't generally true as the EU favors driver assist technologies such as automatic emergency braking, lane departure warning, and speed limiter features.
That is the point, zero restrictions on car size/weight/height and zero standards on driving licenses mean whoever can afford the more dangerous vehicle deserves more safety.
Bear in mind that matrix lights are the norm in EU on high end cars while in US they are prohibited. I bet that explains the brightness: you can have overly bright lights if they are matrix while obviously that would be detrimental in regular headlights.
It's kind of meh news at this point. There's a ton of blinding vehicles on the road in the States, and it is getting worse at an accelerated rate, and even if fancy matrix-ey headlights became the norm it will take a Very Long Time for the old stuff to get cycled out.
Up next, let me tell you about that time that we held onto analog AMPS cell phones for years longer than any developed country that I know if, and how when we did finally begin to transition to something digital we made sure that we failed to standardize on any one format and made all of them as incompatible with things like European GSM as we could.
Since the brightness seems to be the issue, the only way I his makes sense to me is:
The US limits the brightness to X, the EU limits the brightness to Y, and Y > X.
Porsche could just make every car globally use X, but they’re a luxury brand so they probably try to use Y where they can, even if it is a bit of work to differentiate between markets.
It's a significant difference. I doubt any manufacturer would want to limit their European vehicles to the American maximum:
> European lighting standards (UNECE) allow over two times the light output from high beam headlight systems as compared to the U.S. (Broertjes, 2018). U.S. compliant systems allow a vehicle maximum of 150,000 candela while European compliant systems allow a vehicle maximum of 430,000 candela (Official Journal of the European Union, 2018). This provides for gains in sight distance, but also increases the potential for glare to affect oncoming and preceding traffic when high beams are not dimmed.
And
> 3. European specification systems consistently provided more roadway lighting when an oncoming vehicle was approaching, or a preceding vehicle was close.
> a. Based on static target illumination data, the increase in roadway lighting could be as much as 86 percent (comparison of average European specification high beam to U.S. specification low
beam).
> Do people in the EU consistently behave politely and turn them off when appropriate?
In the EU countries I usually drive in, yes they do. If they don't, you turn your own high beams on until their turn theirs off and generally they do it within a second or so, they had probably just forgot them.
One point here: nowadays most new cars have auto high-beam which turns off almost immediately when it senses light coming from the opposite direction. Some higher-end models have matrix led lights which allows them to have the high-beam on even when there's oncoming traffic and they turn off just some parts of the beam to avoid blinding the opposite driver.
The study is comparing "premium" headlights, which in the USA auto-lower for oncoming traffic, and in Europe auto-shade just that vehicle but leave the rest of the road fully illuminated.
I don't have enough driving experience between the two countries to compare driver behaviour.
I'm not sure why you'd bother trying to converse with me if you thought I was asking about people turning off low beams at night.
Plenty of people turn on their high beams and don't bother to manage them. I guess automatic dimming systems should help with that. Looking a bit, they don't necessarily default to on in US vehicles, which is likely to minimize the benefit.
The problem is, lately you can't tell if they are normal or high beams. Something about the cooler color and sharper quality of the LED lights maybe? Often as I curse an oncoming driver for not dipping their beams I notice in my rearview they turn them on after they pass me. So they were low beams to begin with.
I remember when driving in the EU (France) that most cars allow you to adjust the angle of the beams, so you may have more light but it's often pointed down.
Unsure if that was just the few vehicles I drove or if it's EU-wide.
The adjustment you’re mentioning is most likely the knob for angle adjustment which are used if driving with a heavy load in the back. Some cars has suspension which levels the car automatically, for those the adjustment isn’t necessary.
Angle adjustment is useful even when not carrying a load. Angling the beams down onto the road at dawn and dusk provides good be-seen visibility without creating glare for other drivers.
Cars without manual angle adjustment have lost that courtesy gesture and just drive around glaring all the time.
Brightness of two headlights is not a single floating point number.
There are regulations governing the spread/angle, the minimum brightness, the maximum brightness, how much an object at X distance is illuminated, whether the angle of the beams is too bright in the vision of oncoming drivers, etc.
and most manufacturers are guilty of dieselgate style skirting of regulations while upping the ante in the war to create the brightest most blinding headlight
This recall is for the high-beams. And yes, the EU allows brighter high-beams than the US.
This seems to be the extent of the recall. But there are other differences between the EU and US. For example, on what the headlights are illuminating. US headlights shine more light off to the right of the vehicle than EU and I think it is due to the assumption that roadside signs are more often lit via headlights/refection in the US vs sign-mounted lighting in the EU.
I think most people agree that EU regulations allow for significantly better headlights than US regulations allow. But those better headlights must be paired with an expensive adaptive system or they become terribly dangerous. If you compare "cheap car" headlights in the US vs EU they are probably very similar in performance.
Porsche is also based in the EU so starting with a design that meets EU specs and then adjusting export models as needed is probably their procedure anyway
But also, since it's a software-addressable issue, and because this process is likely such a headache, I wonder if in a couple of years they'll have a version that picks its headlight configuration based on your location. You'll drive over a border at night and do a slight double-take as your lights change their beam width or something.
Presumably, if there were a way for the headlights to comply with both US and EU regulations, they'd just have them be that way everywhere...
Unless someone in the marketing department has determined that headlight brightness is a selling point for 0.001% of customers, in which case they'd configure them to the maximum allowed in the region.
>So are the US and EU both saying that each other's way is wrong and too dangerous?
Real life disagreements on minor technicalities between competing bureaucracies are not zero sum or conducted in breathless hand wringing internet rhetoric. It's more like a disagreement on a FOSS mailing list.
I believe EU allows directionally controllable projector headlights (my description, I don't know the official name). These can be brighter because they can be directed away from oncoming traffic. The US, in contrast, is lagging in approving this technology and puts an absolute limit on the brightness.
I'm not surprised there's a disagreement. I'm surprised the disagreement is both sides saying "our way is safer", rather than it being one side saying "this safety benefit isn't worth it" and the other saying "yes it is".
The problem isn't the disagreement in specifications. It's the poor German quality control that doesn't prevent these mistakes from happening. This wasn't a significant problem when the parts were physically different for different markets and the assembly line would ensure the wrong parts weren't present.
Was buying a new car headlight last year and the sales associate pointed me to replace my halogen bulbs with new (more expensive) LED "fog lights", but they were clearly labelled "not legal for use on public roads". I wonder how many people get upsold on headlights which are actually illegally bright and never notice.
OSRAM has now made an LED retrofit kit for halogen reflectors that is approved and road legal everywhere in the EU - it's just very expensive for the time being, I'd have a hard time justifying it.
For me the big advantage of LED over Halogen is the service life. Back when i had Halogens i had to switch bulbs at least once a year, depending on your car you may have to go to a garage to have it done. 130 euro for a set of LED retrofit bulbs would be worth it just to avoid that hassle.
Well not everywhere in Europe. I have Philips version of LED bulbs which replaced my halogen lights. They are great, and they have the same beam form so they don't blind anyone. At the same time, they wanted to fail me on the annual inspection because "a car which came with halogen lights cannot have LED lights". Next time I'll put halogens just for the inspection. Completely moronic laws.
>>they wanted to fail me on the annual inspection because "a car which came with halogen lights cannot have LED lights".
Sounds like the tester was trying to be clever - afaik in most places the test is checking if your beam pattern is correct using a machine that measures it in front of the headlamp. What is inside the headlamp shouldn't matter to them in the slightest - either the beam is correct or it isn't. But I don't know where you live so I can't comment on the law in your specific country.
In a TÜV inspection in Germany, for example, they know what kind of lamps came with your car, or what retrofit lamps are type-approved for your car, and will fail you if you have another kind. How does TÜV SÜD know what lamps are approved for your car? They are also the organization that does the type approvals.
They also will fail you for having polished or otherwise refurbished the lenses instead of replacing them. Basically they are gigantic hardasses about headlights.
That's not correct. Projector headlights can still be used with LEDs and pattern will be correct. Reflector units aren't compatible. Halogen->LED like Halogen->Xenon isn't allowed in Europe if a car doesn't have automatic levelling and headlight washers.
The most annoying thing for me is the "blue fringe" on a lot of modern headlights that use lenses to refract and focus the light. These lenses aren't the best and have chromatic aberration, resulting in a fringe of blue light at the top of the beam.
Result: people see flashing blue(-ish) light in their rear view mirror. Not a good thing, very distracting!
I had this the worst the other day. A car was following me and I kept thinking there was an emergency vehicle behind because I could see the blue fringe.
The worst thing about all these lights is they aren't static. For a start I can see the LEDs flickering, presumably due to PWM. Why a fully DC circuit that doesn't even dim the bulbs needs to use PWM is beyond me. But the worst is their "clever" auto levelling and dipping etc. It just looks like the light is constantly in flux which is really distracting and annoying.
Interesting. I didn't know that. Looking around online it seems they run at a frequency around 250-300Hz which may be noticeable. I notice it more when lights are far away and in my peripheral vision. I assumed they were LEDs because I've definitely noticed it with LEDs but I guess they could be xenons too.
Always interesting about how people get angry about headlights in the USA.
Being from Europe, the European ones are superior. They go further and they are brighter, and have a different cut-off: ECE vs DOT: https://i.ibb.co/ryf8W0w/dotece.jpg
When I lived in Europe (Belgium) every year the beam height was checked on my car. That way I wouldn't blind people when driving behind them.
Here in there US there are no such things, yet cars often enough get headlights replaced which aren't adjusted afterwards. Or people install a lift-kit which hasn't been taken into account when designing the vehicle.
Now I wonder if the Macan has different lights in the US vs ROW, as the cut-off isn't something that is easily changeable, and it would massively increase the cost for something that is never activated.
But having the same bulbs makes sense.
That said, I looked into replacing the headlights on mine, but then you end up with a Frankenstein's monster car, as parts of it are US coded, and parts EU. I did get EU mirrors.
> Being from Europe, the European ones are superior. They go further and they are brighter
Driving in Europe, I get constantly blinded by french cars and their headlights.
