6 ms·
> Lately, I see a lot of drivers who turn on their brights and just leave them on and this includes cars with the older halogen and even incandescents. This is
by 0xfeba 10mo ago
> Lately, I see a lot of drivers who turn on their brights and just leave them on and this includes cars with the older halogen and even incandescents. This is a change in behavior.
This is one of my pet peeves.
I've categorized it into what I believe are the main causes:
1. People just don't know as well today that the blue indicator means you're blinding people
2. People with newer cars which will automatically turn off the headlights, including the brights, when you turn off and leave the car.
3. People with older cars where the low-beams are burned out or broken
I've been tempted to purchase digital billboard space to raise awareness. Eg., "If this blue indicator is on, you're blinding everyone".
And/or, get a mirror on my trunk that I can adjust the angle of from inside the cabin to reflect back high-beams at the driver.
Mostly I'm hoping that automatic high-beams, like some Ford trucks I've seen do well, proliferate more!
- pksebben 10mo agoI have become an aggressive counter-flasher. This has yielded in some cases new knowledge - that the low beams of a lot of cars these days look like high beams (indicated when they flash back, and it's the brightness of a thousand suns). For those behind me, I've discovered that my side mirror has an angle where it reliably bounces the beams back. I've gotten more than a couple of drivers to turn their beams down with this method (but they have to be tailgating for it to work, which usually means we're already in an adversarial situation).
- aceazzameen 10mo agoHaha I've also angled my side mirror out of my eyes, which incidentally is back towards the car behind me. I of course angle it back if I need to change lanes, but it's such an annoying thing I have to do just to see the road ahead of me. At this point I put full blame on car manufacturers and lack of government regulation and enforcement. Lights will keep getting brighter because lights are getting brighter. It's a death spiral.
- radlad 10mo agoMy 2017 Ford Fusion has an auto-dimming driver side mirror. I hate driving a car at night without this.
- aceazzameen 10mo agoMy rear view mirror does this, I wish my side mirrors did too. Although recently I've noticed some cars headlights can even pierce my rear view mirror's polarized dimming. It never used to be a problem in the past. I've seen the difference when drivers turn their high beams on and off. It always did a great job against driver's brights including large trucks. But occasionally there's now a vehicle with the light of a thousand suns that is too bright for the auto-dimming.
- bergfest 10mo agoThe older manual rear view mirrors worked much better in my opinion.
- notyourwork 10mo agoThat indicates the low beams are incorrectly adjusted.
- alt227 10mo agoThe problem is most drivers dont care.
- yrro 10mo agoWhy isn't this flagged during the MOT?
- slumberlust 10mo agoNot all states have inspection, and those that do don't necessarily include an alignment check.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- mickinyourdouth 10mo ago[dead]
- qmr 10mo agoI've half jokingly told my wife I'm going to make a parabolic mirror for her to aim back at such drivers.
- Wistar 10mo ago… or a steerable corner-cube array or retroreflector prism. Steerable in that it needs to slightly redirect its reflection to above the light source—to the windshield area of the offending vehicle—rather than exactly back to the light source.
- nrds 10mo agoWhen I get incorrectly flashed I force my high beams on and keep them on, FYI. Don't do it.
- pksebben 10mo agoMaybe this ought to indicate to you that your low beams are blinding other drivers dangerously. If you have OEM headlights, I can understand your frustration - neither you nor the other driver has control over that. I think this is what OP posted this whole thread about. If, however, you've installed third-party LED headlights, then you're sort of on the hook for this. I'd add that whoever it was that 'incorrectly' flashed you is long gone by the time you're leaving the highs on and blinding everyone in your path. That's aggressive and uncalled for.
- nrds 10mo agoI only do it if no one is behind the flasher; I thought was obvious. And I have OEM headlights.
