Headlamp tech that doesn’t blind oncoming drivers—where is it?

Oncoming drivers? I'm getting blasted by "cars" behind me. Fucking trucks or even lifted trucks with their headlights at my eye level. And it seems like lights are getting brighter as well, or people drive with their high beams on. My rearview mirror is auto dimming, which helps a lot. But since I drive the speed limit these trucks are swerving back and forth behind me, blinding me via the side mirrors.

Man we really really need restrictions on size and weight of cars. It's getting ridiculous out there.

It's not at all clear to me that an actively-shaped beam, which can potentially improperly detect where light should be and blind drivers in that failure scenario, is preferable to simply placing restrictions on how high the light can be.

It'd permit for lights to extend further ahead down the road in some cases, but I have more of an issue with being blinded by headlamps -- sometimes non-stock, improperly-mounted ones -- than with not being able to see far enough down the road at night.

I bike at night often. Very few turn off their blinders for me. It's so bad that I have to come to a full stop until the car passes. If you have ever turned off your blinders for bikers at night: Thank you, seriously. We appreciate it more than you know.

Nobody wants it, they just want brighter lights for themselves to compensate for being blinded by the brighter lights of others, but actually to retaliate, nobody can have brighter brights than me!

We'd need regulations for this, which we'd never get, especially after the Chevron doctrine was reversed.

Your low beams were fine 20 years ago. Don't create this expectation in drivers that they have to turn night into day. That only adds to the problem of asshole drivers prioritizing their ability to see over other people's ability to see. Matrix headlights are unnecessary and create orders of magnitude more light pollution

Blinding headlights are due to poorly aligned low beams, too bright LED headlights, bigger cars with their headlights mounted higher and higher. So the solutions are: low beam alignment that can't be made to blind you by the driver, regulation on luminosity and color spectrum of lights, stop financial incentives to make vehicles large, heavier, deadlier.

I just want to see the day where as a pedestrian I don’t feel like my retinas are fried every time a car passes at night or has their brights on during the day (ugh). I know it is wishful thinking because apparently politicians don’t give a shit about pedestrians (or cyclists).

My problem is my state (MI) refuses to enact any kind of road worthy certification process. We have too many trucks and cars with illegal headlights and brake lights. I've seen green, blue, purple headlights (mostly modded jeeps) and taillights so tinted I couldn't see them stopping during the day. And lifted trucks that never reposition their lights so you are blinded no matter what you drive.

We get laws that stop the new tech of active dimming but at the same time we have lazy chicken shit cops that just let these distracting things that are already illegal just slide on by. Might as well buy an import with the good lights or import the parts and install them yourself.

Nor is losing your night vision to the glare of a car (it's always a pickup) behind you with too-bright lights that fill your mirrors.

It really fucking is. Nothing is a bigger red flag to me than a pickup. 98% of pickup drivers are assholes.

Controversial, but auto-highbeams should never have existed. Turning on high beams should always be manually triggered by the driver.

Nah. The issue is way more complex than that and begins in proper training for drivers and ends in some proper road worthy inspections of vehicles so that they at least have their lights correctly aligned and aimed.

There are no such issues in Europe. Sure, you get the occasional double blink from matrix led system, but I'd take those systems any day of the week over some who just forgot to turn off their high beams or has their lights aimed incorrectly

It seems to me like we didn't have this problem twenty years ago. If blinding LEDs are the problem, why not just not allow them anymore for headlights? It takes 5 seconds to pop in a new incandescent headlight on cars that have them, and well made ones can last 20+ years depending on the construction. Visibility is good and equivalent to some LEDs with higher end lamps, and it doesn't create a superbly unnatural light that impairs the other drivers, pedestrians, or nature. It would also reduce light pollution.

On very rare occasion, the progressive step forward, actually looks a lot like the road backwards. It would take a long time to implement, but anything worth doing is worth taking the time to do it right.