Those headlights are just way too bright, combined with shitty engineering. The automatic ones don't turn off fast enough. Then you have people blinking at approaching cars to trigger that sensor. Many drivers don't bother manually turning them off, on some cars the headlights are still controlled by a rotary switch that requires you to take your hands off the steering wheel, while on others the auto-headlights aren't easy to re-enable if you had to manually turn them off once so people don't bother turning them off at all.
No they aren't. Driving on the roads in continental Europe I see it all. LED lights with blue glare, road beams with strength of high beams, adaptive strobing LED/laser headlights, adaptive LED/laser headlights scanning surroundings with top-down bright horizontal line, badly adjusted headlights directed and the eyesight level. Includes brand new unmodified cars.
The occupational hazard of driving a really low to the ground Mini is that every new car with Bright-Ass-Lights (our family name for them) heading towards me is a punch into my eyeball. Fortunately I can flip the rear-view prism mirror to deal with similar vehicles behind me. The new trucks - raptors and f-150 - are particularly obnoxious, they are 2x my height and terrifying.
High beams are becoming some kind of weapon here in the EU. You have red spots and lines for some time when you happen to encounter a Porsche SUV heading your way angrily flashing at the one in front of them. What‘s next? Lasers? They are just too powerful.
Not quite. Despite the branding they’re using SLDs (Super Luminescent Diode). Sits between diode lasers and LEDs in terms of power, coherence, and bandwidth.
1) indicators ( eu flashing yellow ones) are getting smaller: ok at night, but during the day...very hard to see. I prefer the US red brake/ blinker to these tiny mf's.
*2 Animated (EU only?) yellow indicators. The transition between each segment (usually five?) is always too slow, and very distracting. I prefer the US, and very terrible, blinky-brake lights to these disco-on-xanax horrors.
3. Why can’t there be a sign for 'zippering' where traffic merges?
Because people still think they're somehow going to arrive 30min faster by not merging one-by-one, ignoring the fact that by not letting others in they're actively slowing all other traffic down. Then have all other nervous drivers looking for the first opportunity to cut someone off because they're not going to be able to merge otherwise and you end up with all those crashes near the ends of merge lanes. It's a driving culture issue, varies by country.
I passionately loathe Porsche headlights in general. The particular pattern of 4 very bright dots constantly tricks my eyes into thinking they are focusing incorrectly which is distracting and borderline painful. The Macan EV's pattern of lines rather than dots actually _alleviates_ this problem for me so I'm somewhat disappointed it's _this_ Porsche and not every other one on the road whose headlights are being replaced.
The headlights aren't being replaced, it's just a software fix. Still a bit of a fail for Porsche if a software fix requires a dealer visit and can't be deployed over-the-air, though.
In the mean time, whilst we wait for our ancient laws to catch up to the advent of the LED headlight, it would be really cool if everyone could find that little bit logic and intuition in themselves to do their best to adapt something like this, as their ~"etiquette"~ for night driving;
AUTO HI-BEAMS: OFF (always OFF)
HI-BEAMS ON: ONLY when there are no cars in front of you
APPROACHING BRIGHT HEADLIGHTS: Short 2x burst. Resist going further than this, just glance off to the passsenger-side of your windshield and avoid looking directly at the lights, deep in thought...
IF you are FLASHED by oncoming traffic, at least CHECK (the indicator on your dash will be a very bright BLUE) - IF they are ON then TURN THEM OFF. IF they are off THEN give a courtesy SHORT 1-2x flash.
IF the car(s) IN FRONT of you seem to be excessively braking or flashing their HI-BEAMS seemingly at random - CHECK YOURS! Courtesy flash not recommended so much here.
Cars BEHIND you with BRIGHT LIGHTS? Brake tap might or might not help, I also target large traffic signs with some short rapid bursts to hopefully get their attention.
At some point, doing nothing becomes the best strategy. Some people really do love antagonizing.
Stay focused when you're driving, you should be striving to do it "like a pro" and with respect for others.
/psa
p.s. that botton in your light control cluster that you don't know what it is? Leave it off please. Those are your Tow-lamps and they make your taillights extremely bright.
Ah yes, computer programmers on reddit doing what they do best: thinking that they're so very smart (because they're programmers) and thus more qualified than professionals in their own fields. Can't fool them! They're not one of those sheeple!
> “First, I’d like to teach you some words,”
How has his brain not imploded from the fatal levels of condescension? He thought a writer wouldn't know what "obfuscation" means?
Also: that is a magazine about football, and an article written by someone who writes about culture items like Taylor Swift. It's not "reporting." It's (at best) commentary.
Completely missing: any sources from people who, you know, actually know what the hell they're talking about.
For example, someone who knows what the hell they're talking about could point out that the flood of photos from digital cameras in that subreddit, used as "proof", are from digital cameras which have barely a few f-stops of dynamic range, whereas the human eye has thirty. The very best digital SLRs in the world have a dynamic range of around 14 stops.
The article also contains the bizarre detail that the petrol version of this is available in the US, but not the EU... due to _cybersecurity_ regulations.
It's a race: brighter lights and tainted glass. Looks really cool. Give privacy to the driver of such vehicle, while allowing them to see the road. Good for them.
But other road users: bikes, pedestrians, old car drivers... They suffer.
The only way to improve your situation: also buy a new car with bright lights and tainted glass.
The more tinted your windows are the brighter headlights you need, easy! You can also wear sunglasses at all times which allows for even brighter headlights. Absolute pro tip - cover the windows externally with reflective foil to return any light anyone will dare to beam at your car.
My little Toyota did dim the light or just lower the light … and hence it is better. You need the high beam all the time in uk roads as they mostly do not have road lights. But keep in switch on and off in my old cars are hard.
But those high beam can kill me one day no doubt. Too many close call and hence the little Toyota i got I feel comfortable to use the high beam all the time.
How odd. I used to own a car that had an easily accessible setting adjusting lights to the EU or UK settings. Surely they ought to be a similar setting in Porsches?
I've seen the same thing happen with UK cars here. I don't think most drivers even realise that their headlights aren't uniformly lighting up the road in front of them.
IMO places where people switch what side of the road people drive on (ferries, tunnels, etc.) should put up warnings and hand out fines to people with reversed lights. For cars that don't have digitally adjustable lights, I'm sure there will be money making opportunities for garages near these places where the lights can be physically adjusted.
You can buy special stickers that modify light beams. Adjusting lights is actually mandatory and not doing so can result in a ticket. My old car had a setting for it in the main menu. I used it every time I was driving to and from France/UK.
I don't see why American Porsches would need such an option? Where is the closest left-hand traffic country relative to the US and how feasible is it to get your car there?
I have entirely stopped driving at night because of this. When I do, I drive with my high beams on and sunglasses. If you're gonna be selfish so that you can see 200 meters in front of you, well so can I.
Post-Corona cars are all much brighter. Its gotten so bad that I'm frequently left wondering if people are driving with high beams or just regular new-age lights. Got to wait to see if the person on the other side drops the lights to be sure. SUVs in particular are bad especially during acceleration which points the lights higher and on inclined road. I also regularly "switch" rear-view mirror to dim mode otherwise I'm literally 3-way blinded also from side mirrors. I didn't do any of these things regularly 5y ago. I'm still wondering if this is just automotive industry incompetence of making safe vehicles or an "incentive" to buy a SUV yourself so you don't get blinded all the time.
There are definitely people who don't care to switch between high and low beams when oncoming traffic appears. I was riding in the passenger seat with an ex-coworker the other night, and I noticed he just kept the high beams on the entire time. After a while I asked him, "Why don't you turn the headlights down when there's oncoming traffic?" He looked at me like I just asked the most ridiculous question and said "What do you mean? The high beams are brighter and make it easier for me to see." I reminded him that high beams blind other drivers and he basically said "Fuck them, I don't care and that's their problem if they don't like it." --that seems to be pretty much America's slogan right now. Fuck everyone else, I'm doing what I want.
Maybe mention that head on accidents sometimes happen because a driver target fixates on oncoming headlights. I can't imagine that high beams help with that.
Wow.
Since moving to the US and driving here, I've suspected people have this attitude, but this is the first time I've encountered confirmation.
They might actually have high beams on.
I have a 2021 model vehicle and it has an “auto” setting for headlights, where it turns them on or off automatically depending on if it detects a car in front of them. It’s better latency then I have as a human remembering I have them on and turning them off so I use the feature but it’s definitely not instant and I’ve noticed it fail to detect a few times when there’s obstructions over the sensor like snow or rain.
I assume this wasn’t unique to my $30k model of car and is a common feature now, so might be the cause of the extra brightness
I drove a car with this feature and retroreflective road signs or markers would set it off at night. In the dark of night on a country road, approaching a tight curve and your lights go dim. I've been turning it off ever since.
I like the concept but it's one of those things I struggle to see working practically.
Ive a ford maverick (smallest hybrid truck i could get in the states), and was very skeptical of this feature. Im surprised about how correctly responsive it is. I drive something like 60/20/20 suburban/urban/rural. Im always ready to turn it off, for fear of imperfect performance or incorrect toggling, but i cant point to a single instance where it did the wrong thing. It’s a little bit amazing!
I think it’s decent in some use cases but it’s not a silver bullet and any lack of maintenance on the sensor equipment used to control it causes bad experiences.
As my vehicle ages I might consider turning it off as it gets worse performance but I also live with a few car people who constantly rail against the performance of the feature so I’m primed for this more than the median user
Would that be, possibly, because:
> SUVs in particular are bad especially during acceleration which points the lights higher
Aren't self-leveling headlights standard by now? I think in the EU it was mandatory for Xenon lights, but I don't know whether LED lights are considered differently. My dad's almost 20 yo Citroën had such headlights, even though, thanks to the funky suspension, the car never had dramatic changes in level.
> Aren't self-leveling headlights standard by now?
I don't know, but as a pedestrian & cyclist in the EU, not a day goes by where I don't get blinded by headlights. SUVs are by far the worst offenders, but it's not just SUVs. Most newer cars seem to have the same problem.
Heck, many newer bicycles have a headlight that's offensively bright and often seems aimed directly at my face. It's a sad state of affairs.
