I know I sound like an old coot but frankly I'm glad my dad showed me how to install/aim headlights and along with explaining the benefits of a working unmodified exhaust system and how it should sound.
Before Fast and Furious, I lived through the slammed mini truck / monster car stereo (speakers, speakers, speakers) craze of the late 80s.
And before that there were many, many trends, like muscle cars, etc.
It's always been like this...
It's also a good reason documentaries, classical and jazz music, and non-fiction books in all but self-help and cookbooks sell poor. I'd love to see a huge textbook covering pre-Calc through intros to harder topics like Real Analysis and Stochastics top the bestsellers for 22 weeks. But instead, people are buying the 5,431st political commentary about how we'll never recover from Trump unless we do everything the author says.
First, I'm not sure what politics versus math reading has to do with the topic at hand - namely, car headlights. Second, you're complaining about downvotes. Third, you're complaints sound like "kids get off my lawn". So yeah... that's why you're getting downvoted.
To more directly engage with your point, politics isn't just an exercise in group think. It has very real consequences for many people - consider the number of deaths per capita in Germany versus that of Sweeden. The difference in response is one partly of politics and resulted in unnecessary deaths.
What didn't land for you, maybe for more people, was that documentaries, classical and jazz, etc. are not as appreciated because they require some effort to understand and thereby appreciate. That was my point about wishing a textbook would top the bestsellers list and not yet another book shilling apocalyptic hypotheticals about Donald Trump that the author always has some magical cure for. It's like self-help politics, but The Secret is "impeach Donald Trump", every time. It's easy. It's low brow after the first dozen books, as it only intends to satisfy helpless aggression in readers. And while it's nothing new, I wish people were as enthralled with a book teaching math or chemistry or accounting. You know, stuff that's useful to people.
If someone wants to write a book about the process of governance, that's one thing. But if it's another pseudo-analysis-by-way-of-emotion book, it's disingenuous to suggest an anti-Trump political commentary is any more useful today than anything written by Ann Coulter.
> I've been here off and on for almost 9 years.
But it's flagged / dead.
Anyway. I'm not a Wrongthink Troll. Just a guy, probably more like you than not in most ways... that has a low tolerance for self-aggrandizing behavior. The tone of the post I replied to just rubbed me the wrong way.
I apologize for the unconstructive nature of my comment. I should have said nothing. Now I just feel like the Tone Police... And nobody likes that.
Comments get rethreaded and killed at the drop of a hat as well. The buried comment was a non-mainstream opinion, so not welcome here. We have a flag on the profile screen to see hidden posts and they are often the best posts that point out when something makes no sense, but just happen to be worded slightly rude to someone else's point of view.
It's definitely not a place for free thought and people voting up discussable viewpoints they don't happen to agree with. You should just take it as a heavily curated slice of SV echochamber that you can examine, but not modify.
Disingenuous headlines are a huge problem and are part of "spin" (aka marketing or propaganda effort).
All available research -- plus tons of anecdotal experience on /. or HN or reddit -- shows that people never read the links that are posted, and, if they did click the link, probably won't read 100% of it. Most people share links without reading articles as well.
The headline is what generates the controversy, and should reflect the actual or original content of the piece. I am okay with mods changing headlines to reflect that. I have no doubt this is a SV echo chamber -- but it's a news aggregator run by Y-combinator, what the hell did you expect?
See also: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/nosacredcows/2018/09/study-con...
https://slate.com/technology/2013/06/how-people-read-online-...
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/why-we-do...
http://thesciencepost.com/study-70-of-facebook-commenters-on...
The car modification scene is only slightly younger than the car.
A dragstrip is a facility for conducting automobile and motorcycle acceleration events such as drag racing.
Although a quarter mile (1320 feet, 402 m) is the best known measure for a drag track, many tracks are eighth mile (201 m) tracks, and the premiere classes will run 1,000 foot (304.8m) races
But honestly, why these lengths specifically?
Many short races, for feet or horses, that started way back when are some number of furlongs.
Right next to the parsec, but only because of the Star Wars references :-)
It worked out so well because it gave people a way to experience car modding and illegal street racing in their own living room. If people are getting their kicks from street racing games... maybe we should make more street racing movies.
I think the nost blatent was when Tokyo drift came out, the next NfS had drift races.
Letting anyone do whatever they want can obviously lead to problems, like headlights that blind people or parts that fall off and kill the person behind them. But overall, I think I like the world where people are free to experiment and create.
Kind of like how smartphones are right now.
The obvious question here is - if you make these features work without paying(assuming you paid for the car outright), is that illegal? After all, you own the heated seats - you just installed an extra switch to put them on.
Versus something like hacking a subscription for satellite radio, where the feature in question is the content the service is providing, which is easier to frame as illegal.
Then there's the case of hacking hour Tesla to enable autopilot. The hardware is there (like the seats) but the functionality is continually updated via subscription.
I look forward to the lawsuits, with the hope that the consumer prevails.
If you try and hack through the DRM on the controller, they might try and get you for copyright infringement on the software on the controller. But if you just write your own controller, things might be different.