- LeifCarrotson 10mo agoMy other pet peeve is the opposite - they've got LED daytime running lights, and use those instead of headlights. They're driving around at 11pm with no taillights and abysmal forward lighting, but there's enough of a glow from the DRLs that they assume their lights are on. Or worse, they're accustomed to "automatic" lights and don't even know where the switch is, so they're driving around at dusk or in fog, rain, or snow in a white, gray, or black vehicle without their lights on. I have also been tempted to purchase digital billboard space, but not on the side of the road. I want LED signs on my roof rack (one forward, one back) with column or two of buttons on the dash to call up a slate of messages: 1. TURN YOUR BRIGHTS OFF! BLUE MEANS BLINDING. 1b. OW! YOUR HEADLIGHTS ARE MISALIGNED. 2. TURN YOUR HEADLIGHTS ON! THOSE ARE DRLs. 3. TURN LIGHTS ON TO BE SEEN EVEN IF IT'S NOT DARK. 4. MY SAFE FOLLOWING DISTANCE IS NOT A SPOT FOR YOU. 5. YOU ARE TAILGATING. I WILL NOT SPEED FOR YOU. 6. YIELD DOES NOT MEAN STOP. 7. I AM ZIPPER MERGING, NOT CUTTING THE LINE. 8. DRIVE CAREFULLY! I JUST SAW A DEER. 9. GO AHEAD, I SEE YOU. 10. YOU HAVE A PROBLEM WITH YOUR VEHICLE, PULL OVER. 11. THANK YOU! Plus a few spare slots to be implemented as needs arise. I've been unimpressed with the automatic high-beams on my wife's newer Toyota and on other rentals I've driven, they usually depend on a direct line-of-sight to the other car's headlights, which means they stay on just long enough to hit the windshield of another car cresting a hill and blind them. Then they courteously turn off a few camera frames and vision analyses after the low beams become visible. If a __competent__ driver is controlling the high/low beams manually, they'll see the headlights of the other car illuminating the trees and such and turn off the high beams a couple critical seconds earlier. But I admit that the automatic systems are miles better at managing it than the __incompetent__ drivers who are all too common.
- japhyr 10mo ago> Mostly I'm hoping that automatic high-beams, like some Ford trucks I've seen do well, proliferate more! I have a 2021 Tacoma, and its automatic high-beam adjustment is terrible. It does a reasonable job of turning high beams off when a car approaches, but it has a number of problems that make it unusable. After the car passes it waits too long to reactivate the high beams. That's when they're needed most; my eyes have already adjusted to the other car's headlights, now the road is dark again, and I'm still on low beams. It's way too sensitive. When a car approaches from a long ways away, it sometimes turns high beams off for minutes at a time. It turns them off when there are widely-spaced streetlights on long empty rural highways. I finally took the time to figure out where the switch is to turn off automatic high-beam adjustment. I do a much better job knowing when to dim and reactive the lights than the vehicle does.
- VBprogrammer 10mo agoI dunno, maybe where you live is a lot flatter than the roads that I drive on, but the instant I see a car coming the other way (ideally before they come into direct view) is the time to turn off full beams. Though from a game theory point of view, leaving them on for a couple of seconds is probably ideal to remind anyone who forgets to dim their own headlights.
- japhyr 10mo agoI live near mountains, rolling hills, and lots of farmland. There are many stretches where you can see a car coming from a mile away, long before anyone's high beams are noticeable. But in that darkness, my truck picks up those headlights and dims the high beams.
- VBprogrammer 10mo agoHmm, I mostly drive in the English countryside where most often there are hills and bends, bushes and trees, houses and hedgerows. Seeing another car a mile away would probably mean both are heading into a wide valley, in which case the geometry makes it less important. That said, I'm still not convinced your truck isn't doing the right thing. Even a mile a way you've got perhaps 30 seconds before you are passing each other. Is there much to be gained by leaving them on for a few more seconds? Seeing another car heading towards me is a much clearer and less likely to be forgotten trigger than "ok, about now my lights are probably getting annoying".
- NietzscheanNull 10mo ago> I've been tempted to purchase digital billboard space to raise awareness. Ironically, digital billboards are often 10x more obnoxious than even LED high beams in my area (and those are plenty awful, FWIW). We've got a few nearby that are so bright they could be used as stadium lighting when they're set to white. Naturally, half the ads running on them feature a white background, so it's like a stadium light that flips on and off every 15 seconds. Considering they're pointed directly at drivers' faces, I genuinely don't understand why there isn't more opposition to them; they're absolutely blinding. I'm seriously considering bugging local and state reps about it until they pass light intensity ordinances in my area.