Self-leveling usually "one time", or "slowly", as in changes based on the weight on the rear axle. It doesn't work on the timescale of acceleration, braking, cornering, etc.
Actually, it did it "all the time". I found out about this while being stuck in traffic, and seeing the lights move slightly up and down while inching forward and stopping. It was visible because it moved in discrete steps, compared to the continuous movement of the car.
I hadn't known it was a thing before, and went looking in the owner's manual for confirmation.
They might be, but that does not help much, as roads are neither level nor pitched at a constant grade. The attribution of the effect to acceleration might (at least in some cases) be a misdiagnosis of a problem actually caused by a slight longitudinal convexity of the road.
Here in the UK I can't say that we have the same issue - BUT we have far fewer SUVs and lights are regulated far more. You'll fail your yearly MOT (car roadworthiness test) if you have lights that are too bright or misaligned, and I have seen people pulled over in London for having non-standard/too bright lights.
We have a wattage maximum for headlights too. I am under the impression that roadworthiness test and regulations are very different in the states - is that the case?
It certainly seems like headlights are far brighter in the UK right now, given that they're all LEDs.
Of course it could just be confirmation bias, as I'm getting older and I suppose my eyes gradually deteriorate. I do a lot of night time driving and oncoming traffic is definitely brighter, for me at least, than 20 years ago.
Then there's the fact that old headlights were one bulb, and the mirrored surface behind them was simpler.
Another problem is white light is harsh, and the old incandescent bulbs had a yellow/off white tinge which is easier (the redder the light, the less likely it is to destroy your night vision).
We're all getting older.
But when I'm driving at night and there's a line of cars with sleepy old halogen incandescent headlights in my view, those seem about the same to me as they always did.
Some are brighter, some are dimmer -- sometimes due to differences of voltages or aging, or sometimes due to differences in aiming or beam shape -- but they still appear to average about the same as ~all headlights did 20 years ago.
Sometimes, they're uncomfortable. They very seldom hurt. I can almost always still see where I'm going without any particular trouble unless they're particularly, acutely bright for whatever reason. Just as before, when my eyes were younger.
And unilaterally, they're easier to ignore than when modern bright-white (what are they, 5000k?) LEDs are shining my way. Those are uncomfortable more often than not. They're very often painful. I often can't see where I'm going when they're particularly bad.
Same eyes. Same road. Same weather. Same night. Different headlights, different results.
Yes. The US has excellent national standards (low beams can be 15,000 to 20,000 candela per side), however nearly everything is administered by the states, and only 14 of 50 states have annual safety inspections. It used to be most states, but it was hijacked and used as a racket to steal from customers. Accessory LED lighting (off road) is illegal, but only required to be covered on road in California and Pennsylvania. Additionally, the US also bumper height restrictions that are mostly ignored (except California). Many lifted SUVs and trucks are illegal. That means if your car is t-boned by a lifted SUV you could be struck in the head by the bumper.
Thanks for detailed explanation. I wasn’t able to believe in YouTube videos, that many extremely tuned cars were legal in US. In Germany they would be immediately towed away as not roadworthy. The lifted trucks leave me always speechless. Why!?..
You may have noticed that the most fiercely-invoked right in the US these days is the one to be a full-on asshole.
Comic book lives?
https://youtu.be/67aLDt1VJZI?t=116&si=5Cxyp-GT_i5DK-no
Who is making these cars and mods?
I live in a rural area of Scotland and I don't really have a problem with headlights - 99.9% of drivers dip their full beams when they are aware of you. Now if we could only get people to indicate correctly on roundabouts.... - that's a far bigger peeve of mine than headlights!
> We have a wattage maximum for headlights too.
Are you sure it’s not a luminance maximum?
LED lights can be much brighter at the same wattage vs. incandescent lights.
I was curious about this too so had a look. The brightness is regulated by The Road Vehicle Lighting Regulations 1989 and does specify a minimum wattage in some cases but not for modern cars (“A motor vehicle with four or more wheels first used on or after 1st April 1986: no requirement”). As far as I can tell there are no legal maximums.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/1989/1796/schedule/4
While this check exists on paper it is not enforced in any meaningful way and hasn't caught up to modern headlights which to me are simply too bright even when original from the factory.
If I look directly at any headlight they burn into my vision. It makes driving difficult.
Really? I think we have exactly the same problem in the UK. Granted, my eyes are more susceptible post laser surgery, but headlights are definitely getting brighter and higher as the years go by.
It's so bad I am about to go to the optometrist to see if my eyes are just getting old.
Its not your eyes getting old, it's just that are just more inconsiderate assholes out there now, enabled by newer car models that have a uncomfortably bright high-beams with the worst color temperature for night vision (for both the drivers and their victims).
I wonder if Teslas should be recalled too: all of them are seem too bright, particularly Model Ys.
I have often wondered if my eyes have become more sensitive to car headlights since covid, but it seems I'm not alone in this feeling. I frequently wear glasses with a blue light protective coating while driving on busy roads at night. Interestingly, I find that I don’t need them when the road is empty or when it’s a bright night.
I struggle with the exact same issue in a pickup truck. I think people are driving around with their high beams on without knowing it.
When I learned how to drive, my mom showed me how the headlights turned on and off. If you didn’t turn them off, the car died.
The automation has made light management a very second thought.
My friend didn’t know what the blue high beam icon on the dash was. I blame the automatic light feature.
The default 'height' of the Tesla Model Y headlights make it appear to be bright lights by default. I live in the DC metro area, and buses (who are typically folks that drive a lot) would constantly flash me to let me know they thought my brights were on.
You can go into the car's settings and lower the headlights, but because of where it is by default, it presents a dangerous situation for other cars. How many non-tech folks would know to even search for this option?
https://service.tesla.com/docs/Model3/ServiceManual/en-us/GU...
I had to do the same with my 3 when I got it years back. Now people also get confused when I have my fog lights on (but that’s rare given how annoying difficult it is to find the setting on a touchscreen while driving). Actually calibrating the lights angle should be done at the factory (or prior to delivery), but mine were definitely too high.
But I think in general (and with other cars too), the problem isn’t the brightness of lights, but their angle. Bit even with my lights lowered, if I’m at a stop light that is on a slight hill, that still can cause the angle of my lights to appear to someone on the other side as too bright.
There are too many cars with this problem. Especially high trucks and SUVs whose beams blinds drivers in front of them..
It's bad with cars but even worse with bikes that have flashing or even strobing lights. Busy cycle lanes in London can be horrible on dark winter evenings with all the LED lights that can be incredibly bright and are very often not installed/adjusted/aimed correctly.
I appreciate that cyclists want to make sure they're seen by car drivers, but beaming ultra-bright flashing lights straight into the eyes of oncoming cyclists on a cycle lane surely creates a hazard that outweighs any benefits?!
Blinking lights makes the bicycle driver more visible. When sharing the dark road with cars, this compensates slightly against not being inside a steel cocoon with airbags.
If cities actually invested in safe infrastructure the need for such lights would go away.
Blinking lights stand out more but also makes it near impossible to accurately judge speed and direction, especially with multiple cyclists on the road. That's why it's illegal to use blinking bike lights* here in the Netherlands.
*: technically, you're allowed to use blinking bike lights during the day, but what's the point
Blinking lights grab attention.
That makes them useful during the day
> Blinking lights makes the bicycle driver more visible.
[citation needed]. They sure are annoying to look at, but I doubt about the improved visibility. Drivers are used to tracking positions and velocities of steady light sources - like those from cars, traffic lights, barriers, reflected lights, etc. Blinking lights are harder to track and are unusual; they seemingly should draw attention, but other than bicycles, they tend to show up on stuff like ads, Christmas lights, broken light fixtures, etc. - that is, things safe to ignore.
This is related to inattentional blindness, where car drives dont notice motorbikes since drivers are used to looking for two lights - not one: https://motolight.com/inattentional-blindness/
In the same manner, a single bicycle light might not register as a vehicle in the minds of car drivers. By blinking the light the short-circuit is broken - or so the theory goes.
Can confirm this anecdotally. When I use my bike light in blinking mode, drivers are more careful around me every time. When I use the non-blinking mode, there have been times when drivers have clearly ignored my presence and I’ve had to wave my hand in front of the light to simulate blinking to get their attention.
"ads, Christmas lights, broken light fixtures, etc" are not safe to crash into
They are not. They are also not on the road.
I actually agree, they work great for drawing attention. The problem is, they're so distracting that they cause other problems. As a cyclist myself, I consider them a lot more selfish than bringing a steel cocoon with airbags with you.
Recently I met one of these idiots on a dark cycle path and I veered away from them instinctively (partly because I could see they were present but couldn't judge where they were) and then overcompensated and swerved behind them - very nearly hitting their child on a kid's bike behind! I hadn't seen their child because I was blinded by the adult's light. They probably thought they were keeping their child safe but they were really putting them in danger.
Instead of veering repeatedly and blindly in a dangerous situation, consider slowing to a stop like an AI car does.
Blinking / flashing bike lights were kind of OK when they were in the 10-20 lumen range. But nowadays even the cheap ones are on the order of several hundred lumens, which is a completely different game. It is possible to buy a 1000 lumen light for around 50 EUR (Magicshine), now consider that a single car headlight is around 1500 lumens... These lights have no cutoff beam.
The problem is not even cars though, but other cyclists. Even with a cutoff beam it is easy to blind oncoming traffic if the light is not setup correctly. Flashing, it should be illegal.
Stroboscopes are creating hazardous situations. Everyone will start escalating their visibility until you can't see shit. Bikers need to wear reflective clothing, especially in London. I fucking hate those dudes all black on a black bicycle at night strobing their way through traffic.
In current year, bicycles should have medium brightness LED rope lights for visibility.
There is quite a lot of discussion about this on the London cycling subreddit.
The consensus amongst the cyclists there generally is that flashing front lights are a bad idea. The can be confusing and disorienting and are pretty unpleasant for other oncoming cyclists and pedestrians, not just other car drivers.
actually for drawing attention it is better to have lights mounted at the ankle as the pedaling movement attract attention, makes the cyclist recognizable, all the while without blinking annoyingly.
