Maybe this is a side effect of me owning a car with accurately positioned headlights for the first time, but the headlights feel dangerous as they are. Unless the road is completely level, they only light a car's length away and then it's pitch black after that. No improvement with high beams, as it only makes that same area brighter. I took it to a Toyota service center to have them checked, and the tech said they're fine and that they're at the level they should be. I believe it, but maybe they're designed with perfectly marked roads in mind. I just drove 60 miles through winding mountain roads with no reflectors and street lights at night and it was one scary drive.
What was your prior car? You're posting this in the G5 forum, so one presumes you have a G5, which has ADEQUATE lights to be sure, although you may be driving a smaller car than you're used to and it's a lot closer to the ground. It's possible that you're either trying to 'outdrive your headlights,' or your vision isn't what you may think it is. I have over 200,000 miles in G3s. Same small car, but your (G5) lights should be a lot better! I've never felt that the lights in these cars were inadequate.
A lot of modern headlights are so bright that they fool your eyes back into day mode, so you can only see things hit by your own lights. Older car headlights were dimmer and by consequence you'd sort of stay in night-vision mode, you'd just have an easier time seeing what your lights were aimed at.
My Gen 3 had such bright headlights, that even on low beam, opposing traffic flashed their lights as though I was on hi beam. My Gen 5 seems about right in my opinion.
And those new lights aren't just bright, they also have a razor sharp cut-off. In the days of the sealed beam, we projected much less light, but the light was a soft center of yellow that got weaker farther out, so you has some weak spill that let your still present night vision see upward and to the sides more than you may today. Current lights project a nearly uniform field of blue/white light into a very well defined area. The consequence for oncoming traffic is that falling within that field looks as if you've left your high beams on; you see less well because your night vision is trashed by the same oncoming traffic. On roads without lighting, not seeing the ditches and trees lit up can be disconcerting, but you aren't driving toward those anyway. I'm not sure what the easy fix is. Headlights are so complex and expensive that replacement doesn't seem economic. Even if you had your lights altered, you'd still have to deal with everyone else's.
Yeah, the headlights do feel like they are aimed too low so I adjusted them up a bit more. If you do the same, just don't adjust them too high such that you are blinding oncoming cars.
On an unlit, fairly familiar road, I completely missed the driveway I was trying to turn into the first night I had my new gen 5. This was coming from a gen 2 where I think the lights were angled too high.
I also adjusted mine up. Easy to do - I believe it’s an 8 mm socket. There’s a pretty good YouTube video on how to do it. I raised mine 6 notches - when you take a close look with a flashlight you’ll see what I mean. They’re better now.
I adjusted mine up significantly and it is soooooo much better. Nobody has flashed me for several months now since I adjusted them so I assume anecdotally that they are still safe.
