Well, and the fact they're just way brighter than ever. When I was younger you could stare at the yellowish glow of a car with headlights on and just not be blinded. We even used to park several cars around a basketball court behind the goals with headlights on at times to play at night.

Maybe I just got old or my eyes are peculiar, but that's no longer the case. I cannot stare directly into the new white/blue/whatever lights cars use at all without an immediate reaction of being blinded.

In my opinion, we just don't need this level of lighting at night. My vehicle lights up giant swaths of the fields next to the road and I can see for a hundred+ feet in either direction. I just don't need this level of HD quality night vision, only just enough to see down the road a ways and immediate side of it to check for objects/deer/people.

So now we have these retina scorching lights that are generally fine if the road is 100% flat and the car brand new. Any other situation ends up feeling like everyone is pointing lasers into your eyes.

> When I was younger you could stare at the yellowish glow of a car with headlights on and just not be blinded.

Seconded. And I guess this is about the same thing as has happened to streetlights ?

> When I was younger you could stare at the yellowish glow of a car with headlights on and just not be blinded.

The older incandescent bulbs were a different color temperature (more on the yellow side of the color spectrum) and were not a point source (filament instead). Both contributed to them not seeming quite so bright, even if the net lumens was the same.

The newer LED's are much more on the blue end of the color spectrum (automatically making the same lumen level appear much brighter) and the LED's are much closer to point sources, which further makes the result appear significantly brighter even if the lumen level was the same.

Couple the "harsh blue light" and "point source" with "significantly more lumens" as well and you get modern headlights that are painful to look towards, much less to look directly at.

It would be fantastic if it were possible to dictate a headlight height for standard lights. just because your SUV is twelve feet off the ground doesn't mean the lights need to be positioned there.

> Second, there's a decent sized market for cheap, unapproved HID/LED kits for older cars. They're often not aimed correctly.

This is the biggest problem. Even talk SUV headlights from the factory must meet standards for masking off light and the angles at which they can illuminate.

But when people buy LED retrofit kits and jam them into reflectors not designed for those bulbs, the reflectors don’t mask properly. Light spills everywhere.

I would bet that nearly all of the “headlights are too bright” complaints are coming from people seeing LED retrofit kits.

Those are some of the most offensive lights but I wouldn't say it's the biggest problem. SUVs and trucks often have their headlights at the absolute highest point allowed and it's not uncommon for drivers to install lift kits which raise the lights even higher. If you're in a standard sedan, headlights pointing into your eyes is pretty unavoidable. Even a small vehicle that's oncoming and on a steeper incline than you may shine their bright headlights into your eyes.

There are no government agents going around inspecting all the vehicles coming off the factory line. Anecdotally, my friends Tesla has completely horizontal headlights from new. I could see oncoming drivers faces illuminate and wince in pain. A quick adjustment in the settings fixed that, however the majority of drivers are ignorant of the fact that headlights are usually adjustable.

Not sure there is any real solution other than going back to halogen lights or requiring sophisticated anti-dazzle systems.

How many people are really getting after market headlights installed on their SUVs? There's too many vehicles with blindingly bright lights for that to be the cause.

I used to think it was a lot of people doing it. I drive an older car with what I call "normal" brightness headlights, and the warm color too instead of the annoying blue/white.

But then I had to rent a newer car, and it came stock with super bright blue/white headlights. They were so bright to what I was used to I had to double check the high beams weren't on. The standard lights were as bright as my old car's high beams.

Lights in newer cars are literally just that bright, and I think it's a result of car safety culture being a matter of "I only care of the car protects me" instead of "the car should also be safe for others on the road as well"

I mean, I have those types of lights on my car, but I am VIGILANT about checking that they have a slight DOWNWARDS slope (and I'm in a relatively low sedan to begin with). There's a T-intersection near my house with a retaining wall at the end - very convenient for checking the angle.

Even when I upgraded my old car to HIDs (because I could barely see anything over the other cars), I checked over and over to make sure I was low enough. Also, I ensure I never light up the TOP crease of the trunk of any sedan behind me. If I light up anything inside another car, it's bad.