Auto sensing technology is going to be more of a glaring headache in 20 years, when you have half of the cars with failing sensors and everyone getting blinded even worse. Adaptive Driving Beams (ADB) are not a solution, it does not properly address the issues of glare, and it will likely only make the problem worse by further removing human interaction from headlight controls.

It's right here:

All you need is to have all car's lights be horizontally polarized and then all windshields have a vertical polarizer there I've fixed the problem.

Now basically the light would come out and only vertical polarizer light or scattered light would be accepted by everyone's windshields. If you've ever played with this setup on your own using a flashlight and polarizer shades, the color of almost all objects look so cool.

I'd just go for a "feature" that disables the on/off function (leaving the momentary function alone) of the hi-beam when a sensor/s detects light above a certain luminosity. I also think an extra cost to the registration could be tacked on for vehicles that are lifted or otherwise have headlights above a certain height that would scale with the said height.

I'm curious if the problem is how bright LED lights are or something else. I recently bought a car and it has an automatic brights option. Basically, it switched on the brights automatically for some situations. I turned it off because I felt it was turning them on when I didn't need them.

Can anyone explain this part to me, like I’m five?

From the 1960s, Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards allowed for only sealed high- and low-beam headlamps, and as a result, automakers like Mercedes-Benz would sell cars with less capable lighting in North America than it offered to European customers.

That is quite a complex task. Being able to focus the beam in a certain direction is one thing. And it is the easier part.

But where should it focus to? You cannot just base the up/down position of the head and therefore the lamp as such, you also need to know where the wearer is looking left or right of the direction of travel. Just imagine you are sitting in a car and a guy with such a headlamp is coming in your direction. All this biker needs to do is just turn his head and look at you for some reason, and blam! You are staring right into a blazing array of LEDs.

It's because GM has deep pockets and doesn't want to pay one of their competitors a licensing fee to stay competitive.

While my car was being repaired after a crash, the insurance company gave me a rental to use for the duration. The rental company only had a Land Rover Evoque (or something), and that car had the fancy led matrix lights. It was amazing! You could actually see the light being "shaped" on the road in front, going around incoming traffic, it was constantly moving. To me it was a bit distracting though...

because few people in this society spend money on something that makes other people's lives easier.

More and more I am tempted to buy one of those 36,000 lumen flashlights and shine it at people who refuse to remove their high beams. You can tell when it’s just a tall truck and some asshole with high beams.

It's on my new VW ID.7 in Europe at least. Drove during dark for the first time a few weeks ago and it was pretty amazing seeing the matrix headlights "sculpt" the light around other cars.

Distracting in the beginning, but you get used to it.

Honestly, while it does add more moving parts into the equation, I wonder how realistic it is to just take the plunge and go with driving a car via display rather than directly looking through glass.

Ever since we got cars with a pane of glass up front rather than goggles, that's been kind of the standard way that motorists operated -- look through a big sheet of glass.

But that was also a system that was developed based on technology from around 1900.

There have been displays that provide heads-up augmentation of stuff, projected on the windshield. But end of the day, maybe instead of augmenting vision, it's time to just outright go with displays.

I mean, it's more moving parts, but you've got a lot of moving parts, computers and such, already involved in controlling your car now.

Maybe shining really bright lights in front of a car as a way to see at night when traveling at high speed is getting obsolete.

• As people get older, their eyes inevitably don't adjust as quickly to darkness after being hit by a bright light. Can't do much about that short of swapping out all headlights on older cars, even if you produce a new standard. It takes decades and decades to age that out. But this provides an immediate benefit to users of such displays.

• We had an thread up the other day on !news@lemmy.world talking about how people driving tall vehicles that have poor visibility in front create some risks for kids. You can put cameras wherever you want.

• If you're looking out a window, you have some blind spots due to the roof support beams. Doesn't need to exist with a display.

• Other people in the car don't need to obstruct one's view.

