The Best Headlights in the World Are Illegal in America. “America’s roads are now full of tactical-grade headlights, and no one is happy about it.”
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Omg yes. A thousand times yes. Headlights are so, so awful.
And some seem to flicker, too? I keep thinking about folks with photosensitive epilepsy.
I thought it was just me and my old eyes and the sharp contrast because Vermont roads are so dark at night (no street lights) and yes, this is true. But a few years ago I was in a rental Toyota Forerunner in a different rural dark sky environment and I discovered I was less blinded! The problem appears to be two-fold: MEGALIGHTS but also installed on MEGATRUCKS! So if you're not also driving miles above the road surface, the MEGALIGHTS go right into your eyes, while the MEGATRUCK driver continues down the road, unblinded, with their vision intact.
(Sorry for the all caps, clearly this issue is triggering me!)
I put a set of Dynamic Light Assist HID headlights from the EU into my 2015 Golf Sportwagen, and oh yes - it is a wonderful feature! Might be a little dangerous at first, even, because one gets caught up sometimes watching the shadows move around other vehicles, but it does do as promised: high beams for everywhere that other cars are not.
One thing the article doesn't cover is the worst offenders being people who just drop 10,000lumen LEDs into their headlights in place of the spec'd halogens. Those spray light everywhere because that's how halogens are designed (yellower light and much lower brightness - maybe 1500lm). AND those LEDs are typically around 6000K color temp, which are way into the "blue" spectrum of white light - halogens are closer to 3500K and good factory HIDs around 4500K.
While neat, this does not solve the problem of blinding other people not in cars, such as pedestrians or cyclists.
Fair enough. But it only works above 60kph so that covers most areas where pedestrians and cyclists would be. And the camera that controls the "shading" looks for light - so a decent headlight on a bike would get shaded.
I used to work in a group that developed light steering technology, primarily for projectors, but also other areas where you might need directed light (3D printing, 3D scanning, spectroscopy, lithography, etc.)
We were looking to get into the automotive space and one application that got some traction was headlights. We were demoing the ability to selectively turn off eliminating windshields of oncoming cars, pedestrians and cyclists heads and reflective street signage.
There were other things you could do with these headlights, since they were essentially projectors. Overlay visuals on the road or even play a movie if you wanted.
One wild application a group worked on was actually detecting raindrops and turning off individual pixels to reduce the glare.
I couldn’t find a great video for the headlights, but here’s a technical marketing video with details:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKFK-4Woc1c
Here is a link to the research group doing the work on the rain with the headlights:
https://www.wardsauto.com/news/archive-wards-smart-headlights-improve-visibility-in-rain/780994/
This problem isn't limited to cars. Practically every cyclist in my area with a forward facing light has it set at retina searing levels even in the middle of the day, not to mention facing directly forward into one's eyes vs facing down to illuminate the road/bikeway.
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