This is a fascinating, long piece about how LED headlights got so bright, how government regulation is sidestepped/manipulated since the measurement of brightness can be elided by the new tech, and how a couple of guys on Reddit have made it their mission to make headlights dimmer.
There appear to be two types of drivers in North America these days: those who think about headlights only when one of theirs goes out, and those who fixate on them every time they drive at night. If you’re in the first camp, consider yourself lucky. Those in the second camp—aggravated by the excess glare produced in this new era of light-emitting diode headlights—are riled up enough that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration receives more consumer complaints about headlights than any other topic, several insiders told me.
It’s not just in the aggrieved drivers’ imaginations. Going by the publicly available data of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, headlight brightness has roughly doubled in the past 10 years—although you probably don’t need convincing if you’ve been paying attention over that span. Something happened out there, and a zap of light causing you to grimace behind the wheel suddenly went from a rarity to a routine occurrence.
My anecdata on this is that our van was one of the last vehicles to have older-school halogen headlights, and even though it’s a tall vehicle, I hardly ever got the “your brights are on” flash from other drivers after dark on two-lane roads. In the first night roadtrip in our new truck, which has LED headlights and has headlight auto-dim (which works well), we were getting those flashes all the time, even though the headlights were dimmed.
Anyway, this has been sitting in my tabs for a long time, and hopefully it’s a bit of a distraction from other, more ugly topics.
Westyny
It’s a lumens arms race. I find that amber night driving glasses help.
NotoriousJRT
And here I thought it was just me getting old and having some difficulty with nighttime driving. I notice it head-on and with vehicles following me closely. Tall vehicles of all sorts are worse.
Raoul Paste
I’m so glad to see this validated. I’ll be asking my optician about those Amber glasses
Tenar Arha
I read this article when it came out, and I definitely tend to agree with it. And like @NotoriousJRT said, it’s worse when you’re driving a car and the other vehicles are all passenger truck-like. And AFAICT the 18-wheelers’ lights aren’t nearly as bad.
MCat
Thank you I hate hate hate those lights. Makes me feel better to know I am not alone.
Professor Bigfoot
I’ve always figured it was because their vehicles are so doggone high these days— the percentage of lifted pickups and especially full-sized SUVs has exploded.
I was thinking about upgrading my project car headlights to LEDs, because I would really like for those behemoths to SEE me and if they’re gonna run me over I want them to do it on purpose.
TONYG
@MCat: In a functioning society (which, of course, we are not) those goddamn things would not be legal.
MattF
@NotoriousJRT: Eyes getting older is definitely a factor. Seeing halos around streetlights and not seeing well in the dark are both symptoms of cataracts.
trollhattan
I’ll assert it is less an issue of brightness than one of beam shape and aim. It does not, however, help if said headlights of any constructions are mounted either side of a monster pickup truck FU grill flooding the interior of your car when behind, in traffic. That’s messed up.
Have HID lights in my car, cousins to theater arc-light projectors, and the beam patterns are tightly controlled by reflectors and lenses, with sharp cutoffs on top that keep the beams aimed ahead and at the pavement only, with little spill upward. An LED cluster can do the same, but evidently there aren’t any DOT rules so go nuts, makers.
Gvg
I haven’t noticed this at all. Of course i have night vision problems that are going to prevent night driving at all eventually, unless the cataract surgery corects things.
Some headlights are too blue and those annoy me. But brighter lights are usually good imo.
Harrison Wesley
I don’t drive, but the lights definitely affect me when I’m going anywhere at night. A lot of this is because Southwest Florida is not geared for pedestrians. Having shitty night vision on top of that makes every attempt to cross Route 41 after dark more of an adventure than I’d like.
Trivia Man
Last night i saw headlights that were really blue tinged. Even the pools of light in the road looked blue.
Trivia Man
Many years ago at the service station i did headlight adjustments. Fun job but it was rarely needed. Special tool attached either suction cups and bubble levels. Simple screw adjustments.
Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq)
1) Headlights are brighter.
2) There’s a generation of drivers that think high beams in urban spaces is OK.
3) Most of the w#nkers described in Item 2 drive Teslas.
Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq)
@Trivia Man: NHTSA is changing regulations to make those unlawful.
Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq)
@Professor Bigfoot: NUPE. Tesla 3s and Tesla Ys are the worst offenders I have seen. And right behind them? Benzes.
J.
I’m light sensitive and hate LEDs. And yes, I know you can buy “warm” ones for your home, which I have, but am clinging to my old low-wattage bulbs.
Professor Bigfoot
@Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq): Not BMWs? [snicker]
Repurposing an old Porsche jape: “What’s the difference between a Tesla and a rose? Well, with the rose, the prick is on the outside.“
kissel
I’ve also noticed some people have light strips installed between the headlights (or maybe they are factory installed, I’m not sure), but those strips are like looking at the sun.
Spanky
Headlights are brighter.
Headlights are bluer, which increases glare, especially in drivers over 50.
Headlights are smaller in diameter, making them intense point sources, also creating glare.
And let’s not let street light manufacturers and highway engineers off the hook, because LED street lights are creating the same issues – over bright and over blue.
Another Scott
From your link:
I think this is a big part of it. The light so is much whiter, so we think it’s brighter even if it really isn’t.
The light distribution from LEDs is also very different than that from incandescent bulbs, so it’s harder to focus and adjust the light ‘throw’ and light uniformity. They’re getting better over time, but it’s a slow process. (It’s why BMW is working on lasers for illumination to replace LEDs.)
A huge majority of vehicles being SUVs and trucks doesn’t help, of course. Headlights are farther off the ground now… :-/
But, yeah, vehicle lights are annoying, especially to us oldsters who remember dim, yellowish lights from cars in the 50s and 60s. ;-)
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Spanky
@kissel: I’ve seen those – no surprise – on the wankenpanzers.
Notthatproud
I haven’t read the article but there is a different issue with newer cars, namely automatic high beams. Automatic headlights have been around for a long time, but in the past few years, they have started to include settings that automatically turn on the brights. I don’t know why you would want that. It will turn on at random times in inappropriate places, like inside a tunnel filled with other cars. Maybe the article mentions it, but NHTSA should ban those.
Jay
With the halogens, you could buy bulbs that were legal low beams, and illegal high beams.
trollhattan
@Gvg:
WAY back the US had standard DOT sealed-beam standard headlights: 5″ separate high and low lamps for quad-headlight cars, 7″ dual beam for dual-headlight.
They were tragically dim for driving above, say, 40 and every car in the land used the exact same lamps. Cheap, too, a few bucks each and available virtually anywhere.
Things began to change in the ’70s when makers wanted rectangular lamps for style changes and pushed the gummint to expand the legal choices. From there they began to adopt halogen lights popular in Europe, which were brighter and broader spectrum. Certainly safer for nighttime highway driving. At first they were only sold as sealed beam but eventually the feds allowed lights having permanent shells that only required just the small bulb to be replaced when it burned out. That opened the gates to headlamps of infinite shape varieties.
IDK who first did LEDs as stock headlamps but they’re super popular now. A small benefit is they’re very efficient, drawing less current and lessening the load on the alternator/EV battery. OTOH they are costy to replace. I had an LED taillight replaced last hear and it was over a grand.
I forgot my point. Coffee!
cain
I love the brighter lights because the rain and lack of brighter road paint it’s really hard to see. It could be old age but I think it’s more the fact that Oregon isn’t great at doing reflective paint properly.
trollhattan
@Notthatproud: That’s weird. Auto-dimming I get, but auto high/low?
Have auto headlamps that come on in deep shade and at dusk, off during daylight. Since the dash is always illuminated it’s easy to forget to turn them on and I appreciate not having to think about it.
karen gail
I have had night blindness problems for years, though getting old hasn’t helped; so I haven’t driven at night unless forced for nearly 40 years.