There are also pedals that include front and rear lights. https://redshiftsports.com/collections/arclight-pedals
>Blinking lights makes the bicycle driver more visible.
Blinking lights are not legal according to road code in Germany and I assume many other EU countries nor do they necessary improve your safety.
Yes, strobing lights do draw more attention at a glance (which is why they are reserved for emergency vehicles and signaling an emergency) making you think you'd be safer, but actually not since it makes it very difficult for the human eye to determine the distance to/from that object in motion on the road if it's always blinking, making the use of only strobing lights on the road unsafe and therefore banned for non emergency purposes.
That's why your front and tail lights must be in a constant state. It's for your own safety too, hence why emergency vehicles don't strobe their running lights/brake lights but have additional strobes for that.
I agree with the underlying logic here. However, when street maintenance trucks are driving around normally with their extremely bright orange strobes enabled (mind you, not parked in the street doing repairs, I'd totally understand that! Oftentimes they are just driving normally with the strobes on) I fail to see the logic applied consistently. In my opinion a good compromise for cyclists would be to allow strobing rear lights that only have power cycle of at least 90% and power periods of at least 2500ms, meaning they are on for 2500ms and then off for ~280ms, creating a strobing effect that is not as overpowering as normal strobing rear lights, which I'd agree are overbearing in commute traffic.
>when street maintenance trucks are driving around normally with their extremely bright orange strobes enabled
Street maintenance trucks and all such vehicles, at least in Europe, don't strobe their running lights which are constant-ON as on all road vehicles and the strobes are additional warning lights. So they get the best of both worlds.
But for cycling, blinking lights are stupid because you're strobing your only running light you need to see and be seen.
Same thing for bicycles btw. Strobing rear lights are allowed as long as they are on your person (i.e. clothing/helmet or backpack), only on the bike itself they are not permitted.
I have both. My bicycle has a headlight and taillight. My helmet has built in front and rear lights, which can flash.
Fixed mixed with flashing or pulsing is fine. It's the strobing lights that do 5 super-short staccato flashes and then nothing for a moment that are the bad ones.
Germany also has the most cyclist deaths of any country in the EU (~450/year), twice as many as the next country.
The UK has one quarter the deaths despite having ~3/4 of the population of Germany...
Blinking lights are also banned in the Netherlands, which does a lot better in the statistics. Even then, the statistics are kind of useless; here bike deaths are mostly caused by old people on (electric) bikes falling over or getting into minor accidents, nothing to do with lights. The statistics are skewed in ways that cannot be compensated for easily, as on average UK cyclists are younger than Dutch cyclists and therefore less likely to die or get severely hurt in a traffic incident.
Great Britain has half the bike usage of Germany. Germany has 36 million bikers (43% of 84 million), Great Brittain about 12 million (19% of 68 million), so the stats line up more than you'd think at a first glance. The difference between Germany and Great Brittain becomes laugably obvious when you look at the statistics for how many people use bikes as a primary transport method (6% GB vs 21% DE).
That said, biking outside of large cities in Germany is kind of terrible, so I'm not at all surprised about how deadly cycling in Germany, though that may just be my spoilt Dutch take on things.
Edit: my source for these statistics: https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/...
Such statistics without the full context are meaningless. How many people per capita cycle in the UK vs DE.
It's expected that if a lot more people cycle, you're gonna have more cycling deaths than in countries where fewer people cycle.
If nobody would cycle you'd have zero cycling deaths, hooray problem solved, you successfully gamed the metrics, if wining arbitrary metrics is the goal.
In terms of urban distance travelled:
DE 5.5%: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
UK 1.7%: https://www.cyclinguk.org/statistics
I mean, the numbers are the numbers. Sounds like the point you wanted to make, accidentally, is that cycling has a linear growth rate of death if more of the population cycles.
Was that your goal?
>I mean, the numbers are the numbers.
Random numbers alone mean nothing if they're meaningless and out of context. More people are killed every year by cows than by sharks. Does that make cows more dangerous than sharks or just that people are more likely to be around cows more often than around sharks?
If Germany has a higher population than UK, and also a higher percentage of people of that population cycle, then yeah you're gonna have more dead cyclists. D'uh!
Show me deaths per capita and cycling rates per capita, then we can talk about drawing a conclusion.
Correlation is not causation.
I'd rather have blinking lights than what seems to be a disturbingly common fashion here in Zürich — no lights at all, drivers with dark clothing, AND running red lights.
Can't really blame them for running red lights... if I were cycling at night with no lights and wearing dark clothes I would also be in a hurry to get home to safety!
Does it make them more visible?
Surely they are just turning the light off half the time so half as visible?
On my bike lights, the "strobe" mode doesn't actually turn the lights on and off. It turns them on steadily at moderate brightness, with periodic very brief flashes of higher intensity. That seems to me like a really good compromise.
A blinking light is off as often as it is on.
There’s a lot that could be done to make the infrastructure safer for both cyclists and drivers
I find blinking lights on cyclists both harder to spot and harder to judge the cyclists speed.
How can you know how many cyclists you didn’t see?
It's ok, you feel the bump.
What you need is a high-visibility jacket, not make the problem worse using selfish solutions.
[dead]
In the US the strobing lights are critical. A huge portion of drivers are looking straight down while they drive at their phone.
The grid ones are fun though: https://www.yankodesign.com/2013/05/21/lumigrids-while-cycli...
Yes, this is a huge problem as well. The lights are so bright, randomly mounted, and as you say, the user can just strobe them if they like. Imagine if car lights were as unregulated.
They are effectively unregulated. Most drivers have no clue how to adjust them, and the "modders" replace them randomly with whatever they find is the brightest/coolest. Yeah, you _could_ fine them and claim that the cars are unroadworthy until fixed, but if a rule is not enforced, is it a rule? So, yeah, effectively unregulated, too.
I bicycle a lot and I tell other cyclist that they need to adjust their lights all the time. At least they seem to take feedback. Somehow, drivers think that they, in their multi-ton metal boxes are a band apart, and tend to take zero criticism from anyone outside of their metal boxes.
> So, yeah, effectively unregulated, too.
No, one is actually unregulated, and the other is imperfectly regulated.
> Somehow, drivers think that they, in their multi-ton metal boxes are a band apart, and tend to take zero criticism from anyone outside of their metal boxes.
I can't imagine, with such a homogenising, negative attitude towards a group comprising millions of people, why they might not listen to you.
I think safety isn’t just about being seen, it’s also about not impairing others’ vision
In the absence of safe bike networks and traffic calming it seems like a reasonable attempt at self preservation.
I’ve got a slightly dimmer light on my helmet that is great for getting people’s attention when they’re just not looking for bikes.
strobing bike lights are also a horrific health/pain hazard for people who get migraines or have light-triggerable epilepsy. I really wish they'd be banned from sale :(
Yes, American bike lights are totally out of control. They almost all have circular flashlight beams, totally inappropriate for use on the road. If you try to show someone a proper cutoff optic light they will say it's dim because it doesn't blind them with useless near field light.
The only ones I've been able to find are imports from Europe like B+M or Supernova, and a few expensive domestic ones like Outbound Lighting. If you walk into almost any bike shop in America they will have only circular optics that blind everyone.
no it's not worse than cars. I drive at night and you'd be lucky to even see a bicyclist amid those blinding LED's.
It's really hard to find non-blinding lights for bikes here in the States.
The Germans seem to have a standard (with TUV certification) for it, as of course they do. But we don't get much of that kit here.
(And because search engines are absolutely ruined: Searching for less, like "dim bike light" or "non-blinding" or whatever always winds up with finding more, instead.
"Oh, you're searching for a nice pleasant light that just illuminates the path in front of you at a warm color temperature without blinding anyone? Let me show you the MEGAFUCKER 9000! Powered by 48VDC and over 9000K, this light is guaranteed appear brighter than the sun and to ABSOLUTELY FUCK anyone within a kilometer! /r/fuckcars approved! You always knew you were an asshole, and with the MEGAFUCKER 9000 everyone else will know it too!"
Every single time.
(It's the same with anything else. Want a small, diminutive spatula so a small egg pan can actually be used for cooking instead of wall art? The more specific the search terms are, the bigger the fucking spatulas in the search results become.
Or even industrial or craft materials. Want rigid, open-cell, large-pore foam that doesn't sponge up water for a project? Good luck. Unless you already know exactly what product you need down to the SKU (which one can only glean via telepathy), the search results will consist entirely of opposite-world SUPER-SOFT EXTRA ABSORBENT foam.)
Could an LLM fix this, please.
Nope. Not yet, anyway.
LLMs are absolutely terrible at finding specific, detailed facts that have any consistent element of truth to them, and the well from which they draw their knowledge was deliberately poisoned from the beginning.
I hope there's a special place in hell for people with stroboscopes on roads.
Just came here to see this. Per capita I get blinded more often by cyclists.
I get having bright lights, but try and angle them slightly downwards at least.
When I grew up we had a heap of rules for bicycle lighting drilled into us (ok not that badly but I remember them for the most part), one of them was the angle of your headlight should be at xyz to not blind other traffic. And that was in the time of bulb lights and dynamos so the lights would've been a lot more gentle anyway. Since then they've slacked the rules by a lot due to the sheer amount of decrepit and new/modern bikes on the road that didn't conform, so now instead of a red rear light and a white section on your rear fender, a shitty 1 euro LED light strapped to the back of your backpack or package carrier is apparently enough. And LED front lights are a thing, often aimed straight ahead for visibility / being able to see further than three meters ahead of you.
I mean I'm guilty myself, got myself a new bike a few years back that has a headlight built into the frame etc.
That's a failure to regulate, to set the rules and enforce them. Mostly everyone should just adopt the German StVZO rules for bike lights.
https://www.bikeradar.com/advice/buyers-guides/stvzo-bike-li...
German StVZO rules are not helping when the users are not directing the beam towards the road but horizontally. The current bicycles lights are very strong and I am sometimes nearly blinded from them in day light!
I have yet to see a single bike light that actually lets you direct the light just to the road (like you can with dipped car headlights).
Maybe there are some super expensive ones, but I don't think we can entirely blame cyclists. The design of affordable lights is just not very good.
