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...

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 upside? It probably saves the lives of some people so reckless they shouldn’t be driving.

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 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.

There's a reason that driving safety is the #1 public policy when a country develops.

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.

Nor are moving violations.

That isn't generally true as the EU favors driver assist technologies such as automatic emergency braking, lane departure warning, and speed limiter features.

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.

> 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).

Do people in the EU consistently behave politely and turn them off when appropriate?

I don't have enough driving experience between the two countries to compare driver behaviour.

and for a fraction of second they are indeed blinding, disorienting, and irritating other drivers and pedestrians

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.

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.

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.

Properly leveled lights should cast the beam below the horizon: any person seeing the headlights situated above the their height should not be blinded by them. I suspect the etymology of "high beam" is because they project higher to allow seeing further (and blinding everyone in the path)

Unsure if that was just the few vehicles I drove or if it's EU-wide.

Cars without manual angle adjustment have lost that courtesy gesture and just drive around glaring all the time.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

This has subsequently changed: https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/nhtsa-allow-adaptive-dr...

(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?)

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.

> held onto analog AMPS cell

*cough* faxes, anyone? *cough*