Interesting, my daytime running lights are always on unless I turn the headlights on or park and engage the parking brake

The problem isn't really the brightness, it's that they don't bother aiming them.

They come with most cars. Its not typically a choice.

First thing I do in a car is set them to the lowest they go. Some recent cars are missing that dial though...

I think that’s yellow reflective tape already, though a tasteful border wouldn’t go amiss.

I don't blame the individuals, no one is recomending shops to their friends on how to get these adjustments.

The fact that no one believes in regulation, or MAINTAINING regulation depending on our needs, that these things happen.

Wish I could blame the assholes, but I leave that for the people who commute in big fucking truck 1000 because they are too insecure to buy anything else for their commuting machine.

If you squint a bit, I guess that accusation could apply to me? Hard to say when you're being this vague.

My newish car has LED headlights, but it's a CAR, and is low to the ground. I hope it doesn't blind oncoming cars like these fucking trucks that are 3,000 feet tall.

Tip: DO NOT install LEDs if you had halogen previously.

You might be increasing your risk while night driving doing that by making it substantially easier to overdrive your headlights and reducing visibility.

Im not saying dont properly adjust them, but going to the lowest setting possible is likely not the answer and a very real risk factor.

Or if they're loose and the car's engine vibration shakes them at you.

You're not going to tell me that some of them aren't adjusting them to be blinding on purpose. In certain segments of car culture, obnoxiousness is a virtue.

SE Asia was brutal when I went there. India had all nice old yellow lights and sometimes light bulbs and sometimes oil lamps or candles to light their way. That was nice, and constantly terrifying.

Gotta get some retroreflective mirrors on there

Headlights didn't use to blind me.

Then came LEDs.

Now headlights blind me.

I blame LEDs.

A lot is getting pushed on us strictly out of profit motives, you shouldn't just blindly accept "new and improved" just because capitalism says so.

I use high beams or adjust them in places that require it, most roads around where I live are well lit at night.

That feels like a bullshit handwaving excuse "well it's really the user's fault!". No, manufacturers are responsible.

Almost everything we buy is "pushed" on us out of profit motives, not as a public service. And yes, we shouldn't buy things just because they're "new and improved", but I'm not sure how that's relevant to aiming headlights too high - a problem as old as cars.

Halogens blind me just as much as LED and there are LED lights that don't blind me.

I got pulled over and the cop didn't give a single shit about the light, even though I blasted him with it (I thought they were a tailgater). I only got a ticket for speeding.

So it really depends. Thankfully (or unfortunately) most cops aren't familiar with the law.

Riding a motorcycle against LED's sucks. There is a moment of blindness.

I saw a new truck that had them FACING-BACKWARDS in the wheel well and bumper. We're fucked.

There is a bill before the US congress right now that would mandate a study to gather hard numbers on safe luminosity and proper mounting of vehicle headlamps. I've written my rep asking them to support, if not sponsor, the bill:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/7772/text

Wow, that's wild! Glad you got off though.

Maybe I'm mistaken, but I recall that tape being crazy bright. Led headlights drivers are fucked up, but not fucked up enough to deserve getting in a wreck and almost dying if they get blinded by the tape.

It's reflective tape, won't be brighter than the light used on it. I have stuck some to my bike before.

the edit to my top level comment should make my opinions clear

I wasn't directing this at you, just adding that plenty of left-leaning people wash their hands of it and say "it came like this" like that absolves them of all responsibility for something they chose to buy

Oh ok so I probably overestimated the effect.

I see the edges now with that hexagonal pattern, thought it was just fluo tape, but you're right (I just shill for that stuff cause it saved my bacon riding a bike back before every driver became a hazard)

They make LEDs specifically meant for halogen housings that shouldn't blind you. They also make "off-road use only" LEDs with 10x the lumens that go in the same bulb sockets and guess which ones people will buy

Cars missing that dial are auto-adjusting, you only change the initial setting if they're wrong. It's adjustable on the headlight assembly itself. 1% decline is what you're meant to be aiming for. It may also be adjustable via dealer-level diagnostics.

If your eyesight has gotten bad because of old age, perhaps you shouldn't be driving.

To be fair, depending on the housing, alignment is nearly impossible. Many housings are simply not designed to have a sharp cut off.

Yes, halogen housings. Which is why halogen headlights CAN in fact blind you more than proper factory LEDs, but people here usually won't listen to that.

I have yet to see HID or LED headlights installed from the factory that don't have sharp cutoffs.

That is what I have done with my car, I have LEDs brighter than the sun, but I have them in projector housings with projector lenses

If you retrofitted those, that's most likely still illegal in the EU. The LEDs that you're allowed to retrofit to halogen projectors are pretty dim actually. And headlights above a certain lumen count have to be auto-adjusting for when you've got a load and the rear end is sagging for example. Which is why it's difficult for me to share in LED hate. HIDs and LEDs literally legally require proper aiming and cutoffs, whereas halogens are "do whatever the fuck you want" outside of having to make sure the aim is right for the annual inspection (which sometimes they'll just adjust for you anyway and nobody's stopping you from aiming it wrong again after you leave).