> I have yet to see a single bike light that actually lets you direct the light just to the road
My 1975 vintage Peugeot bike already has a front light with a lens that directs the beam downwards, can be adjusted to point even further downwards with a screw, and even has a small shield on top of the lens to stop the beam from travelling upwards.
It works perfectly with the original dynamo and a cheap LED light bulb from Amazon.
https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikeforums.net-vbulletin/640x48...
>I have yet to see a single bike light that actually lets you direct the light just to the road
What the hell, are your lights welded/glued in place to the bike frame or what?
Most bike lights are screwed in, and with those screws you can adjust the angle of the light both up/down and left/right like this: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71AKoH1V25L._AC_SL1500_....
> What the hell, are your lights welded/glued in place to the bike frame or what?
You have misunderstood. Obviously I can angle the light, but it still has a circular beam pattern like a torch. Dipped car headlights are not like that. They have a sharp cut-off at the horizon so you can light the road brightly without blinding oncoming traffic. Very few bike lights have a beam pattern like that.
The comment mentions "affordable lights" so I think they're talking about lights like [1] that are mounted on the handlebar and where you can only adjust the vertical angle.
Speaking for my German bubble, there are roughly two types of bike riders: those who invest 1k+ on their gear and those that buy a flea market bike for 100€ and then fit the cheapest light they can find (that is, the ones I mention). Most students I know fall in the second category, making those lights quite popular.
[1] https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71nSkKcBIdL._AC_UF894,10...
>I think they're talking about lights like [1] that are mounted on the handlebar and where you can only adjust the vertical angle
It can't be that what he meant, since if you can adjust the vertical angle, you can stop blinding people.
>Most students I know fall in the second category, making those lights quite popular.
I know. I nearly ran over one who had no good lights, dark hoodie with no reflective gear, when I was reversing on a dark street, at night. Nearly shat myself after the close call.
I know students are poor, but God damn man, your life is worth more than a couple of Euros you're saving by running a crappy light who's battery died 2 years ago. Skip on a pizza/few beers in town one time and get a proper light.
You don't need to spend thousands of euros on gear to have a safe and visible cycling experience.
People are just stupid and lazy about their own safety, that's all. You only realize it when you switch from a cyclist to a driver, how dangerous these cyclists with no good lights are at night.
> the cheapest light they can find (that is, the ones I mention
Dude, that light you shared is a luxury compared to what most students I see have. Most have these god awful things with low battery: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Bicycle-Accessories-S...
The main problem is the lack of rigor fixing, i.e. lamps rotate up or down.
https://www.gazelle.de/fahrraeder/esprit this is a solution
My cheap lights, which are rubber-strapped onto my handlebars, can be directed anywhere I want...
And do they have a shaped beam pattern like a dipped car headlight? I doubt it.
For example this one (Color: QD-1301T): https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4001313812415.html
It's not exactly cheap (and probably can be found cheaper elsewhere), but then it's superbright 2400 lumen with 2 sets of leds (headlights and meeting/dipped lights) and a powerbank. You can switch with the buttons. I own a slightly different version (2200 lumen, same casing) and it's great.
edit: cheaper here: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006446894517.html
and enforce them
This must be a joke:
In any case it's not true, batteries can be used too (I believe the dynamo regulation was true some time ago, but not currently).
it was changed in 2014 - but still a lot of 2015 vintage ebikes have a dynamo for their lights (like mine)
I don't know about Germany, but here in Belgium front hub dynamos are very common. They're never discharged and always work, so I don't see a reason not to use that.
In Germany, hub dynamos are far from the norm, they're much more expensive than the usual wheel-side dynamos and as (as usual) the German market is much more price sensitive it's rare to see hub dynamos.
The problem with wheel-side dynamos is that they barely work when it's raining (which is often correlated with the moments you actually need light) and they add so much drag (and noise).
Hub dynamos are indeed more expensive (around 50€ as a starting price) but since bikes are the primary means of transportation for many people, I think they usually see this as an acceptable price for the convenience it brings (I know I do).
Also, quite a few bikes here are leased (for around 20€/month, including all maintenance) and those always have a hub dynamo I think.
There are many good LED light bulbs for vintage bikes on Amazon which can be directly used with a dynamo. I have been a happy user for years now. Replacing / recharging bike light batteries is a life overhead I don't need.
Would that be the country that has the highest number of cyclist deaths in the EU, twice as many as the next highest country, four times as many as in the UK which has 3/4 the population?
Here's a hint: Germany is extremely car-centric and makes regulations that cater to drivers, not road safety.
Germans cycle more than 4 times as much per capita than Brits. Absolute numbers are meaningless, you have to look at deaths per km. Germanies bike infrastructure is not great and there is lots to criticize, but that's true for most places in Europe.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Kilometres-cycled-per-in...
Here's a paper that attempts to do it right: Castro, A., S. Kahlmeier and T. Gotschi (2018), “Exposure-adjusted Road Fatality Rates for Cycling and Walking in European Countries”, Discussion Paper, International Transport Forum, Paris.
https://www.itf-oecd.org/sites/default/files/docs/exposure-a...
Germany does rather well. Though the paper is 6 years old (and based on numbers even older) and the number of bike accidents in Germany have gone up since then.
This data is from 15 to 20 years ago. I think the usage of bike has probably increased in the UK in the meantime. That may not change your point, but this 4 times figure is probably inacurate now.
You failed to establish a causal connection between regulating bike lights and whatever you are on about. Yes Germany is mostly car-centric (I'm not German and don't live there) and the UK is car-centric too, but I'm mostly a biker and get blinded by bike lights all the time. StVZO lights help with that.
This irritates me as well. Every vehicle on the road is supposed to have solid white front light and solid red back light, no reason why bicycles should be different. Strobing bright white light directed at the eye sight level is just aggressive and extremely selfish. The manuals usually state that in blinking or strobing mode the lights work longer on one battery charge.
Flashing rear is much more noticeable and marks you out as a cyclist. Certainly in the UK, it's perfectly legal.
> no reason why bicycles should be different.
Except for all the dead cyclists of course.
Blinking and strobing lights prevent bicycle deaths?!
Yes.
You're getting exactly what you asked for.
The reason they're so bright and annoying is that you, dear motoring public, love complaining we're "not visible enough" in the comments of newspaper articles about people killed while riding a bicycle. Or in letters to the editor. Or to your legislators. Or at hearings about road infrastructure. Or hearings about road safety legislation. Or after you've plowed into one of us.
If you all would like to work on the whole "not killing large numbers of vulnerable road users", we can certainly look into the whole "make our bike lights not blink."
My state requires, at night:
* a rear light visible more than 500 feet * a rear reflector * pedal reflectors or ankle reflectors (both ankles) * front reflector (+500 ft) * front light (+500 ft) * wheel reflectors
Our state used to only require a rear light, but a state legislator refused to let a road safety bill pass unless he got put his paws all over it and increase equipment requirements for cyclists to "balance" out requiring drivers must give cyclists a minimum of three feet passing distance.
And yes, sometimes it is necessary to use a blinking mode to assure that we won't run out of battery (and thus have NO light) before we get home. On a long ride, for example, or in wintertime when lithium ion battery capacity plummets.
Where this kind of road rage attitude comes from, "we against you", "you get what you are asking for"? I commute within city both with car and on a bicycle. When there is need to use bicycle lights I simply switch them on in constant light mode. During darker season of the year I have another constant light attachable to clothes or saddlebags as a backup. What is the even the problem here?
Yes, agreed. Not the only us-vs-them-cyclist in this comment thread either, which is a shame. I also cycle and drive, and this is clearly something we cyclists need to fix for us drivers. The tribalism is vomit-inducing.
Bike LED lights tend to strobe when pushing the bike manually, which is very annoying. This is due to technical reasons with the dynamo and LED rather that programmed behavior afaik. But do LED bike lights that attempt to fix this issue (either be off or dim rather that flicker at low speed) exist? It's not a feature typically listed on their product descriptions...
There are plenty battery-based lights that simply have multiple operating modes, some of them being strobe. This is by far the majority of the issue. I haven't seen someone using a dynamo for more than a decade.
People choose the strobe, presumably because they feel more visible and therefore safer. I understand it, but it's annoying as hell.
I'm talking about a hub dynamo in a bike in Europe. This is not uncommon at all.
Maybe these are not common in other locales but I don't understand why that seems to have offended some :/ I'm talking about rapidly flashing lights in narrow streets in cities from people pushing their bikes (and me having such bike too, and trying to remember to switch of the light when pushing bike manually to not annoy others)
They're quite common even in the US as well. That person probably has no idea hub generators exist, or that they have standlight functionality.
All the bike-share bikes in the US have generator hub lights as well (except for the ebikes, of course.)
I had a driver yell at me that they only look for bicycles that have strobing lights, not bikes like mine that used a steady light. I don't know how common that specific mentality is, though.
I keep a hand mirror for just this case. Most passengers are more than eager to reflect it back and it almost always solves the problem.
Another option, if the headlights are at eye level, is to move the rear-view mirror so that you see the passenger seat headrest. That makes it the perfect angle to make their headlights reflect right back at them.
Is it because of the dual mirror system? Do you have to actually lower the mirror? Asking for a friend who is blinded daily by these idiots.
It's because that will square up the mirror. From a top down view, the mirror will be perpendicular to the light rays
Feedback at its finest.
Solas tape is another potential option.
With respect to trucks, it’s people who modify the trucks height and don’t readjust the lights. This should be enforced much more!
Lifted trucks should have a season, like deer season. Control the population.
Fucking Teslas are pain in the rear. Even the stop lights on some models are so bright it burns a hole in the head every time you're behind one.
We need an automatic adjustments to ensure everyone's safety on the road
We don't need automatic adjustment. The lights never needed to be this bright. Ultra-bright lights are not solving a real problem. People think brighter == better, but it really doesn't help whatsoever. It's an emotional salve.
Adaptive driving / glare-free lighting is legal in the US and Canada now and is supposed to reduce that problem
Glad we got around to closing that barn door. It only took nearly twelve years from when adaptive headlights hit the market.
Heads should have rolled years ago when the problem became glaringly obvious.