But what I have noticed with the blue lights that they are a pain even during the day if it is raining or heavy cloud cover; one would think that only day light driving would get me out of the too bright lights but it hasn’t.
Also, Maine has a number of places where the signs tell you to turn on headlights, so they do during the day and often they seem to be either high beam (I have SUV because I wanted to be out of range for most headlights.) or super bright blue lights that can be blinding even on sunny days.
Redshift
LED street lights are also a major factor in light pollution, because if the brightness and especially the blue. They call be hooded to mostly avoid that, but the public safety insight is “more light everywhere, great!”
A friend of mine who likes to take her telescope out in her street and observe is at war with her county to get the new lights hooded to narrow the beam and prevent upward light. At least her house isn’t right at one; the new light basically shines in the windows of the neighbor’s house.
trollhattan
@cain: Yeah, we traveled east last fall and the highways didn’t have reflective bots dots nor reflective striping. Most highway signs were not illuminated. It was an unpleasant surprise and I appreciate our highway department much more now.
Pete Downunder
I have a Tesla M3 and a while ago I started getting flashes from other drivers even though high beams were off. It turns out the headlights were just aimed too high and after being adjusted (which could be done from the touch screen) the issue was solved. So it might be a matter in some cases of the aiming rather than absolute brightness.
Baud
I don’t like those low intensity traffic lights. Too hard to see, especially in bad weather.
Butch
@Professor Bigfoot: I heard that one as the difference between a BMW and a porcupine. Same punch line.
MomSense
Driving on back country roads without streetlights when trucks with wicked bright headlights are driving towards you is absolutely terrifying. Those lights are blinding. I have to look down and pray to dog that there are white stripes on the outside of the road so I can stay on the road. The shoulders are also in terrible condition on these roads so you can end up in a ditch upside down very easily.
I don’t want to drive at night anymore.
trollhattan
@MomSense: Some of those things are mental. Unsatisfied with stock lights, the monster truck crowd add light bars and aren’t afraid to fire them up, even when not jacklighting deer.
https://www.rigidindustries.com/e-series-pro-20-driving-black-121613.html
(The very last spec bullet “Off road use only.” If only.)
Times like that are when I want a frickin’ shark with lasers.
different-church-lady
Corporations are run by sociopaths with simple minds, so “BRIGHTER IS BETTER” is the coin of the realm, fuck safety or thinking.
zhena gogolia
@Raoul Paste: Yes, I didn’t know about them.
different-church-lady
@Notthatproud: When you say “automatic” you mean automatically leave them on high at all times, yes?
different-church-lady
I’m finding it comforting that over the past week I’ve seen people kvetch about some of the same things that drive me batty. But it makes me wonder: if pretty much everyone is in agreement that these things suck, why do companies do them?
kjazz
@NotoriousJRT:
Lol, I came to reply exactly this, almost word-for-word.
I live in a big city, and a part of me (the grumpy old man asserting itself) started thinking there’s a generation of young’uns who probably never have been out of the city and don’t know what high beams are for. They just think “hey, i get more light when i switch this on”
JDM
This^^ Way back in the olden days I had a set of Marchal Ampilux headlights with 100 watt bulbs, the brightest thing around 50 years ago. But those headlights caused far less glare than sealed beam headlights of the time because the beam was shaped to avoid it. On low beam there was a sharp line – below it’s brightly lit; above it’s dark. And the low beam also angled up at the right edge so you could see signs.
Brightness itself is not the problem. Light can be aimed. If the French could do it 50 years ago someone should be able to do it now.
Leto
@trollhattan:
From NAOEVO:
Shape/reflectors yadda yadda play a part, but the HID/LEDs are brighter.
NotMax
Aren’t the majority of stock headlight bulbs still HID, not LED?
Elie
Eureka!
