Car headlights these days

Is it just me or are some of them akin to landing lights on a UFO? You know the ones I mean white/blue blinding when approaching you.

Down with this sort of thing.

Funny you should say that… A car was behind me the other day and I thought he was going to blind me.. I kid you knot they were distractingly bright. I flicked the thing on my rear view mirror but the glare from my wing mirrors was irritating, driving down a country road near where I live it was getting on my nerves. He wasnt driving aggressively or anything and when I turned off he was just in a new “sporty” Jag so yes they are becoming unnecessarily bright.

around here they are increasingly only 50% working… so i guess they are brighter to compensate for only one working half the time.

yes cant stand the things… range rovers seem to be the worst…

Outnumbered around my way by the fannies with one light / no lights / day running lights only / full beams / fog light and no headlights / fog lights and main lights when not foggy.

But yes also annoying. It’s especially noticeable when the road has a rise in it and the oncoming beams are dipped straight towards your eyes.

Yeah, brake-lights too. I’ll change lanes if i get stuck in traffic behind new cars, gives me a headache!

I believe drivers are making similar comments about mountain bikers with some of the lumenage available these days.

Maybe lights are getting brighter as people get dimmer?

I think this is a little ironic as a little while ago, people were saying bike lights were too bright! even made it onto radio 2.
Car lights are too bright, especially when driven really close.
Its light wars!!

And if you wear specs, LED headlamps can have a blue ring which can flash over bumps, which is tedious.

yes, but it keeps the old dodderies with cataracts off the road at night…

They also seem to be very directional in the vertical plane, which means the slightest bump makes it look like oncoming cars are flashing you.

Driving home fro Christmas I was followed down an otherwise deserted bit of dual carriageway by some numpty who thought a good solution to only having one working headlight was two have the other on full beam 😡 He was driving slightly faster and blinded me for about 5 minutes. When he finally got passed I was so worked up I put my full beams on until he was out of range. Childish, but satisfying 😈

It’s like déjà vu all over again in here:

http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/bloody-inconsiderate-drivers

Its a fair comment. My current car (Merc c220 Coupe) has the xenon auto headlight system. It puts the main beam on when there are no other traffic around which is nice. It does however seem to have its fair share of ‘delayed’ moments.

They are quite bright and i get the annoyance. My wife is starting to have real trouble with her night time driving as she says she is getting a haze effect from these brighter lights from other cars when she drives her Fiat 500. Maybe the angle of windscreen effects this too.

And then we move onto the current must have which is LED headlights (Not the LED DRL’s). These things are even brighter and as some have commented are also used on rear lights. Its getting harder and harder to not be effected by them.

Still, none of it is as bad as the driver who drives with one headlight out or with their rear foglight on (Especially in hard rain). Those guys deserve to be shot for endangering others.

Bizarrely I’ve been having similar thoughts recently.

In my experience the stupidly bright lights on some cars these days make it a lot harder to see other road users at night as they just burn everything else out of vision.

There is a new advert on the telly for the new Vauxhall astra, with a fox forced to close his eyes.
They are saying this is a safety feature, who are they kidding?
What bugs me is the insistence of using full beam when I am cycling towards them, I put my arm up and make it obvious they are blinding me, doesn’t stop them though.

Yeah, brake-lights too. I’ll change lanes if i get stuck in traffic behind new cars, gives me a headache!

And no-one uses their handbrake these days. They will sit in traffic for ages with their foot on the brake pedal.

This sounds like a thread on The Daily Mail…..

I put my light on full beam back at them. Or point my head light at them. On full beam.

Just a flash.

We have a car that has a *really* annoying thing of always wanting to have the fog lights on – the dealer had to go away and phone and find how to de-activate.

We still cannot stop the thing where the fog light turns on the inside of the turn – it cannot be turned off according to Seat….

😈

Those guys deserve to be shot for endangering others.

Hey! I replaced the bulb yesterday okay. 😐

Driving home fro Christmas I was followed down an otherwise deserted bit of dual carriageway

Probably Chris Rea 🙂

matt outandabout – Are you mixing up fog lights with daytime running lights? Different things

All new vehicles sold for the last few years have to have DRL’s which are on permanently. I dont think its law yet that they have to be turned on so you can decide to turn them off if the vehicle has the option. Ours have the option in the menu system to turn them off (So does my wifes fiat 500).

its guide me home lights he has by the sounds of it ….

never understood them – i mean the orange flashy light tells the others where your going….