If there was one invention that made its way into every car - I wish it would be some kind of oncoming active light dimming / compensation system. Maybe in the glass, or glasses / goggles a driver wears.
What I do now on the highways is point my side mirrors all the way out and flip the rearview mirror. I already have deeply tinted windows.
Of course this doesn't help with oncoming traffic.
Some cars have matrix LED headlights, where the car can turn off the LEDs pointing at oncoming cars, as well as turn the lights when driving around corners.
Here [1] is the VW ID.3. It's subtle, but notice how the area around the other cars is much darker. In real life it's kind of amazing to watch, as you see the LEDs follow the other cars on the road and "erase" them from the light.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFH0URtbX1s
Apparently these were illegal in the US until 2022, so I don't know how many cars here even have them yet.
https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1135084_us-finally-allow...
Surely the inhabitants inside the houses being flashed on, drivers in front of this car, and drivers from the opposite direction just finishing the curve are ecstatic about this "brilliant technology". Nothing excites people more than being flashed on with blinding white light especially in bad weather during the night.
Maybe you misunderstood. What you say is already true for the type of regular high beams that all cars have. What matrix LEDs do is "blot out" areas they should not shine. That is an improvement over high beams, not worse.
I believe the ID.3 does blot out drivers in the opposite direction even in a curve.
My Volvo automatically dims both side mirrors and the rear view mirror when bright lights are detected, it actually works really well.
Some cars already do this, like Tesla's Adaptive Headlights feature [1].
[1] https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_sg/GUID-1C20964...
> High beams are currently turned on, and Adaptive Headlights is ready to turn off the high beams if light is detected in front of Model 3.
The description makes it sound like the Tesla implementation of "Adaptive headlights" is actually just "automatic high beams". The most common extra feature of adaptive headlights is corner-adaptive, the ability to pivot into the direction of travel. For the past years adaptive headlights could even mean "smart headlights" with selective dimming. Does Tesla include these features as well?
Anecdotally I can say that what stands out with (some?) Tesla headlights is that they keep the high beams shining for way too long and even the low beams seem to be overly bright. I can't say if this is down to the driver manually controlling the high beams or the general calibration of the incoming light sensor and the auto leveling of the headlight.
Tesla's are the worst offenders outside of big trucks imo
> ... I wish it would be some kind of oncoming active light dimming / compensation system.
I think fancy Mercedes models have very advanced stuff like that. IIRC it's even crazier: in addition to compensate in the mirrors/rear-view mirror, they can also detect where another car or pedestrian is and adapt, constantly, precisely how their own beams are projected as to not blind anyone.
EDIT: other manufacturer do it too, it is called "Matrix headlights".
I find these a bit annoying, as I think the side effect is that they are basically main beam all the time otherwise, and only dim selectively.
Which is great and all, but means things like they are projecting FRICKIN' LASERS into people's homes (especially when turning) or if you are a pedestrian that it doesn't detect properly (e.g. at some distance down a cluttered urban road etc) you get someone driving at you with really very uncomfortably bright lights shining in your face (I get this a lot when running at night - perhaps the models detect a pedestrian walking but not jogging?).
I am sure it works great in controlled conditions (and I have seen YouTube videos out on the clear open road where it detects oncoming vehicles nicely) but it feels pretty ineffective and anti-social in an urban/suburban environment, at least to me.
I agree. I've got a Porsche Panamera and the headlights are too bright. At times people flash their headlights at me, thinking I've got my high-beams on: I then cannot do much else then quickly flash back the real high-beams to mean "sorry mate, no, these were the regular beams, THAT is the high-beams so stop flashing at me".
Now even the regular beams they sure do work fine (the car even does fancy stuff as lighting the interior of a turn when you take a sharp turn at night) but honestly I find many cars, including mine, have headlights to bright.
Worse: on these new cars with super fancy headlights if I'm not mistaken you cannot even configure where they aim at anymore. It's all automated. It used to be the case on older cars where it was easy to configure and you could aim the regular beam moderately low as to be sure to not annoy anyone.
I don't bother flashing at people anymore because I figured out they may simply have a car where the regular beams are simply too bright too.
Just in case - have you tried directing the beams down a bit? Not sure what the situation is on that model but there is a dial to the right of my wheel (right hand drive) which controls for this. Maybe worth investigating if you have something similar
I think one of the points of these "smart" systems is to do the aiming themselves and adjust to the conditions, including the vehicle's load.
My dad's 20yo Citroën had self-leveling lights, which weren't user adjustable (at least not in an obvious way). However, even though the lights were relatively bright (Xenon), nobody ever "complained" about them, they somehow always found a way to not blind oncoming cars while lighting the road very well.
They were fixed pattern, with the high beam on a manual switch, though, so they never tried to guess whether there was someone in the oncoming lane.
Don’t buy such an antisocial car next time?
This sentence stood out to me:
> Due to a software data set error, the affected vehicles were programmed from the factory after the Economic Commission for Europe (ECE) specs, whereas U.S.-spec vehicles need to conform to the requirements of the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS).
Presumably, if there were a way for the headlights to comply with both US and EU regulations, they'd just have them be that way everywhere, rather than having to deal with multiple configurations at all. So are the US and EU both saying that each other's way is wrong and too dangerous?
There are some notable value judgements that are different between US and EU regulations.
I remember reading that the US car safety rules generally assume that the people in the car do not follow the rules, whereas EU regulations assume they follow the law and use seatbelts.
US crash safety tests don’t care about the damage the car does to pedestrians, but EU regulations do factor that in.
https://www.npr.org/2015/10/16/449090584/why-arent-auto-safe...
> US car safety rules generally assume that the people in the car do not follow the rules > US crash safety tests don’t care about the damage the car does to pedestrians
As a EU citizen living in the US, this makes perfect sense.
The quality of driving here is far lower, I often see vehicles without plates or temp tags and it's not unusual to hear about uninsured drivers hitting people.
It's ironic that such a car centric country naturally ends up with terrible drivers because of the low barrier to entry.
The US driving experience varies by state to roughly the same degree that the EU varies by country.
The parts of the US that are within about an 8hr drive of Mexico are like the US's poor eastern europe, at least as far as driving goes.
You might make it an hour in the northeast or southeast without a plate. The cops would see dollar signs like Mr Krabs.
Pacific Northwest also does not enforce any vehicle identification or registration laws. No license plates, different license plates, only one license plates, fake plates, expired car tax sticker, none of it is enforced.
Nor are moving violations.
IMHO, there’s diminishing returns in regulations that try to protect someone who actively doesn’t want to protect themselves. It just adds extra cost (R&D, complexity of design/manufacturing, different parts for different jurisdictions, different parts SKUs to stock, etc).
The upside? It probably saves the lives of some people so reckless they shouldn’t be driving.
And the pedestrians?
Pedestrians are uncommon in most of the US, and where they are common people are supposed to be driving slow anyway. If somebody is flaunting the speed limit and hits a pedestrian and sends them flying fifty feet down the road, the value of their car being ostensibly built for pedestrian safety is very dubious.
Fewer people will walk when infrastructure prioritizes drivers and makes it uncomfortable and unsafe to walk. This isn’t the only option.
Cars being built for pedestrian safety is one piece of that picture. As you note, impact safety falls into this category and provides limited benefits for collisions at speed. There’s a lot more to that story though, as we can see in societies that value pedestrian lives. Automatic braking and avoidance, driver attention monitoring, and speed limiters are all options. Add in safe infrastructure, safety enforcement, etc.
There’s a broad range of tools available to reduce pedestrian deaths. None are perfect, none apply universally, but we should consider all of them.
For various reasons, Americans broadly opted to live in suburbs with car-centric lifestyles instead of dense urban areas where walking is viable. Where I live now I'm about 100x more likely to encounter a deer than a pedestrian. This is the context needed to understand why Americans generally aren't interested in prioritizing pedestrian safety. Making pedestrians safer so people can give up their cars is just a bizarre proposal to most Americans. The American anti-car niche is very small, comprising mostly of terminally online people with anxiety problems.
For what it's worth, I did personally live in a city and had a pedestrian lifestyle for about 15 years. I never felt particularly imperiled; the national statistic for pedestrian deaths may seem spooky but some very basic precautions, like making a habit of looking both ways even when you have the right of way, eliminates almost all of the risk.
The cost of car accidents is extremely high so I doubt that you would ever reach diminishing returns.
There's a reason that driving safety is the #1 public policy when a country develops.
Pedestrian safety is one of the reasons it will be hard to ever sell the Cybertruck in Europe without significant modification. People who have imported them themselves have had to fit rubber strips on all the sharp edges, and I'd imagine that if they were to sell them locally the rules would be even more strict. The shape is inherently dangerous to pedestrians, particularly children.
>> whereas EU regulations assume they follow the law
That isn't generally true as the EU favors driver assist technologies such as automatic emergency braking, lane departure warning, and speed limiter features.
US car “safety” rules are basically the the bigger/higher the vehicle you can afford, the safer you deserve to be.
Conservation of Momentum applies in every country.
And it turns into an arms race, with everyone buying increasingly larger cars to feel safer.
That is the point, zero restrictions on car size/weight/height and zero standards on driving licenses mean whoever can afford the more dangerous vehicle deserves more safety.
Bear in mind that matrix lights are the norm in EU on high end cars while in US they are prohibited. I bet that explains the brightness: you can have overly bright lights if they are matrix while obviously that would be detrimental in regular headlights.
Things like matrix lights used to be prohibited on new cars in the US.
This has subsequently changed: https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/nhtsa-allow-adaptive-dr...
Oh, that's good news!
(Why do I have a feeling that all the ways I can come up with to compliment the US for this achievement sound like irony?)
It's kind of meh news at this point. There's a ton of blinding vehicles on the road in the States, and it is getting worse at an accelerated rate, and even if fancy matrix-ey headlights became the norm it will take a Very Long Time for the old stuff to get cycled out.
Up next, let me tell you about that time that we held onto analog AMPS cell phones for years longer than any developed country that I know if, and how when we did finally begin to transition to something digital we made sure that we failed to standardize on any one format and made all of them as incompatible with things like European GSM as we could.
