Lifted trucks with idiot owners have entered the chat.
I had a dickweed in a lifted truck pass me last night. That fucker had like 12 lights on the front. They lit up the area like daylight. Why cant the NTSB make a change for what is legal so we can get these dicks off the road.
The NTSB is not a legislative government body, they are an investigative government body, they can only make recommendations for other government bodies to act on
Went to Houston recently for a thing and the number of lifted trucks I saw was astonishing. Most of them didn’t even have the wheels to fit the lifted trucks either so they just looked super awkward. The dumbest one I saw was a lifted SUV where only the front wheels were lifted.
The ones with regular wheels might be the better ones. Some fraction of them have a different set of off-road tires they swap to rather than drive on 40" all the time.
Me: Surely they left their brights on accidentally flashes my brights to alert them
Them: turns on actual brights blinding me for the next 30 seconds
I did this one time on a dark rural road, and not only did they blast my retinas with the equivalent of ten thousand supernova when they turned on their brights, but they also turned on their flashing blue-and-red lights on top of their car for a second.
oops
Dude, police flashers are criminally bright now. I had a cop blow past me a couple weeks ago with his flashers on, and he lit up the road for a 1/4 mile in all directions.
Cop pulled the guy right behind me over 2 weeks ago. It was cloudy and had rained like an hour before so there was a little water on the ground, early morning (730ish)
It blinded me a little off of the reflections in the water. Why are they that bright
Reminds me of the “No full auto in buildings” clip.
Idiots that don’t change the headlight aim after installing LED lights.
Fun fact! The NHTSA requires any aftermarket replacement LED bulb be approved by them, and have noted in this letter that not a single aftermarket replacement bulb has received such approval.
As of writing this comment, LED retrofit headlights are illegal. It’s just that this rule hasn’t been enforced in a very long time (if ever)
Can confirm. I had after market xenon’s in my old car. I took great pains to make sure I had the correct housings and everything was aimed. To my surprise, they never checked
Edit: I used factory parts from the xenon option that came from the OEM. You can stop rage down voting. Not every xenon upgrade is eBay blue.
To be fair they do seem to have approved LEDs on big trucks which are the eye fuckingest type of headlight arrangement
I live in the SF Bay Area and about 20% of cars are driven with their high beams on all the time. The drivers just click that stalk and leave it there no matter what. It’s an epidemic.
I thought this was just a Portland thing… “surely everyone can’t be that stupid”
My latest pair of glasses have a yellow tint for this very reason
Are the glasses actually effective? Seems like the effect is controversial and perhaps detrimental.
https://www.healthline.com/health/night-driving-glasses#do-they-work
They technically work for me. They make bright lights darker… Because they make everything darker. I can’t see anywhere near as good normally while wearing them.
How do you know they’re not really bright stock/aftermarket lights?
Far fewer than 1/5 vehicles in SF/SJ have their high beams on IMO.
I mean, 1 in 5 is a lot, just to be perfectly clear, so anything even approaching that is a pretty bad. When I was growing up, the number of cars inappropriately using high beams in city traffic was basically zero, so this is a massive regression.
You can tell that a car is using high beams because their light fixture appears fully and evenly lit from eye level. Low-beam headlights look “half full” from an opposing driver’s view. You can also tell because many lower-end cars have a separate housing just for the high beam that only light up when the high beam is on.
The issue is vehicle height has gotten obscene. A lifted truck with halogens still blinds me in my sedan
They’re supposed to adjust their lights and point them down, but I guess most people don’t.
OEM and correctly angled lights will still blind you from pretty far away due to the angle of attack on the beam.
Think of the lights like a triangle, inside that triangle you will be blind, and to get the same length of visibility with a taller vehicle, you will grow the triangle.
Where as my sedan is low to the ground. I could improperly aim my lights and have them firing out at 90° and still most people’s eyes wouldn’t be low enough to be in the triangle.
I replaced my work truck headlights with LEDs and parked out in front of several lines of fencing to angle them downward.
I ended up having to get a different headlight geometry because the reflectors weren’t designed for LEDs and there was too much spillage.
When I ask people how hard it was to get to the angle adjustment screws and usually get weird looks.
Honestly I don’t even know if modern cars HAVE adjustable angle headlights. Every old car I’ve owned has though. Not a huge amount of play but enough to angle up or down by about 10-15 degrees if needed.
My wife’s car is a 94 and low to the ground, even with brights on I don’t have a problem when she drives by me. 10/10 headlights on that thing.
It doesn’t seem to be limited to tall cars for me. I’m constantly blinded by little sedans and I drive a mid-sized pickup truck. I think they’re luxury cars with the power of 10,000 suns captured inside their headlights. Also, I drive a mid-sized pickup truck with aftermarket LED bulbs, but I don’t blind passenger cars. I had my wife pass me on the road in her sedan after I adjusted them to be sure I wasn’t being an asshole.
I’m in an element, so I’m pretty high up and I get blinded. When I drive my wife’s Mazda 3 it’s fucking horrible
Dude, I drive tractor-trailer and still get blinded frequently, with my eyeballs like eight or nine fucking feet off the ground. It’s ridiculous. New Subarus are the worst offenders right now, their low beams are literally aimed up on like a 15 degree angle
Even an element has the driver’s eyes below the hood of a lot of these new SUVs. I agree, shit sucks. There needs to be regulations around vehicle heights and weights. I don’t get why I need a special license to drive a work van that weighs less than these things
Light trucks exist in kind of a legal loophole in the US
These vehicles have been pushed hard because they’re not held to the same standard as cars and are more profitable as a result
I’m pretty sure that even tho cars have gotten more efficient that average fuel economy has gone down because of the proliferation of these massive vehicles sold to Americans a daily drivers