I thought it was largely my problem — getting old, cataracts — It has put me off driving distances at night. Drivers facing you and driving up behind you — its intimidating and dangerous. Its a symbol of what our treatment of each other has become.
Thank you for talking about this… something needs to be done…
Ryan
God bless this post. As a professional pedestrian, I cannot tell you how many times headlights have recently been burned into my corneas, sometime for days.
They make filters that let in the same amount of light, but scatter the light so it doesn’t completely aim forward. I don’t understand why people don’t adopt these, aside from the fact that at the library I work act, the engineers were clueless, but the librarian I worked for was once a theater studies student and knew about all this stuff. Short version, we got the filters, the lighting at the desk worked out great, and the engineers learned something about LED lighting.
JaneE
When we got our 2004 Prius, I got flashed so often that I had the dealer check the headlight alignment. It was fine. Surprisingly, I got flashed more often by semis than cars or pickups. I have auto dim now and it works almost too well. Any oncoming traffic rates dimming, even when the road is a divided highway. There are also more than a few cars around here that always seem to run with their brights on.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
Quite a few folk are driving with their high beams on all the time, it makes it very difficult to see the lane markings on the road. The worst is CA-14 from the Antelope Valley to Santa Clarita.
Elie
@MomSense:
I totally experience this. In the winter add fog which makes these powerful headlights even worse. It IS hard to drive at night anymore
Miss Bianca
@MomSense: Yeah, it is kinda terrifying to be screwing my eyes shut at night on the grade leading to my house with these fucking HUGE new F150s and 250s (which are now the size of 250s and 350s of old) barrelling down on me with those FUCKING BRIGHT LIGHTS and having to drift over to the side of the road in an attempt not to be run into while blinded, praying that I’m not going to run into a cow or a cattle guard or a ditch.
Night driving while Old. So.much.fucking.fun.
Trivia Man
@Spanky: unintended consequences from LED lights: stoplights. After installing LED it was discovered they needed to add heaters. In snowy conditions the old bulbs melted all snow but LED doesn’t get hot.
Jobeth
@Notthatproud: I love my automatic high beams. We have extremely dark roads and it’s great to be able to concentrate on driving instead of switching the high beams on and off as needed for oncoming traffic. They work great and have never turned on in an inappropriate place. Heck they even turned off for the Christmas lights on houses when I turned into my neighborhood.
bbleh
I think a major factor is mentioned near the end of the article: simple selfishness. An increasing number of people simply don’t care about other drivers: they drive with high-beams around other cars, they tailgate, and they generally behave like assholes. Combine that with the not-at-all-related-to-feelings-of-inadequacy trend in ever-bigger, ever-taller, and ever-brighter me-big-man-look-at-me vehicles (which the auto industry, never blameless in such things) is happy to encourage, and you basically have a fleet of actively dangerous vehicles on the road.
Needless to say, I would suspect a very high degree of correlation between the owners of such vehicles and support for Republicans …
trollhattan
@Leto:
Certainly agree the newer technologies are brighter but also, that’s not inherently a problem so long as the beam is designed competently.
Jay
Seeing as we are in complaint mode, daytime driving mode, you know, where people pull out onto the road, at night, with their headlights off, and drive for blocks until they hit a dark patch, and suddenly realize,…………………..
Oh, and get off my lawn,…………………………….
rosalind
forget night-time driving, it seems all the new cars & trucks now have “always on” small headlights that can be just as bad coming at you during the day. the worst are the small circular pinspot lights where when there’s a rise in the road directly hit your eyes and scorch them until the road flattens out.
also the new e-bikes w/always on bright lights during the day that hit pedestrians eyes as they ride past.
and on…
VeniceRiley
@bbleh: Well, I love a biggy in America, but it’s not practical in in the UK at all. Narrow roads that make me cringe! Nevermind I do not want to learn how to drive on the wrong side of the car and wrong side of the road and roundabouts instead of traffic lights
What shall we discuss next in the “Get Off My Lawn!” chronicles? Is there a hoover gadget for picking up dog poop? If there is, I need it now-ish.
