Tim Stevens
Appearances
Today, Explained
Blinded by the headlights
Well, you know, there are certainly really bright lights in a lot of new cars. But if you look at the Reddit forums and other places where people are complaining, a lot of these complaints are actually coming from aftermarket headlights. So we're seeing a lot of aftermarket retrofit kits for older cars, particularly on larger trucks, many of which are not legal.
Today, Explained
Blinded by the headlights
And the result of that is incredibly blinding, incredibly bright headlights, which can be pretty annoying and frankly damaging at some point to other people's eyes.
Today, Explained
Blinded by the headlights
It definitely depends on the model. Certainly higher-end, newer models, that kind of thing, do come with super bright headlights. We see a lot of bright LED technology, that kind of thing. But most modern cars do include brighter headlights, LEDs built in.
Today, Explained
Blinded by the headlights
But when you're talking about older cars, cars that maybe came out 10 or 15 years ago, at that point, that's kind of an active thing where a lot of owners are replacing maybe broken headlights or they want something brighter that's maybe comparable to a more modern car and they're going out to Amazon or eBay or somewhere else and buying aftermarket retrofit kits instead.
Today, Explained
Blinded by the headlights
Which may or may not be legal, and they do result in brighter lights for you, the driver, but they can be pretty painful for everybody else.
Today, Explained
Blinded by the headlights
It's really a question of enforcement. A lot of states like Michigan, for example, they don't have any kind of... annual inspection at all. So at that point, it just becomes an issue for the police to basically pull someone over if they think that someone's headlights are too bright. And that's asking, you know, a lot of our law enforcement officers out there.
Today, Explained
Blinded by the headlights
So, you know, there are a lot of very strict defining rules when it comes to new vehicles coming on the road, that kind of thing. But for older vehicles, you know, people who are either maintaining or modifying them, it's really hard to actually enforce that people are doing these things and doing them in a legal, safe way.
Today, Explained
Blinded by the headlights
So we've seen technologies to address that. Auto dimming headlights is one of the kind of most common things that we see these days where a car will basically detect there's an oncoming car and automatically go from high beam to low beam. The problem is a lot of the early implementations of this technology were pretty bad, particularly on Tesla cars, for example.
Today, Explained
Blinded by the headlights
I used to have a Tesla Model S, and it was so bad at identifying other cars. It would just leave the headlights on full blasts. for way too long. And I would have other people flashing me all the time. And I felt awful because the car was just really bad at identifying other people and dropping those headlights down. So that technology is getting better.
Today, Explained
Blinded by the headlights
But really, I think the better solution is kind of coming down the road. We're just sort of starting to see that now, which is what's called an adaptive beam headlight or an active matrix headlight, which is kind of a much more advanced technology. It really gets rid of the old high beam, low beam paradigm. But that really could change things quite a bit.
Today, Explained
Blinded by the headlights
Yeah, it's pretty exciting stuff. So basically, you know, since the dawn of cars pretty much, we've had a high beam and a low beam. When there's nobody else around, you flip on the high beams, it lights everything up, everything's great. And when you are maybe in town or there's a car ahead of you or oncoming, you flip down to the low beam, which lowers your headlights down.
Today, Explained
Blinded by the headlights
Typically, that's from two sets of bulbs, two sets of reflectors, completely separate headlight system. And you're flipping from one to the other. When you switch to a more modern advanced or active matrix headlight system with an adaptive beam system, something like that, you're kind of getting rid of that differentiation. And now basically everything is on all the time.
Today, Explained
Blinded by the headlights
You're shooting out a lot of light in a lot of different directions. But now the car is advanced enough to be able to identify oncoming traffic, pedestrians, cyclists. And it can basically individually dim individual portions of the headlights to block out those things that would be blind to other people.
Today, Explained
Blinded by the headlights
So think of it like an advanced monitor on HDTV, that kind of thing where you have portions of the display that are bright white and portions that are black. It's the same basic idea. You've got a bunch of small LEDs and mirrors in your headlights now, which can block out individual portions of light. So you can have basically the high beams on all the time.
Today, Explained
Blinded by the headlights
But if there's someone standing in front of you, that portion of the light will be turned off so they won't see anything. It's really remarkable technology. And as is the case with many cool things in cars, it's been available in Europe and in the rest of the world for quite a few years. It's only been made legal in the U.S. since 2022.
Today, Explained
Blinded by the headlights
But because it takes a long time for auto manufacturers to bring new technology to market, it's still taking some time for them to be able to bring these new headlights to the American market. So that technology is really promising. That'll mean we can have really bright, really amazingly high-tech headlights, but theoretically without the glare.
Today, Explained
Blinded by the headlights
But again, it's only going to be on the newest and highest-end cars, so it's going to be a long time before we see those really on the majority of cars on the road.
Today, Explained
Blinded by the headlights
From a car that's coming directly at you, the advice that I've got is to look at the white line on the side of the road off to the right of your fender as you're driving ahead. Basically, that allows you to keep an eye of where your car is going, but without looking directly at the headlights. I
Today, Explained
Blinded by the headlights
But there is some technology that is much more available on modern cars now, which will help for really bright lights coming up from behind you. There are camera-based rearview mirrors that are getting to be more common, particularly in larger SUVs and trucks, where basically instead of having a traditional mirror to look backwards, you now have a camera pointing backwards.
Today, Explained
Blinded by the headlights
And when you flip the little switch on the bottom of the rearview mirror, it actually pops over to basically an integrated LCD that's built into the mirror. So instead of having the reflection of the lights coming at you, you're looking at a camera feed, and that camera feed can block out those really bright headlights.