Blinded by the light:

[burgess]

Blinded by the light:
Lumens, light intensity output of some head lights are simply just too bright. Recently driving at night heavy rain and wet roads, the whole thing becomes a sea of light, head lights and their reflections and head lights in the rear view and side mirrors.

Surely manufactures with all this hi-tech could come up with some kind of automatic intensity reduction control circuitry. Those blasted rear red fog lights.

Is the only remedy to fight fire with fire, i.e., fit the max brightest bulbs you can get hold of.




Burgess

[Doingitsideways]

No, as a general rule it's either badly aimed dipped beams, HIDs in reflector lamp units, or both.
Properly aimed headlights won't dazzle or light up the rain, etc. The beam's cut off should be below oncoming driver's field of vision.

Then there's the muppets who drive around with their main beam on all the time without realising, and don't get me started on the new breed of idiots that think that DRLs are the same as headlights on all these new cars, when the taillights aren't on at all!

[jamesy12345]

My pet hate is people who park in the lane facing traffic with their dipped beam on...so you need to crawl past them in case they have a door open or something & you can't see. I've tried explaining a few times to people about beam pattern but usually doesn't go down well

I agree loads of people seem to have badly adjusted headlights or HIDs in when they shouldn't

[burgess]

Yeah two aspects to my post:

Automatic head light/tail light intensity reduction:

A fairly simple feed-back circuit to reduce the intensity of light emitted, especially these ultra bright LED side/driving lights when there is an on coming light source/vehicle or street lights, even in day light those LEDs are just too bright.

On my Cabrio there's a light control -rheostat- by which one can lower the aim of the dip-beams. Only needs a relatively simple LDR circuit to sense presence of on-coming lights to dip the beam or reduce intensity without human intervention.

If a manufacture can come up with self parking tech than digitally dimming lights is a back of a fag packet exercise.

We need Muppet proof lighting systems.


The situation I was referring to:
The other night I was coming back from Porthmadog westward on the A497 coast road, bendy section, smooth asphalt road surface poor drainage so water acting as a mirror. Not unusual for tourists any time of year to be driving on this road doing so with great care averaging around 35mph, with several locals in their train nose to tail. For locals this is a fast but relatively short stretch of bend swing road including a short wooded stretch, not unusual for some doing 60mph. Others do exceed this and provide practice for the local dry-stone wall builder and recovery truck service.

So, about ten cars nose to tail on this -for me- left-hand bend no carriageway lighting. Their lights were pointing away from me, but the reflections from these head lights weren't. Hence literally a sheet of light reflecting up from road surface and a wall of light from the vehicle headlights around the bend.