Oh yeah, tell me about it.
> held onto analog AMPS cell
*cough* faxes, anyone? *cough*
Since the brightness seems to be the issue, the only way I his makes sense to me is:
The US limits the brightness to X, the EU limits the brightness to Y, and Y > X.
Porsche could just make every car globally use X, but they’re a luxury brand so they probably try to use Y where they can, even if it is a bit of work to differentiate between markets.
It's a significant difference. I doubt any manufacturer would want to limit their European vehicles to the American maximum:
> European lighting standards (UNECE) allow over two times the light output from high beam headlight systems as compared to the U.S. (Broertjes, 2018). U.S. compliant systems allow a vehicle maximum of 150,000 candela while European compliant systems allow a vehicle maximum of 430,000 candela (Official Journal of the European Union, 2018). This provides for gains in sight distance, but also increases the potential for glare to affect oncoming and preceding traffic when high beams are not dimmed.
And
> 3. European specification systems consistently provided more roadway lighting when an oncoming vehicle was approaching, or a preceding vehicle was close.
> a. Based on static target illumination data, the increase in roadway lighting could be as much as 86 percent (comparison of average European specification high beam to U.S. specification low beam).
https://www.aaa.com/AAA/common/AAR/files/ResearchReportEuroS... (scroll to at least page 19-20 for illuminating illustrations).
The low beams on newer US cars are already blinding.
Do people in the EU consistently behave politely and turn them off when appropriate?
> Do people in the EU consistently behave politely and turn them off when appropriate?
In the EU countries I usually drive in, yes they do. If they don't, you turn your own high beams on until their turn theirs off and generally they do it within a second or so, they had probably just forgot them.
One point here: nowadays most new cars have auto high-beam which turns off almost immediately when it senses light coming from the opposite direction. Some higher-end models have matrix led lights which allows them to have the high-beam on even when there's oncoming traffic and they turn off just some parts of the beam to avoid blinding the opposite driver.
The study is comparing "premium" headlights, which in the USA auto-lower for oncoming traffic, and in Europe auto-shade just that vehicle but leave the rest of the road fully illuminated.
I don't have enough driving experience between the two countries to compare driver behaviour.
Most new cars in Europe are using LED arrays that shut off specific zones based on oncoming traffic. Like a hyper specific "auto high beams" feature.
> shut off specific zones based on oncoming traffic. Like a hyper specific "auto high beams" feature.
and for a fraction of second they are indeed blinding, disorienting, and irritating other drivers and pedestrians
People don't turn off low beams at night, why should they? They turn off high beams even if everybody forgets them on sometimes but that's inevitable.
Low beams are getting too bright. I never turned my rear mirror into the anti glare position so often as in the last couple of years.
I'm not sure why you'd bother trying to converse with me if you thought I was asking about people turning off low beams at night.
Plenty of people turn on their high beams and don't bother to manage them. I guess automatic dimming systems should help with that. Looking a bit, they don't necessarily default to on in US vehicles, which is likely to minimize the benefit.
The auto-dim systems don't always work, either. My mother-in-law's Toyota has this feature, and it seems to work when it wants to.
Same with a 2020 Honda Civic. Those auto-dim headlights shut themselves off in a timely manner about 50% of the time.
Yes. Do people not reliably dip beams in the US? that must be horrible!
The problem is, lately you can't tell if they are normal or high beams. Something about the cooler color and sharper quality of the LED lights maybe? Often as I curse an oncoming driver for not dipping their beams I notice in my rearview they turn them on after they pass me. So they were low beams to begin with.
No, cars in EU actually have periodic inspections that include lights test.
I wish we had inspections where I live in the US. We don't even have emissions tests. Some of the vehicles around me are just horrible.
I remember when driving in the EU (France) that most cars allow you to adjust the angle of the beams, so you may have more light but it's often pointed down.
Unsure if that was just the few vehicles I drove or if it's EU-wide.
The adjustment you’re mentioning is most likely the knob for angle adjustment which are used if driving with a heavy load in the back. Some cars has suspension which levels the car automatically, for those the adjustment isn’t necessary.
Angle adjustment is useful even when not carrying a load. Angling the beams down onto the road at dawn and dusk provides good be-seen visibility without creating glare for other drivers.
Cars without manual angle adjustment have lost that courtesy gesture and just drive around glaring all the time.
Brightness of two headlights is not a single floating point number.
There are regulations governing the spread/angle, the minimum brightness, the maximum brightness, how much an object at X distance is illuminated, whether the angle of the beams is too bright in the vision of oncoming drivers, etc.
and most manufacturers are guilty of dieselgate style skirting of regulations while upping the ante in the war to create the brightest most blinding headlight
This recall is for the high-beams. And yes, the EU allows brighter high-beams than the US.
This seems to be the extent of the recall. But there are other differences between the EU and US. For example, on what the headlights are illuminating. US headlights shine more light off to the right of the vehicle than EU and I think it is due to the assumption that roadside signs are more often lit via headlights/refection in the US vs sign-mounted lighting in the EU.
I think most people agree that EU regulations allow for significantly better headlights than US regulations allow. But those better headlights must be paired with an expensive adaptive system or they become terribly dangerous. If you compare "cheap car" headlights in the US vs EU they are probably very similar in performance.
Porsche is also based in the EU so starting with a design that meets EU specs and then adjusting export models as needed is probably their procedure anyway
But also, since it's a software-addressable issue, and because this process is likely such a headache, I wonder if in a couple of years they'll have a version that picks its headlight configuration based on your location. You'll drive over a border at night and do a slight double-take as your lights change their beam width or something.
Presumably, if there were a way for the headlights to comply with both US and EU regulations, they'd just have them be that way everywhere...
Unless someone in the marketing department has determined that headlight brightness is a selling point for 0.001% of customers, in which case they'd configure them to the maximum allowed in the region.
Ideally, a universal standard that balances both approaches would be the safest way forward
>So are the US and EU both saying that each other's way is wrong and too dangerous?
Real life disagreements on minor technicalities between competing bureaucracies are not zero sum or conducted in breathless hand wringing internet rhetoric. It's more like a disagreement on a FOSS mailing list.
I believe EU allows directionally controllable projector headlights (my description, I don't know the official name). These can be brighter because they can be directed away from oncoming traffic. The US, in contrast, is lagging in approving this technology and puts an absolute limit on the brightness.
I'm not surprised there's a disagreement. I'm surprised the disagreement is both sides saying "our way is safer", rather than it being one side saying "this safety benefit isn't worth it" and the other saying "yes it is".
> I'm surprised the disagreement is both sides saying "our way is safer"
That's somewhat common for US/EU safety disagreements. Here's the canonical example, from back when the TTIP was still seriously being considered: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nadiaarumugam/2012/10/25/why-am...
The problem isn't the disagreement in specifications. It's the poor German quality control that doesn't prevent these mistakes from happening. This wasn't a significant problem when the parts were physically different for different markets and the assembly line would ensure the wrong parts weren't present.
Was buying a new car headlight last year and the sales associate pointed me to replace my halogen bulbs with new (more expensive) LED "fog lights", but they were clearly labelled "not legal for use on public roads". I wonder how many people get upsold on headlights which are actually illegally bright and never notice.
It's not only that they are bright, but also that halogen optics aren't appropriate for the emission pattern of LEDs.
OSRAM has now made an LED retrofit kit for halogen reflectors that is approved and road legal everywhere in the EU - it's just very expensive for the time being, I'd have a hard time justifying it.
https://www.osram.com/ecat/NIGHT%20BREAKER%20H4-LED-LED%20hi...
For me the big advantage of LED over Halogen is the service life. Back when i had Halogens i had to switch bulbs at least once a year, depending on your car you may have to go to a garage to have it done. 130 euro for a set of LED retrofit bulbs would be worth it just to avoid that hassle.
Well not everywhere in Europe. I have Philips version of LED bulbs which replaced my halogen lights. They are great, and they have the same beam form so they don't blind anyone. At the same time, they wanted to fail me on the annual inspection because "a car which came with halogen lights cannot have LED lights". Next time I'll put halogens just for the inspection. Completely moronic laws.
>>they wanted to fail me on the annual inspection because "a car which came with halogen lights cannot have LED lights".
Sounds like the tester was trying to be clever - afaik in most places the test is checking if your beam pattern is correct using a machine that measures it in front of the headlamp. What is inside the headlamp shouldn't matter to them in the slightest - either the beam is correct or it isn't. But I don't know where you live so I can't comment on the law in your specific country.
In a TÜV inspection in Germany, for example, they know what kind of lamps came with your car, or what retrofit lamps are type-approved for your car, and will fail you if you have another kind. How does TÜV SÜD know what lamps are approved for your car? They are also the organization that does the type approvals.
They also will fail you for having polished or otherwise refurbished the lenses instead of replacing them. Basically they are gigantic hardasses about headlights.
That's not correct. Projector headlights can still be used with LEDs and pattern will be correct. Reflector units aren't compatible. Halogen->LED like Halogen->Xenon isn't allowed in Europe if a car doesn't have automatic levelling and headlight washers.
The most annoying thing for me is the "blue fringe" on a lot of modern headlights that use lenses to refract and focus the light. These lenses aren't the best and have chromatic aberration, resulting in a fringe of blue light at the top of the beam.
Result: people see flashing blue(-ish) light in their rear view mirror. Not a good thing, very distracting!
I had this the worst the other day. A car was following me and I kept thinking there was an emergency vehicle behind because I could see the blue fringe.
The worst thing about all these lights is they aren't static. For a start I can see the LEDs flickering, presumably due to PWM. Why a fully DC circuit that doesn't even dim the bulbs needs to use PWM is beyond me. But the worst is their "clever" auto levelling and dipping etc. It just looks like the light is constantly in flux which is really distracting and annoying.
Xenon bulbs run with an ac inverter
Interesting. I didn't know that. Looking around online it seems they run at a frequency around 250-300Hz which may be noticeable. I notice it more when lights are far away and in my peripheral vision. I assumed they were LEDs because I've definitely noticed it with LEDs but I guess they could be xenons too.
Always interesting about how people get angry about headlights in the USA.
