Got rear ended and hit and run...

When you were younger (not just you, it happens to all of us) your eyes could pass much more light through to your retinas.

And that's before any degenerative disease makes anything worse.

Modern cars make hot spots of light in front of them, keeps the driver from adapting to the dark and actually seeing what is around.

 

A modern sealed beam will cost more than a halogen bulb today just from the extra materials used.

Glass is heavy and more prone to breaking than the plastic now used. It is a polycarbonate; what is used in 'bullet proof' glass. When you don't need to stop a bullet, but just deflect a rock on the highway and not shatter, it is very effective for its weight. I think it also allows more light through than glass, specially considering the required thickness glass would need to be to be as durable.

Polycarbnate's downside is in not being UV resistant. A coating is added for that. There just isn't any incentive for automakers to have that last beyond the warranty period.

HID and LED headlights have a clearly defined cut off at the top edge of the illumination. People might reading that as the light being too dim instead noting how far the light is traveling down the road.

25mph is also the speed at which many auto systems turn on the high beams.

More concerning to me is the number of people not noticing how much dimmer their lights are when it is just the daylight driving ones. So there are cars out on dark nights with no tail lights on.

I used to just drive with the parking lights on in snow storms and even fog. No back scatter that way to blind me. But it seems they are using dimmer bulbs in those applications now. The 2005 Prius was like having the lights off when I tried the parking alone in fog. Guess for those lights they just need to be seen, and not illuminate an area.

 

I've seen variations of this on every auto forum I've read. Somebody complaining that the car just isn't throwing light far enough down the road for them to feel confident at speed, without making the connection that they've been driving too fast the whole time.

 

I wonder whether that drives people to mal-adjust their lights upward. In heavy snow storms, I see some headlights adjusted so the light below the cut-off rises with distance, a condition not to code.

That can be unfortunate too. I doubt the appearance that an oncoming car is flashing his high beams just because the road is a bit bumpy is rare.

I suppose a lot of these are car driver complaints. When I drive an SUV or van, the experience is easier on the eyes.

 

Possibly? I feel fortunate that most people don't know how to adjust their headlights.

I run into it more often in the context of drivers wanting to add auxiliary lighting. I mean sure, you can strap on some rally lights and see way further down the road, but that very much misses the point of compatibility with public two-way traffic. Lamps like that are for off-road use, racecourses and such.

 

Then I wonder if headlamps aren't being adjusted to code as part of the PDI process. Those very sharp cutoffs trollbait notes leave vivid evidence of how they are aimed in falling snow.

 

Fortunately it's becoming an older car driver complaint.

My latest medium family sedan has an auto-dimming side view mirror in addition to the rearview mirror. Really helps a lot with headlight glare. The feature is becoming more common.

Another thing that helps is a shiny foil sticker on the rear window. Doesn't look like much, helps ID the car in a parking lot. But it also makes a heck of a bright dazzler when a truck or something with elevated headlights gets a little too close.

 

Getting close to needing cataract surgery, not quite there yet, I am really feeling this aging eyes problem.

I must still say that light patterns themselves are important, independent of total light flux, and am remembering specific pattern problems. In my 20s with two household cars using different sealed beam formats, the 1-lamp rectangular-light car had a pattern noticeably worse than the 2-lamp rectangular-light (separate high and low beams) car. Changing to a different brand lamp didn't help.

On low beam on the 1-lamp car, each lamp seemed to light up primarily a spot in its own narrow tire track ahead. Even with both lamps together, there was inadequate light in the lane center and on the shoulders. The 2-lamp car seemed noticeably better, as if the low-beam lamp's pattern didn't need to make compromises for the longer narrower high-beam mode. Vertical cutoffs on all were poor, and horizontal light distribution was very non-uniform. I ended up adding white fog lights (or "auxiliary drivings lights", according to a friendly state troop, adding "fog lights are yellow") that proved to be a great improvement, helping fill in the horizontal holes in the low beam pattern, and giving a much wider horizontal spread too. Adding the same lights to the 2-lamp car was also an improvement, though to a smaller degree.

I eventually ended up changing the 1-lamp headlight to an off-road rally light that was not federally approved for highway use, but similar to European highway standards and not a problem with local troopers.

My very first car with the new non-sealed-beam systems had a much more uniform horizontal pattern just as good as the augmented results on the older cars, combined with a better vertical cut-off. Though it did take a bit of time to get accustomed to that sharper cutoff. While it also had factory "fog lights", they turned out to be just useless decorations, nothing like the real fog lamps added to the older cars. But with the greatly improved headlights, the fog lights were no longer needed.