I don't mind soft-locked features too much since it can be cheaper for the manufacturer to just install it on everything than to build two separate models; plus it can be nice as a consumer to still have those additional features available if you change your mind later.
*Well, there's been one case where a second hand Tesla lost all the extra features that were paid for by the previous owner and Tesla argued that the new owner had to pay again, but I think after media complained they backed off and reenabled it
Then get a guitar or a paint brush.
Reminds me of the hotrodding chapter of John Muirs[0] venerable How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive [...] for the Compleat Idiot[1] that starts describing the interplay between various systems and how just throwing a hot cam into an engine and calling it a day is a bad idea. Basically - How to hotrod your engine:
1) don’t
2) if you must here’s what you really need to know
It al boils down to how much money police can get out of fines and how many licenses they can suspend, AND how easy they can do that.
If they lack measuring equipment, the fine is too low, police won't bother enforcing a law.
In Germany, headlight aim is checked at the 2-yea mandatory inspection, dito for exhaust stuff. Is that not a part of US checks?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_inspection_in_the_Unit...
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX%3A...
Here (Italy) you have the first check/inspection after 4 years (for a new car) and from then on every 2 years.
Untrained people fiddling with their cars didn't start with The Fast and the Furious! If anything, this era marked the beginning of the end of all that.
The old timers "aged out" and into better, stock cars, and the young kids coming in could actually only do less with the available cars (modding anything reasonably recent is a frustrating and expensive task, and so were limited to things like headlights and exhausts).
When I wanted to put a small new lip spoiler on my car I got an insurance quote for 4x because of it. Suffice to say I left it stock.
Apart from that, not sure. Top Gear was always pretty good when it came to car culture, it's just a lot of surface level "car fans" just follow their word and end up being the face of the trend.
If anything, they get their inspiration from across the pond. TG is an older man's comedy show.
I think I spent roughly half the drive back with stars in my eyes from people in Audis and BMWs blowing by me with their ridiculously bright headlights. If I made the mistake of checking my blindspot at the wrong moment of glancing in the side mirror when one of them was blowing by me I'd be left half blind.
I don't know whether they were driving with their high beams on accidentally on a crowded expressway or if their lights were just that bright but it was a damned menace. Give me shittier yellow old style bulbs any day over that.
When people improperly load vehicles, especially when towing things like boats, the headlights tip upwards. You were probably seeing overloaded vehicles, trailers with high tongue weights because they pushed everything to the front rather than center the cargo over the axle. That pushes the back of the truck down and the headlights up.
1. Pickups are comparatively very popular in the US.
2. The US has more stringent regulations for towing than the rest of the world; a vehicle rated to tow 2000lbs in EU often is rated to tow nothing at all in the US. [0]
1) No tolls roads
2) No mandatory vehicle checks
3) No traffic cameras
My state gets a lot of things wrong, but they get those 3 things right.
I used to drive a Fiat X1/9, which is a very low car by modern standards, putting me on eyelevel with SUV/truck headlights. Preserving night vision can be more important than stereoscopy
You can see this effect clear as day when it's foggy - every other vehicle with projector headlights are aimed down, at the road, yet Toyota's (and Corollas especially it seems) are very blatantly aimed up, and at best are exactly level (which is still incorrect).
Honda drivers, on the other hand, seem to leave their high-beams on as a hobby. Over the 100k miles I've put behind the wheel of my truck in the past year, I could count on one hand the number of cars that have left their brights on, total. You'd need both hands to count the number of Honda's daily.
In the country I live in you’ll get honked to oblivion if you mess with that and blind the other drivers.
brightness isn't the issue, precision is.
Unfortunately those fancy LED setups are a headache for the rest of us drivers sharing the roads with those models, because they're also bright as hell from the factory.
Fortunately the tacky way Audi had implemented its rear-lights signalling wasn't adopted by the wider industry, and I think the VW group itself is having second thoughts about it. A rear-light should only inform me about the driving intentions of the car's owner, not visually distract me with its rear-life <marquee>-like implementation.
They're bright but they're not pointing to your eyes because that's not allowed in Europe either.
If you stand in front of your car and look at its LED lights, then duck down and look at the actual beam, you'll realize the great difference.
Even normal halogen bulbs can be blinding to other drivers if they're aimed too high. That's why such aim setup wouldn't let the car pass the MOT test either.
I agree however that the sweeping led indicator implementation isn't really of value
Really? I'd say about 10% of cars here are LEDs and an additional 25% are Xenons, and honestly it isn't particularly bothering. They don't blind you because the beam is pointed downwards.
> Fortunately the tacky way Audi had implemented its rear-lights signalling wasn't adopted by the wider industry, and I think the VW group itself is having second thoughts about it.
Not sure about that, they're rolling it our across VW models now, and Renault (or was it Peugeot) have started copying it on some models...
My bad then. At least I think they made the newer implementations a little bit less obnoxious, I can only notice them on Audis that are a few years old (like 2013-2015, even newer), on the newer Seats or Skodas they are not such in "your face".
> They don't blind you because the beam is pointed downwards.
