Respect
Man I want to put LED bulbs in my 1999 model year car, but I don’t want to start blinding people. The last thing I want is for someone to hit me because they were blinded. It seems many LEDs do intend to have similar beam patterns to halogen bulbs, but I’m not sure how well they actually do.
Our 2020 Mazda has LED headlights, and I gotta admit, they are much better for seeing. We live off the beaten path, not a ton of traffic, but plenty of deer and other animals.
On the other hand, my headlights in the 1999 had gotten really hazy, and I recently did one of those headlight restoration kits to it, and it worked stunningly well. Since then, I haven’t driven at night very much to get a feel for how much it helped. So maybe I won’t need LEDs. (The halogens in there are relatively new.)
Congress could easily pass a lazy maximum brightness law but we’re too busy stalling a mostly approved daylight savings law because some asshat party leader(s) is waiting to slap 200 riders onto it like another morbillion dollars of tax money to Israel.
It’s so bad people put here are getting illegal windshield tint just to reduce the insane glare.
Of course a real solution would be a proper regulation with tickets for anyone running incorrectly adjusted headlights or anything that is basically acting as a high beam.
Of course a real solution would be a proper regulation with tickets
That would require a municipal government with any real legislative authority, a state government that wasn’t the wholly owned subsidiary of big business, and a police force that considers “driving with overly bright headlights” more worthy of their time than “driving in the wrong neighborhood while black”.
The new trucks in America are all blinding because of how high off the ground they are and the ridiculous number of lumens. It’s like manufacturers just want bigger number, bigger number = better, lol.
I can’t prove it, but I suspect that a lot of people are suffering from having backlit phone, console, and cluster LCD panels in their face while driving. The dim incandescent glow of the speedometer as the only thing illuminating the cabin is a thing of the past. This makes me think that folks actually need more lumens on the road in front of you because your pupils are not at all dilated for the dark.
Meanwhile the color temperature and spectra of LEDs vs halogen lights could not be more different. I honestly think our eyeballs respond to to these things differently and it just so happened that halogen is/was easier on our eyes in a lot of cases.
BTW, I’m not excusing anyone for blinding other drivers where it can be helped, especially manufacturers. That shit drives me up the wall.
It’s mostly the color of the light that’s the problem right? Our brains register the cooler light in the contrasting darkness as blindingly bright as opposed to warmer incandescent light, despite both lights having the same measured brightness (lumens).
I do not think so, the LED lights are just really bright. The human eye is most sensitive to green light. And according to the following graph similarly much to reddish and bluish tones (maybe even more sensitive to the yellow stuff rather than blue) https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-eye-sensitivity-function-7_fig17_343319896
Supposedly car manufacturers even brag about their stupid bright lights, so I do think they put effort into making their lights more and more bright, even if they try containing the beams to the street. I couldn’t find Mercedes’ original ad to this picture though: https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2556223