> Lights in newer cars are literally just that bright, and I think it's a result of car safety culture being a matter of "I only care of the car protects me" instead of "the car should also be safe for others on the road as well"

This theory can't work on its own terms. It'd be hard to make the car less safe for the driver than by automatically blinding oncoming traffic. Brighter headlights aren't a safety improvement for anyone.

They represent car manufacturers unilaterally making the product worse for the sake of having a worse product, just like the replacement of physical buttons with touchscreens.

Unless the testing scheme involves only testing the single car and nothing else.

When my taillight burned out, I went to the local autoparts store to get a replacement. The first light I picked up had printed on the packaging, in not-terribly-visible writing, "For Off-Road Use Only." I had to go back and hunt longer for the light that was legal for road use.

There's probably a decent contingent of people replacing their lights with out-of-spec lights not realizing that the lights are not actually road-legal.

That's not how it works. They can write whatever they want on the packaging. It's the final assembly that's compliant. They're covering their ass in case you put their 5W bulb in some application they've never heard of where it technically fits but a 2.5W bulb was supposed to be used or something.

It's like how aftermarket brake hoses all say "off road use only" despite pretty much all of them vastly exceeding the FMVSS for brake hoses.

The correct bulb will not say that, aftermarket LEDs do. The light reflector housings are designed and tested for specific bulb standards. There are LEDs which try to output light from the same place as the filament in the bulb they are mimicking. But there is no guarantee they function properly, hence the warning and illegality.

If you swap one side and walk around your car, you may see that they are significantly dimmer than the stock bulbs from some or all angles. Or it may work fine. Often times the aftermarket LED dual intensity tail/stop lights have barely any difference between the two brightnesses which is egregiously unsafe

Most Teslas come mis-aimed from the factory and expect their owners to "calibrate" them - they just never tell them that.. Guess how many owners actually figure it out? A vanishingly small percentage.. (or they're all assholes who want to blind others on purpose)

No, new cars are actually just ass.

Aren't there any checks for that?

In EU most DMV equivalents check headlights yearly to catch illegal illumination envelopes (along with other safety-related aspects, brakes and whatnot).

In theory, yes. But, it's state-by-state, enforcement at drive-time is next to zero (unless the cop just wants to hassle you), leaving it to either annual or time-of-sale inspections that are easily gamed (slip the mechanic a $20).

Heck, people will reinstall stock parts for inspection then swap back to the illegal parts. Common with emissions stuff as well.

Only a handful of US states have any type of safety inspection

The only one I've experienced (Massachusetts) wouldn't catch any of what we're discussing in this thread. They put it on the emission testing machine, walked once around the car, maybe checked the brakes, and that was it. It was in no way comparable to the UK's MOT test, which is a proper inspection.

Headlight function (including aim) is on the MA vehicle inspection: https://www.mavehiclecheck.com/motorists-basicinfo

Whether it’s done carefully or not, I doubt, though I did fail one year for headlight lenses too cloudy, requiring a fix and reinspection.

Maine also requires headlight aiming to be checked and compliant.

It's just not done though. There's a list of like 10 items to check, and you are only allowed to charge like $12-$18 for the check, so corners are cut, and your average 18 year old who was given the job of doing the inspection does not care, and enforcement is more concerned with the shops willing to give you a sticker for stuff that is outright criminal, like not really working brakes.

Most US states don't have an inspection regime. Of those that do, it's often just for emissions (and with 2001+ cars, it's increasingly just confirm the check engine light shows up in the light test and turns off when the engine is started, plus check that the emissions computer says ready for test). The driving public does not want to pay for safety inspections.

But yes, if there was a safety inspection, it should include verifying that lights function and that headlights are aimed appropriately. A brightness test might be too complex, but safety inspection would be the place to do it.

> I would bet that nearly all of the “headlights are too bright” complaints are coming from people seeing LED retrofit kits.

Disagree. The "too bright" headlights are new cars. And sedans as well as trucks SUVs.

Another big problem is that the lights are much closer to "point source" than older headlights which were 4-6" in diameter. A modern headlight is more like a 2" or smaller diameter projector lens, which is even more blinding.

My 2024 outback has no 'high beams'. My low beams are the same brightness as high beams. The only difference is the field of view. I switch on the high beams on and height of the beam increases, but intensity stays the same.