Ohio Mom
Oh yeah, those super bright headlights, especially on pickup trucks. Painfully blinding.
Like everyone else, I have stories but we all agree, they need regulating. However, not expecting any progress for at least four years. Sign,
different-church-lady
@Ohio Mom:
FOUR YEARS FROM NOW: Only people who make financial contributions to Trump’s re-election campaign are allowed to have headlights.
cmorenc
FWIW, the LED super-bright headlight problem is a very hot topic on Astronomy forums, not so much because of intrusion into amateur observing sites, but more because of getting dangerously blinded out on the road in night driving for any purpose. Needlessly intrusive / poorly designed lighting in general is an obsessive rant among the astro community, but insanely over-bright LED headlights are a particularly hot issue because of the thoughtless dangerous safety issue they pose to everyone, not just astro folks.
Leto
@trollhattan: don’t agree with it not being “inherently a problem” but the combination of the two make it a hell of a lot worse for everyone involved.
Kelly
If I were the king no headlights could be used if more than 18″ above the road.
Sloegin
@Miss Bianca: Agreed, shoulder-high lamps bright enough to do lasik on a moose are no fun to encounter. I had to give up driving at night.
OldDave
Did you mean halogen (incandescent filament in inert gas) instead of HID (short arc lamp)? HID bulbs aren’t cheap, especially with the requirement for ballast circuitry to control the arc. I think most of those have been replaced with LEDs.
Speaking of LEDs, some makers have LED headlights with multiple LED light sources so they can dim the pattern where an oncoming car is – except that the US government didn’t allow these Matrix headlights until very recently.
And yes, one extreme annoyance with modern automotive lighting are those inattentive drivers who drive at night without turning on their headlights, assuming that they must be on because the daytime driving lights are (somewhat) lighting what’s in front of them. Pay no mind that their taillights are off, making it difficult for the drivers behind them to see them.
Rant over.
Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq)
@bbleh: Interesting correlation to that. The DC metro area seems especially prone to this behavior. Get only as far away as Winchester, VA, Harrisburg, PA or similar distance and drivers become far more mannered. West of Baltimore as far as Manassas and Fredericksburg, though, the arseholery is real.
Jay
On the 4Runner, I had the two beam halogen bulbs, low beam legal, high beam illegal. I also had 6 KC 10,000 watt floodlights mounted on top of the winch bumper, Along with 4 more mounted to a light bar on the roof. The truck was lifted, but the headlights were adjusted for that.
I had a switch board that allowed me to turn the lights on in pairs, sets or all at once.
I did a lot of predawn 4x4ing on very sketchy roads to go fishing, and then driving back out in the dark, so the truck was set up to basically turn 1000 yards in 360 degree’s into bright daylight.
If somebody was high beaming me, I would flash my high beams, a common curtsey,
If they were a-holes about it, ( I would often get some jerk turning on their accessory lights in response, instead of dimming), I would go full daylight on them.
CliosFanBoy
Clios Fan Boy @cliosfanboy.bsky.social
·
I am looking for recommendations for a podcast app (listening, not making). I DO NOT want to use Spotify. It needs to work on Android so I can listen in my car via my phone. Thanks
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@cmorenc: When I shoot in a dark site, I’ll often wait for dawn to return due to the bright headlights(usualy high beams). Then again, if I wait, then traffic. Might as well go for a hike.
Ruckus
@Another Scott:
What I like is 4 wheel drive, jacked up pickups with huge tires and not a speck of dirt on them. In SoCal they are like 20% of the vehicles one sees. (I may be exaggerating – but only slightly) The gas milage must be great, the worry about being hit not so worrisome. Oh well, if it wasn’t for big trucks with less than stellar gas milage with one person inside, what would gasoline companies do for profit?