Being from Europe, the European ones are superior. They go further and they are brighter, and have a different cut-off: ECE vs DOT: https://i.ibb.co/ryf8W0w/dotece.jpg
When I lived in Europe (Belgium) every year the beam height was checked on my car. That way I wouldn't blind people when driving behind them.
Here in there US there are no such things, yet cars often enough get headlights replaced which aren't adjusted afterwards. Or people install a lift-kit which hasn't been taken into account when designing the vehicle.
Now I wonder if the Macan has different lights in the US vs ROW, as the cut-off isn't something that is easily changeable, and it would massively increase the cost for something that is never activated.
But having the same bulbs makes sense.
That said, I looked into replacing the headlights on mine, but then you end up with a Frankenstein's monster car, as parts of it are US coded, and parts EU. I did get EU mirrors.
> Being from Europe, the European ones are superior. They go further and they are brighter
Driving in Europe, I get constantly blinded by french cars and their headlights.
Those headlights are just way too bright, combined with shitty engineering. The automatic ones don't turn off fast enough. Then you have people blinking at approaching cars to trigger that sensor. Many drivers don't bother manually turning them off, on some cars the headlights are still controlled by a rotary switch that requires you to take your hands off the steering wheel, while on others the auto-headlights aren't easy to re-enable if you had to manually turn them off once so people don't bother turning them off at all.
> European ones are superior.
No they aren't. Driving on the roads in continental Europe I see it all. LED lights with blue glare, road beams with strength of high beams, adaptive strobing LED/laser headlights, adaptive LED/laser headlights scanning surroundings with top-down bright horizontal line, badly adjusted headlights directed and the eyesight level. Includes brand new unmodified cars.
The occupational hazard of driving a really low to the ground Mini is that every new car with Bright-Ass-Lights (our family name for them) heading towards me is a punch into my eyeball. Fortunately I can flip the rear-view prism mirror to deal with similar vehicles behind me. The new trucks - raptors and f-150 - are particularly obnoxious, they are 2x my height and terrifying.
High beams are becoming some kind of weapon here in the EU. You have red spots and lines for some time when you happen to encounter a Porsche SUV heading your way angrily flashing at the one in front of them. What‘s next? Lasers? They are just too powerful.
> What‘s next? Lasers?
Yes!
https://www.kyocera-sldlaser.com/bright-solutions/automotive
Not quite. Despite the branding they’re using SLDs (Super Luminescent Diode). Sits between diode lasers and LEDs in terms of power, coherence, and bandwidth.
Still obnoxious to use on the road.
BMW has been using them in their higher end cars for many years now.
Asserting their asshole reputation with the latest tech.
I thought they already used lasers
EU? Switzerland being the worst!
Related:
1) indicators ( eu flashing yellow ones) are getting smaller: ok at night, but during the day...very hard to see. I prefer the US red brake/ blinker to these tiny mf's.
*2 Animated (EU only?) yellow indicators. The transition between each segment (usually five?) is always too slow, and very distracting. I prefer the US, and very terrible, blinky-brake lights to these disco-on-xanax horrors.
3. Why can’t there be a sign for 'zippering' where traffic merges?
4 - Why can’t people just zipper-in anyway?
> Animated yellow indicators [are] very distracting
Completely agree. If I buy a new car, I will ask if it is possible to turn these off out of respect for other drivers!
> Why can’t people just zipper-in anyway?
Because people still think they're somehow going to arrive 30min faster by not merging one-by-one, ignoring the fact that by not letting others in they're actively slowing all other traffic down. Then have all other nervous drivers looking for the first opportunity to cut someone off because they're not going to be able to merge otherwise and you end up with all those crashes near the ends of merge lanes. It's a driving culture issue, varies by country.
Regarding point 3. Different countries we have slightly different signs and road markings but signs for merging is a thing. Example from Denmark: https://koerekort--guiden-dk.translate.goog/sammenfletning/?...
Only the Macan? They should recall about 1/4 of new cars if we're to believe what I see when night driving...
I passionately loathe Porsche headlights in general. The particular pattern of 4 very bright dots constantly tricks my eyes into thinking they are focusing incorrectly which is distracting and borderline painful. The Macan EV's pattern of lines rather than dots actually _alleviates_ this problem for me so I'm somewhat disappointed it's _this_ Porsche and not every other one on the road whose headlights are being replaced.
The headlights aren't being replaced, it's just a software fix. Still a bit of a fail for Porsche if a software fix requires a dealer visit and can't be deployed over-the-air, though.
In general new cars have annoying lightings in compare to old cars
I guess it is the LED to blame. Many small bright spots instead of a bigger, but less bright single light source
This is a general problem in the UK: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/apr/02/uk-governmen...
In the mean time, whilst we wait for our ancient laws to catch up to the advent of the LED headlight, it would be really cool if everyone could find that little bit logic and intuition in themselves to do their best to adapt something like this, as their ~"etiquette"~ for night driving;
AUTO HI-BEAMS: OFF (always OFF)
HI-BEAMS ON: ONLY when there are no cars in front of you
APPROACHING BRIGHT HEADLIGHTS: Short 2x burst. Resist going further than this, just glance off to the passsenger-side of your windshield and avoid looking directly at the lights, deep in thought...
IF you are FLASHED by oncoming traffic, at least CHECK (the indicator on your dash will be a very bright BLUE) - IF they are ON then TURN THEM OFF. IF they are off THEN give a courtesy SHORT 1-2x flash.
IF the car(s) IN FRONT of you seem to be excessively braking or flashing their HI-BEAMS seemingly at random - CHECK YOURS! Courtesy flash not recommended so much here.
Cars BEHIND you with BRIGHT LIGHTS? Brake tap might or might not help, I also target large traffic signs with some short rapid bursts to hopefully get their attention.
At some point, doing nothing becomes the best strategy. Some people really do love antagonizing.
Stay focused when you're driving, you should be striving to do it "like a pro" and with respect for others.
/psa
p.s. that botton in your light control cluster that you don't know what it is? Leave it off please. Those are your Tow-lamps and they make your taillights extremely bright.
It would be nice to have “blue light cameras” that automatically ticketed people for this, since cops seem uninterested in enforcing it.
Related: https://www.theringer.com/2024/12/03/tech/headlight-brightne...
Ah yes, computer programmers on reddit doing what they do best: thinking that they're so very smart (because they're programmers) and thus more qualified than professionals in their own fields. Can't fool them! They're not one of those sheeple!
> “First, I’d like to teach you some words,”
How has his brain not imploded from the fatal levels of condescension? He thought a writer wouldn't know what "obfuscation" means?
Also: that is a magazine about football, and an article written by someone who writes about culture items like Taylor Swift. It's not "reporting." It's (at best) commentary.
Completely missing: any sources from people who, you know, actually know what the hell they're talking about.
For example, someone who knows what the hell they're talking about could point out that the flood of photos from digital cameras in that subreddit, used as "proof", are from digital cameras which have barely a few f-stops of dynamic range, whereas the human eye has thirty. The very best digital SLRs in the world have a dynamic range of around 14 stops.
Perhaps it's my old age but I feel like either folks drive around with their brights on or new cars have lights that are way too bright.
It's real, and manufacturers are deliberately skirting US headlight brightness regulations
A petition to sign, for those in the US:
https://chng.it/kZbGRfkzMY
Do these petitions actually do anything? I've always assumed they are a feel good measure that accomplished nothing.
At least it's a relatively easy fix, though owners still have to make the trip to a service center
I’m mainly glad to see that this is a recognised problem and not just another thing that I’m noticing more as I get into my 50s
The article also contains the bizarre detail that the petrol version of this is available in the US, but not the EU... due to _cybersecurity_ regulations.
Disappointingly little detail is given on just what the issue is in the linked article... https://www.motor1.com/news/706105/porsche-continuing-gas-ma...
I’m so freaking sick of tall cars/trucks with LED beams that are so bright.
It's a race: brighter lights and tainted glass. Looks really cool. Give privacy to the driver of such vehicle, while allowing them to see the road. Good for them.
But other road users: bikes, pedestrians, old car drivers... They suffer.
The only way to improve your situation: also buy a new car with bright lights and tainted glass.
The more tinted your windows are the brighter headlights you need, easy! You can also wear sunglasses at all times which allows for even brighter headlights. Absolute pro tip - cover the windows externally with reflective foil to return any light anyone will dare to beam at your car.
My little Toyota did dim the light or just lower the light … and hence it is better. You need the high beam all the time in uk roads as they mostly do not have road lights. But keep in switch on and off in my old cars are hard.
But those high beam can kill me one day no doubt. Too many close call and hence the little Toyota i got I feel comfortable to use the high beam all the time.
Regulators asleep at the wheel while drivers and manufacturers are locked in an eye melting arms race to blind everyone else on the road
How odd. I used to own a car that had an easily accessible setting adjusting lights to the EU or UK settings. Surely they ought to be a similar setting in Porsches?
> setting adjusting lights to the EU or UK settings
Many people on the continent need to learn about this. Lot of them are lighting up the opposite lane like if it was the side of the road instead.
I've seen the same thing happen with UK cars here. I don't think most drivers even realise that their headlights aren't uniformly lighting up the road in front of them.
IMO places where people switch what side of the road people drive on (ferries, tunnels, etc.) should put up warnings and hand out fines to people with reversed lights. For cars that don't have digitally adjustable lights, I'm sure there will be money making opportunities for garages near these places where the lights can be physically adjusted.
You can buy special stickers that modify light beams. Adjusting lights is actually mandatory and not doing so can result in a ticket. My old car had a setting for it in the main menu. I used it every time I was driving to and from France/UK.
Any modern car should just be doing that based on GPS since it has the hardware.
I don't see why American Porsches would need such an option? Where is the closest left-hand traffic country relative to the US and how feasible is it to get your car there?
The Bahamas is my guess, and would be relatively easy to ferry a car there from Florida.
The very essence and point of some brands is being a selfish asshole.
I have entirely stopped driving at night because of this. When I do, I drive with my high beams on and sunglasses. If you're gonna be selfish so that you can see 200 meters in front of you, well so can I.
You're literally the type of selfish person you're complaining about.
If you can't beat em join em