Maybe the drivers around these parts of the continent are doing it wrong, thing is that driving at night has become particularly challenging when there's even slight traffic coming from the other way. And I don't think I'm that old (I'm 39) or with a particular bad eye-sight. It also doesn't help that I drive a small 1.4l hatchback while the majority of newer cars seem to be higher CUVs/SUVs, in which case them "pointing their lights downwards" practically means them pointing the lights straight at me.
People don't realize that with these lights, they put their own safety at risk.
But then we have TÜV and all kinds of laws around that.
Is this still a big problem? While I would have agreed with you, say, back in the 2000s when the whole "import tuner" craze was in full swing, I don't think this is popular anymore. The car mod scene seems to be close to extinct now, with whats left being a lot less crazy than those in the past.
Especially true for midwest drives across long stretches at night where the brightness is much more annoying than in the middle of a city.
If the truck is lifted, the brightest points of the light can hit you from further away, worsening the problem.
It is also bad when someone is behind you with this setup, especially lifted trucks. Some cars have a rear mirror that can dim them to tolerable levels, but not the side mirrors. So you'll get flashes from them as you drive unless you lean forward or angle the mirrors away.
The US National Highway Transportation Safety Administration actually has a suggestion for eliminating the glare and reducing blindspots [1]
https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.dot.gov/files/blindzonegla...
What is worse about the LEDs is that they are sold as "compatible" to various vehicles, when that means they will work mechanically/electrically, but not optically (some actually try to put LEDs in the same spot as the filament). All of the units I've seen cause the car headlamp to put out light at higher angles than a halogen bulb will, causing more glare for opposing traffic.
No. Retrofitting Xenon bulbs is an expensive pain in the ass compared to dropping in some LED replacement bulbs for a marginal increase in light and little to no increase in glare or change in beam pattern because they're made to be geometrically equivalent to the halogen bulbs they replace (which they kind of need to be in order to work adequately in all possible applications for whatever bulb they replace)
At the very high end you can get stupid bright LEDs but pretty much nobody does that because they are expensive.
Most of the glare you see is from OEM headlight assemblies (regardless of the type of bulb installed) that were simply not designed with not blinding other people as more than a "check the compliance box so we can get back to optimizing for every other metric" sized priority.
Apparently it was to reduce dazzle and glare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_yellow
In other EU countries they were however allowed up to a certain date (in Italy they are accepted only for vehicles built before 1993, and in the same date France made them not mandatory).
The yellow is not "a" yellow it is a very specific one, called "Selective Yellow":
Granted, I'm no expert on fog lights, so I could be misunderstanding the details of the situation. I've never owned them, so I haven't had occasion to know how they're supposed to work. All I really know about them is that they regularly blind me when I'm driving at night.
The Astrolux MF01 was all but made for this. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32976932742.html
After that, as a pedestrian I'd rather have a full beam to the face than think a car might not have seen me, even if I'm safely on the pavement.
This sounds suspiciously like "There Are No Bad Safety Measures"
How are you at risk from a driver not seeing you, if you aren't anywhere near the road?
If a driver has to travel that far off the roadway to reach you, that driver's issue isn't low visibility.
Occasionally (and in my experience it is only a handful of poor actors compared with the number of cars on the road), I'd take getting intense glare as a pedestrian if it works in everyone's safety.
Appreciate it's a different call for cyclists etc, but as a pedestrian I'd welcome the trade off more than drivers not using their full beams when they deem it neccessary.
Another term for "What It Could Be" is "What It Isn't".
Your comment implied that drivers who instinctively switch on their high beams to get a sense of a situation where they need more visual input are "jackwads" which I tried to highlight isn't the reason they're doing it.
Wanting to see more when you're driving a massive piece of machinery at decent speeds isn't something that makes you an outright asshole.
If they've blinded countless pedestrians over an extended period, then they aren't considering anything. Inconsiderate people are jackwads.
Disobeying traffic laws in order to be nice is tricky, especially if doing so has an remote possibility to cause an accident. The blame will always be on the driver.
We should be glad the kind of person who would go out of their way to endanger themselves and others with something as useless and petty as... retaliatory light flashing is on a bicycle instead of a 2 ton vehicle.
The people who give cyclists a bad name are never self-aware
The xeon light addon for a porsche in 2013 was $2k.
Life safety is certainly a bigger factor with the headlights, but all other aspects are orders of magnitude more disruptive on the acoustic side. Having bright-as-sun headlights driving around town at 3am is not going to cause a lot of trouble for most residents (as they would be indoors sleeping peacefully). On the other hand, someone driving around at 3am in a turbo diesel truck with muffler delete may be able to single-handedly rouse your entire town from its slumber.
Which one of these actors has the most adverse net impact on society?
I suppose in terms of net impact to society, there's no way of deciding without knowing in advance if the hypothetical victim is Mother Theresa or Hitler, so it's kind of a wash.
But for me (and feel free to disagree), I'm going to err on the side of preventing a devastating impact to a small number, over a minor annoyance to many.
I mean, hey -- i'm usually happy about automotive modifications that the police leave me alone about, but this aftermarket headlight trend is many times worse than a nuisance loud exhaust -- it can literally blind you for seconds during night driving.