Jay
@Ruckus:
Don’t look for dirt, look for a Chilcotin Cut Polish.
Monday to Friday, all the 4×4’s I owned were cleaned and shiny.
Weekends, they would be filthy.
The telltale sign is scratches all down the side and rock chips in the paint.
Matt McIrvin
@Notthatproud: My car has automatic brights and I normally don’t use them at all, but I found them tremendously useful when driving around in the semi-rural wooded residential areas we have in places around here, in which you’re basically following a narrow winding path through pitch black deep woods until a cluster of buildings pop up. It’s a lot better than trying to ride the bright lever while you’re trying not to collide with a tree or a deer.
Matt McIrvin
@Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq): used to live there, and yes. This was long before LED headlights, but jacked-up trucks driven by assholes abounded.
Matt McIrvin
@different-church-lady:
Because they only suck when other people use them, but they’re great for the driver who is using them. And that’s the person who bought the vehicle.
It’s just like the arms race of taller and taller trucks. You want the tallest truck so you can see over all the other tall trucks. The situation is escalatingly dangerous but it’s a collective action problem.
different-church-lady
@Matt McIrvin: That’s why I drive a used city bus. I’M UP HIGHER!
cmorenc
IMO the method used for lumen-rating comparison for LEDs (compared to incandescents) is substantially off how they real-world compare. When replacing a burned-out incandescent indoor lamp-bulb with an LED, I find I often need to use the next-step-down wattage equivalent (e.g. 60 instead of 75) instead of the nominal luman-equivalence. I plan to read the linked article about LED car headlights in the frontpage post here, and hope there is an generally applicable explanation in it.
WTFGhost
I thought I saw somewhere elseweb a discussion of technology that can dim headlights in specific regions, to avoid blinding drivers – “adaptive headlights” seems to be the name of the tech, but, there are several such adaptations.
Makes me wonder if the day will come when they don’t give us windows, just cameras. I know some military jets are considering such technology, but they tend to move a bit faster than cars, especially during rush hour. (Oh, come now, tell me you haven’t dreamed of getting a missile lock on some dunderhead, just to prove you could have, or to blast your afterburners, and go all Jetsons home.)
Matt McIrvin
@Redshift: When we were visiting our folks in Virginia, at one point we went down by the Potomac River and my daughter was amazed at all the stars she could see in the sky. The thing is, it wasn’t that dark. The area was pretty light-polluted and we weren’t seeing anything beyond about the third magnitude. But I realized that she had rarely even seen a sky that dark and unobstructed, growing up in our neighborhood in fairly urban Massachusetts.
different-church-lady
LAST TIME I BOUGHT A CAR…
DEALER GIVING ME ORIENTATION: “That’s the head light control. Leave it on auto.”
ME: “Umm.”
DEALER: “No, seriously, leave it on auto.”
ME: “UMMMmmm….”
Ruckus
@OldDave:
Rant shouldn’t be over.
There are a lot more of us than used to be around when us old farts started driving. The vehicles are far better, the brakes work far better, etc. All of what vehicles have become make them work better. But. The drivers haven’t changed all that much, other than being a hell of a lot more of them. And because vehicles are basically better in so many ways, people being people the speed can get higher. Except in places like SoCal where there are always vehicles on the road. And people being people there will always be people that have to get wherever there is faster than traffic allows. And there will be people that are not at their best – or their best really isn’t good enough for the traffic level or their speed. We live with the people that are around us and perfection is extremely rare. Like damn near impossible to find. So actually doing things as reasonably well as possible is the goal. Or at least should be.
Matt McIrvin
@WTFGhost: A major reason to use cameras on a jet is to give the pilot forward visibility when the aerodynamics of the plane make it difficult to do so (the Concorde had a heavy and complex droop-nose mechanism just to give the pilot enough of a view of the runway to land the plane, but if it wasn’t a window, that might have been avoided).