Hey Graham, i would never ask for you to be shot.

Wife had a DRL out recently on a fiat 500. Trust me i hate changing them. I went into hospital the next day for an operation (Unrelated)and they had to use the other hand to put the canular in as i had made such a mess of my skin on the back of the hand trying to get my normal size hand into a stupid size hole 🙁

I can live with it, what annoys the **** of me is that even with a pajillion lumens of lighting power, bellends still put their bloody fog lights on. It doesn’t make you look like a rally driver mate, just a sad git. Give it up.

Yep, I sliced open the base of my thumbnail yesterday trying to get the Focus headlight cluster off (one star-head screw, plus two carefully hidden plastic catches that are barely visible or accessible, plus a very snug press fit).

Didn’t take long but it hurt! Glad I did it in daylight though – it would have been a nightmare in the dark.

Yes, they are stupidly bright and completely unneccessary. I thought Xenon lights were bad but these new matrix LED lights are even worse. The totally drown out bike lights – I very nearly pulled out on a cyclist the other day at a junction because his lights were completely drowned out by the glare from the ultra bright car lights behind him. The only reason I didn’t pull out was because out of my peripheral vision I thought I saw a slight shadow.

For the record I think the bright bike Cree lights are too much for road commuting and usually always incorrectly aimed at the retina’s of the other road users – it’s generally not the best idea to try to blind the drivers you are trying to avoid.

The worst thing about car headlights is not that they’re stupidly bright, but the type of light in that it seems to scatter and cause more glare.

Are you mixing up fog lights with daytime running lights?

I presume matt was talking about the VAG cars that have fog lights coming on when the wheel turns.

The ones that are really bright with a razor sharp cut off are the worst. When there’s a car with those fitted following you, every time there’s a bump in the road it flashes in all your mirrors like they’re flicking their high beams on and off.

What bugs me is the insistence of using full beam when I am cycling towards them, I put my arm up and make it obvious they are blinding me, doesn’t stop them though.

I ended up stopping in the middle of a single track country road near Haldon a few weeks ago because I was so dazzled I couldn’t even see the edge of the road to pull over. The car coming the other way had to stop 10 ft from me before he realised he had his thermonuclear brights on. Plonker. I assume they just think “Oh, it’s just a cyclist, no need to use dips”

Still never noticed this phenomenon but there’s lots of idiots who fail to turn off their full beam.

Still never noticed this phenomenon but there’s lots of idiots who fail to turn off their full beam

Love the people who just have the one headlight working so put it on full.

I can remember my Grandad going on about headlights getting brighter and not being able to drive at night anymore. Its started happening to me so I did a bit of googling and its all down to age..

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1771460/%5B/url%5D

Brake lights are staying on because Auto-hold keeps them on, not because people are sitting with their foot on the brake. And yes, it’s annoying. I usually pull the parking brake lever so as not to blind people behind me.

Cars with fog lights on annoy me so much that I usually flash them in the hope the idiots will crash. Haven’t succeeded yet.

less folk have neglected to dip their headlights on my flash request since i fitted a 1600lumen light bar in the A bar – to assist my classic firefly in jam jar lucas 7 inch lights.

Wear sunglasses !

Brake lights are staying on because Auto-hold keeps them on, not because people are sitting with their foot on the brake

I wager you’re wrong on that unless there’s 10000s of car out there with auto-hold as in a queue nearly all have their brake lights on.

OP,

Ya, that UFO lights do blind eyes if you look straight into them.

Luckily mine is the old fashion normal light … 2005 Toyota so old fashion lighting.

😯

Love the people who just have the one headlight working so put it on full.

If I find myself with only one headlight in the dark then I just put my front fogs on.

Not sure if that’s better or worse… ?

They will sit in traffic for ages with their foot on the brake pedal.

Interesting. When I picked up my new car about 3 years ago (a Merc C class auto) it was my first auto and the salesman told me the correct way to drive is to leave it in drive and when at the lights just keep my foot on the brake. I am happy to be educated on this fact.

Place it in park not drive.