• We've gotten increasingly-compelling systems that can process data from the outside world. Here's a video clip from ENVG-B. That's a US military system that can do things like do edge-detection and highlighting -- I believe it aims to specifically detect and highlight humans -- see into the infrared, prevents people from being blinded by flashes (which is a particular problem for the military, with muzzle flash and explosions and such).

• While there is some competition with self-driving cars (if I never drive my car, if the computer drives it, then I don't need to see to drive it) there's a lot of overlap in the problems to solve. For self-driving cars, the car has to be able to generate a 3d model of the world around itself with sensors and such. That's also the same data that you'd need to be obtaining, processing, and providing a human driver with if you wanted to provide an display of the world around oneself.

• You can leverage sensor fusion, combining data from many different sensors. LIDAR, millimeter-wave radar, numerous cameras, hyperspectral imaging, light polarity-sensitive sensors.

• While our eyes are pretty good, there are some environments that we run into, like dense fog or rapid transitions in brightness, that they just aren't all that great at dealing with compared to the sensors that we have.

• If you have the driver driving via display, a lot of constraints on where you place them in the vehicle go away. You don't have the left-hand/right-hand split with vehicles, or even need to have the driver sitting at the front of the car. You can make a vehicle a lot shorter, and still potentially provide for pretty good visibility -- and I understand that wanting more visibility is part of why people buy taller vehicles.

• Windows aren't great in terms of thermal insulation, especially single-pane car windows. If we didn't have to have a lot of a car's sides covered in glass, we wouldn't need to spend as much energy on climate control.

• Windows -- though newer ones have improved on this -- let in a fair amount of solar energy. Be nice to not have the "greenhouse effect" with a hot car that's been parked in a parking lot in summer.

• You can provide for more privacy if people can't just see into cars. Some people tint vehicles for this reason, but tint comes with visibility drawbacks.

• It's not obvious that a parked car contains something valuable left in it, and you can make a car a lot more secure if someone can't just smash in a window to get in.

• Laminated car windshields are pretty safe and durable compared to their early forms, but they're still a weak point in terms of safety; people have had rocks go through them and whack a driver.

• One situation that I recall reading about that apparently has a nasty tendency to hit epileptics is driving down tree-shaded avenues; that can produce the regular flashing at about the right frequency to trigger seizures. If you've got a computer in the middle, it can filter that out.

One downside is that I'm not really happy with the present state of computer-integrated cars in terms of privacy. Like, it's technically doable to build a system like this without privacy implications -- a computer gathering data doesn't need to mean that that data goes to anyone else -- but the track record car manufacturers have here is not good. I don't want to buy a car with sensors that can measure everything around me if what it's going to do with that data is to then have the manufacturer try to figure out to make money from that data.

Another is that cars tend to have longer lives than do computers, as automotive technology hasn't moved as quickly. As things stand today, you can't really upgrade the computer in a car, much less sensors. A thirty-year-old car from 1994 might be perfectly driveable in 2024, but if we built a computer into it back in 1994, it'd have long-outdated electronics. My guess is that the kind of view of the world we could provide in 2054, thirty years from now, is gonna be a lot better than the view we can provide in 2024. I don't really want to throw out a car in order to get a newer car computer and sensors. That's not a fundamental problem -- it'd be possible to make cars that have computer systems and sensors that can be replaced -- but the economics would need to make sense.

Fuck oncoming drivers, blind them more.

People are getting older or in poor health and they can't see when they're driving at night. It's terrifying how many people should probably stop driving once the sun goes down

This could be really simple to achieve with polarisation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polarizer

A polarised filter on the headlight with an other one on the windshield. Reflected light would be non polarised, thus not filtered.

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It's a tuning applied to such cars. You can get it at any sporting goods store. Look for the Louisville Slugger, a fan favourite.

It's existed for decades, until recently it was a non issue

Dont stare into the lights of oncoming traffic. I know it's bright and all but just dont stare directly at them at that'll solve 90% of the problem.