- asdefghyk 10mo agoRE ".... get a mirror on my trunk that I can adjust the angle of from inside the cabin to reflect back high-beams at the driver. ...." I had this idea too this annoyance too - but never implemented it. One way to implement would be to mount a thin object , like a toothpick thickness and 1 or 2 cm long say on the mirror 90 degrees vertically to mirror surface , then (auto? ) adjust so their is no shadow from car's headlights that is behind. Like lots of my other ideas , when i search for them , they already exist .maybe this one too Found similar ideas already exist for car rear view mirrors .... ie Google finds ... ".... auto-dimming rearview mirror automatically adjusts to reduce glare from incident light by using sensors and an electrochromic gel layer...." However my google of words "...auto adjust reflecting mirror to face incident light...." FInd there is much discussion on Faceboot and REddit for people asking for "...mirrors that reflect very bright high been lights BACK at the driver BEHIND ...: Could not find a implementation though ... Maybe it should be an Arduino project ....
- NickNameNick 10mo agoYou don't need electronics for that, just corner-cube reflectors.
- pipes 10mo agoI might just be getting old, but more and more I see people not using indicators and not understanding the rules of junctions. Tail gating also really annoying. I was in a mates car recently and it scared the hell out of me, he was tail gating for most of a 3 hour journey. Eventually we got to a bit with chevrons and he wasn't obeying the rule staying N chevrons away from the car in front. I told him and he replied "nonsense, my car beeps if I'm too close to the car in front" I didn't have the energy to point out that is a collision warning not a safe distance measurer type device.
- abustamam 10mo agoWow this gives me anxiety just reading. My 2012 BMW has a warning everytime I turn it on. "DO NOT RELY ON BEEPS" (I'm paraphrasing of course.) And yeah, I don't let tooling on my car replace common sense driving habits. I still turn my head when reversing, even if I can see what's behind me on the camera. I think it's crazy that people rely so much on unreliable tech on their cars.
- ash_091 10mo agoThe recommended 3 second gap is a much bigger distance than most people recognise, especially at high speed. On another note- I feel sad that you could tell your mate "the way you're driving is making me uncomfortable" and be met with basically "your discomfort isn't valid because [technology] so I won't change my behaviour".
- MichaelBurjack 10mo agoAs someone who continues to mask in public shared-air settings for my own health, I am entirely unsurprised by that response and get it all the time. Recently heard from a friend that also continues to mask when sharing air, they had arranged car pooling for one of their children. And just this morning the other parent texted saying "your child wearing a mask makes me uncomfortable so we can no longer car pool". So … yeah. Entirely unsurprised by that attitude. "Every person for themselves but also not if it's something I personally dislike."
- gorgoiler 10mo agoAutomatic high beams only dip for other cars. They don’t dip for bicycles or pedestrians. Those walking or cycling by the road do not even register. Pure hubris.
- timthorn 10mo agoThey also don't dip in anticipation of a car coming round the corner, which humans can do fairly accurately.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- Sohcahtoa82 10mo ago> I've been tempted to purchase digital billboard space to raise awareness. Eg., "If this blue indicator is on, you're blinding everyone". The thing is, IMO, there is a growing psychopathic trend of not giving a shit about other people. You can tell them "you're blinding everyone" and they will not care. They can see better, and the fact that you can't see at all as a consequence does not concern them. It's not their problem.
- rob74 10mo agoIt could become their problem however if you are so blinded that you drive into them head-on. But yeah, I doubt they realize that, otherwise they wouldn't do it in the first place...
- alvah 10mo ago"If this blue indicator is on, you're blinding everyone" In many modern cars with auto-dipping headlights, this is not true (or at least not intended by the manufacturer to be true).
- gblargg 10mo agoA big cause on older cars is haze on the clear plastic that develops over the years. This makes even low beams spread so they blind oncoming drivers. There are kits where you polish and re-finish them, and they do make a noticeable difference in beam directionality.
- branko_d 10mo agoAccording to Project Farm, Sylvania is the best headlight restoration kit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyVCEbfrU-c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyVCEbfrU-c
- rconti 10mo agoThe blue indicator is almost impossible to see on modern screens, vs the old one that blinded you from in between a couple of dim gauges.
- nrds 10mo ago> If this blue indicator is on, you're blinding everyone Your information is outdated. My Tesla with matrix headlights keeps the high-beam indicator on but oncoming drivers are not blinded.