I feel awful about essentially high-beaming everyone unless the road is flat.

They are often aimed too high from the factory

> The only difference is the field of view.

That's normal. Low beams are aimed low and often have a illumination pattern reducing light over the median, high beams are aimed high and uniform illumination. Very often, they're the same intensity.

Thanks, previously the only other car I had was a 1995 volvo which used additional bulbs when the high beams were engaged. Intensity and field of view were increased. The outback's headlights were very confusing to me since I leapt through like 3 generations of cars

I wonder if it became normal around the time everyone started complaining headlights were too bright

Most vehicles with dual-filament bulbs will turn off the low beams while the high beams are on, but looking around, I see it's mixed for vehicles with dual bulbs; US standards don't require it one way or the other --- you can meet the high beam requirement with separate bulbs or with both bulbs in concert.

I think complaints about headlights really started when different bulb types came out. HID, projector, and LED bulbs all cast qualitatively different light than the ubiquitous tungsten halogen bulbs that preceded them. A lot of these put out a lot of blue, especially in the fringes that I find very objectionable, and the lumen output seems to have increased quite a bit, as well as the spread.

Halogen bulbs were tightly constrained by power limits and output requirements; but the other types can hit the output requirements at well under the power limits, so they can cast a wider field of view (which is nice), but may need to be brighter in more of the the wider field of view to hit the output requirements in the central portion, and that additional brightness is more likely to cause glare. Of course, all of our eyes have aged as well which makes night vision more difficult, especially with light variance. I remember my parents sometimes complaining about other vehicle's lights when I was young and thought everything was fine, but everyone was using halogen lights back then.

This is how almost all cars with HID bulbs work, because HID bulbs can't be toggled on and off - they need time to warm up and have a limited number of arc initiation cycles before they wear out. So there's a mechanical shutter which changes the cut-off distance. Generally, there is also a leveling sensor which adjusts the cutoff when the car starts up, to account for suspension sag differences and load.

High also refers to the lack of beam cut-off or masking[1], not only the intensity. In UK English, the terms are "full beam" and "dipped beam" to reflect this.

[1] For older US cars, it was more about intensity as the masking sucked. I don't think it's that relevant to this discussion but you can look up "DOT vs Euro headlights" if it interests you.

> Second, there's a decent sized market for cheap, unapproved HID/LED kits for older cars. They're often not aimed correctly.

This, so much this. I'm having no issue with new cars and their LEDs. The aftermarket kits that are installed on 1994 Swifts and Passat B5s are not at all configured properly. They just throw it on the car and "yay i can see more" and sometimes I even think that they are using their high beams. But no, it's just their incorrectly set up lights.

> I'm having no issue with new cars and their LEDs

funny, its the opposite for me. brand new SUVs are by far the worst offenders,

a third thing is some people drive with brights on all the time, particularly in snow-bird seasonal communities, I've noticed. when the seasonal people, many geriatric, are in town, the vehicles driving day and night with bright lights activated is noticable.

Might be some mistaken confirmation bias there. Canadian registered vehicles are required to have "daytime running lights" while American cars are not. You might be seeing low beams vs no beams, as opposed to high beams vs low beams.

We've got daytime running lights for years here south of Canada, almost everyone has them enabled by default, but they seem not mandated still.

Anyway, occasionally F150 / Silverado lights are mis-aimed, so low beams seem bright, but more commonly (here) German and American cars with distinct fixtures for brights vs low beans are driving in daylight with both sets activated. Not sure why, but it's not unusual.

Aiming and beam restriction is not enough and cannot ever be enough to prevent bright headlights from blinding people. It only works when the road is flat. You introduce a hill or even a speed bump and suddenly the headlight angle is zero. Brightness has to be managed directly.

I've seen lifted Miatas...

This isn’t the whole story. I’ve been driving the same Prius compact since 2015, and only I the last few years have I suddenly started experiencing these insanely bright headlights. The giant cars have been around the whole time. The brightest lights seem like they are on specific brands of new cars, although I’m terrible at recognizing car brands and obviously only experience this issue at night when I’m being blinded by headlights, so it’s not easy to figure out exactly which brands cause the issue.