Yeah, being able to see animals about to jump into the road is suuuuuch a bad thing, only because of capitalism do people want it.

what you are asking for is practically impossible, and actually literally impossible without spending multiple tens of thousands of dollars finding and paying someone to reverse engineer a car's lighting system, including the car's whole computerized network that likely controls the lights and their electrical environment, then find and pay someone to manufacture a custom, one-off modification, and finally find and pay someone to actually install it.

the result may not be legal, may void a car's warranty, may cause a car to fail a mandatory state inspection, may be unreliable and cost insane amounts of money to fix if/when needed

this is a wildly unreasonable request and expectation that you're making.

Dude. I wasn’t joking. They make tape for this. It’s all over amazon. Search for “headlight filter tape.” We’re talking like $7 and 20 minutes of your life to have a lower chance of getting in a wreck. So do it!

Not in the EU but no the car came with projectors already i just changed the bulbs

We were already able to do that. So what is the improvement besides blinding people?

Food, energy, drinking water, health care, fire and police, none of those are pushed out of profit motives. They are things we need to survive and have a society. The problem is when the system itself stops being just the set of rules regulating trade to being an active participant and incentive in and of itself.

Capitalism has its own prejudice- profit, over and at any and all costs.

Humans need food, energy, water, health care and so on, and we will need that regardless of what capitalism has to say about how to provide it. And there is a lot to say about what capitalism has to say about how to provide it.

LEDs in projection housings that are properly aimed aren't an issue at all, the issues arise with 1)poorly aimed lights and 2)installing LEDs in reflector housings not meant for them

I see zero correlation between what you said and I said. Yes you are right. If you can't see, don't drive.

Also, if you drive, don't blind people on and off the road.

It's strange though since LED lights are extremely much more powerful, and this is a current and ongoing and big complaint by hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

Maybe you have a rare genetic eye disorder that makes you impervious to being blinded. Good for you. The rest of us get blinded by LEDs.

Lucky I've been blinded by lights pre led. It is way more common know.

Don't we finally get the headlifhts ike EU that then off some when a car is coming.

Damn that is some fine tape lettering. Great effort.

I don't blind people, I have HIDs and the projectors are still functioning well enough to get a razor sharp cutoff. Current ones aren't even that bright, still on the original Hella E55s which are a lousy projector and burn out quickly.

But I also don't get blinded by oncoming factory LEDs like, ever. It happens about as often as with old pre-projector halogens that spew their (admittedly dimmer) light all over the place. Which is to say, never.

Which leads me to think that perhaps the people who say they used to get blinded less back in the day and can barely see now, have gotten worse eyesight over the years, rather than LEDs in particular being the problem.

OR maybe it's yet another North America special, where everyone's driving tall as fuck trucks with their low beams aimed straight forward, especially in retrofitted LED lights. Doing any of that near me would be highly illegal, which is why pretty much the only times I get blinded by LEDs, it's some asshole's lightbar they decided to install to supplement their high beams instead of fixing whatever is fucked up with their headlights. Somehow that's the one loophole we have: You can have super bright additional lighting on your car as long as it's ONLY high beam.

I actually was asked one time why I didn't do that myself when I had crappy burnt out headlights and decided to go the more expensive route of getting brand new bi-xenon projectors installed in a car I had (~500€ all in for parts, installation, polishing, and of course it came with a pair of new high-end bulbs, also included in that price, compared to ~100€ for a super bright stupid fucking LED lightbar). My answer was that I wanted my low beams to be good too, so I don't have to switch over at the last possible moment and blind everyone with a light bar. I was right, too. I barely even felt the need to use the high beams, and NOBODY flashed at me for my low beams, which were about 20x brighter than the burnt out OE projectors. Like those HIDs were brighter than many people's LEDs after that, compared to the old E55s (as you can probably tell, I hate the Hella E55, super common bi-xenon projectors in 00s German cars and even some Japanese ones), which made my old 1992 Audi 80's halogens look bright. And not a single time did anyone flash at me. I even asked a friend to drive towards me and tell me if I was blinding him. Nope. Two days later, said headlight restoration/upgrade actually saved me from hitting a couple of deer hiding in bushes, so there's a point for bright headlights. I can see well enough without them, but I'm pretty sure I couldn't have seen those deer. I don't think anyone could have with dim headlights.

In that case, I hope you either have bulbs that are legal for halogen projectors, or you were very particular about how you aimed them, because LED, HID and halogen projectors all work a little bit differently as I understand it.

But if there's nobody blinking at you at night when you're using your low beams, then it's probably fine.

Yeah, somewhere in this ridiculous thread I mentioned I also used a different vehicle to do a pass by of each other to make sure it was good. It's also just pretty easy to see where the light is. The cutoff is quite sharp and defined. It's fairly clear what it's hitting and what it's not.