I suppose the ridiculous angry hoods of today’s monster pickups present a similar visibility problem, but it’s for no reason other than aesthetics.
Jay
@WTFGhost:
My Fundi Brother had one great idea, once.
When you got your DL, or renewed it, you got one RPG launcher and two missiles.
So for the next 5 years, you got two shots,……….
So did everybody else,……………..
VFX Lurker
A few weeks ago, I drove on the highway at night. Most of the trip was fine, but then a car with weirdly bright headlights blotted out all other cars from my rear view mirror and reduced my night vision every time I checked my mirrors.
In retrospect, I should have flipped the rear view mirror up to dim those lights. Even so, this car’s lights shone in all my mirrors and made it harder to see other cars on the road.
Mega-bright headlights are not safe when other drivers are on the road.
Ruckus
@Jay:
95% or better of the jacked 4x4s I see around LA County are relatively new, polished and don’t have a speck of dirt on them. And that is because the vast majority of them never go off road. Because we really don’t have a lot of open off road areas around any longer. Decades ago when I started driving there was a lot of off road open for use. Most of it is no longer open or has been closed off because of all the use of it long ago. Also having the population of SoCal there just is not a lot of open, drivable land left. That’s one reason the latest fires were/are such a disaster – they burnt down homes on land not near as much occupied 50-60 years ago. Because there just isn’t a lot of empty flat land left. When I was in elementary school here in SoCal, next to the playground on the other side of the of a chainlink fence was a dairy. Cows walking around, doing what cows do, eat, crap and be milked. School is still there, that dairy is long gone now.
sab
OT: I have had a bad cold for a week. Sleeping round the clock, which I am enjoying.
Our weather sucks. Fluffy snow, six inches at a time so not buried but it adds up. We kept the driveway hill and walkways clear but nothing else. Then warm today so everything started to melt but nothing disappeared. Tomorrow will be subzero, so yard and flat part of driveway will be an icefield for the foreseeable future.
Solomon the satby rescue came up from the basement and has spent the day asleep on a bed in the guestroom!! A first.
His sister Echo is currently sitting on my lap!! A first. Dobby the former Demon Cat is curled asleep on a pillow beside me. He likes both Solly and Echo.
Ponyo the pitbull is watching Scoobydoo on tv with my husband in their new common search for MAGA level IQs
ETA Ponyo looks a lot like ScrappyDoo, but has better ethics.
RevRick
@Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq): I think bad driving behavior is worse in urban areas due to the frustration of being stuck in traffic jams on a daily basis. People just want to get home, but end up crawling for miles, and when the clog breaks, they just explode. It reflects an elevated blood pressure and heart rate.
sab
@Matt McIrvin: My 73 year old husband has never seen the Milky Way.
frosty
Try driving a small car where the headlights of the fucking huge pickup truck behind you are at mirror level. No way to escape it.
Yes, I’ve noticed this whole change. Modern life sucks.
MADA Make America Dim Again!
Bill Arnold
@trollhattan:
Yes, but it’s due to deliberate rules-lawyering. From the article (bold mine):
Ron Skurat
headlight auto-dim does not work well
RevRick
@frosty: Trump is working on it.
NotMax
Wondering what the percentage of the lights people are complaining about (rightfully) are caused by after market installation of too bright bulbs.
I suspect it’s, at minimum, 27%.
Tehanu
@TONYG:
Too right. I’m another who hates hates hates them.
Mr. Bemused Senior
A manifestation of the universal law of crazification?
TheQuietOne
I don’t think I’ve used high beams on any car I’ve owned since I got a car with halogen lights which was probably the late 80s. Low beams were always enough and I never had anyone flashing their high beams at me. Now I have an Outback with LEDs and I get high beams flashed at me fairly frequently. I feel bad about it. I wish there was something I could do about it. I understand EU headlight standards are much better and even with cars using LEDs, they don’t have the problem we have. Thanks regulatory capture.
Butter Emails!!!
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