Drivers Blinded by “Too-Bright” LED Headlights on New Cars, Warns RAC

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According to a survey by UK motoring organization RAC, two-thirds of drivers are dazzled by modern headlights, which are much brighter due to LED technology. Many say that they are blinded even when the lights are dipped, and that it takes up to five seconds before they can see clearly again. The Department of Transportation is investigating.

"Headlight technology has advanced considerably in recent years, but while that may be better for the drivers of those particular vehicles, it is presenting an unwanted, new road safety risk for anyone driving towards them or even trying to pull out at a junction." The complaints have led the Department for Transport to set up a United Nations working group to find out why more drivers feel headlights have become overly bright.
 
Glad I'm not the only one to notice. It's out of control where I'm at. LED light bars on vehicles, improperly installed after market lights (doesn't matter if LED or not). It's the worst on trucks -- the lights are too high up if you're in a sedan/coupe.
 
Lumens aren't really any different, given that lumens are regulated. Although i know jackasses with illegal lights meant for offroad only on their daily driver. LEDs don't really fade like halogens would, that while being more directional means hitting the right angle and you're getting peak brightness in your eye.

The fact every car's headlamp height is already at eye line for lower cars turns everyone blinding everyone else like jackasses with sylvania silverstar ultra's on their lifted truck.

Installing auto-dimming mirrors on your car help out a lot but nothing you can really do about on coming traffic; polarized film can only do so much plus you do need to see at night out of your car.
 
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Yeah, I freaking hate it when I am going down the road and the jackass behind me has his lifted truck with fog lights on, completly blinds me, but he won't go around unless I actually pull over and stop moving, but he is perfectly fine riding my bumper.

People really should simply be more considerate with their driving, it's a privilege not a right and what you do to your vehicle affects others.

My last car I bought had those super bright blue lights that are supposed to be better for you to see but blind anyone coming the other direction. First thing I did is went to Walmart and bought some cheap, normal headlight bulbs. I don't want to see them coming at me, so why would I want them in my car?
 
Car lights are supposed to have a maximum lumen rating because of situations like this. It especially affects older people.

Ironic consumer reports yelling for more lighting without knowing the consequences even on low set vehicles. They must be like 90 years old to be that blind.
 
tesfaye said:
Glad I'm not the only one to notice. It's out of control where I'm at. LED light bars on vehicles, improperly installed after market lights (doesn't matter if LED or not). It's the worst on trucks -- the lights are too high up if you're in a sedan/coupe.
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Cry me a river, liberal. Waah waah I can't see while I'm driving.

Just kidding. I hate this too. :LOL:
 
azuza001 said:
Yeah, I freaking hate it when I am going down the road and the jackass behind me has his lifted truck with fog lights on, completly blinds me, but he won't go around unless I actually pull over and stop moving, but he is perfectly fine riding my bumper.

People really should simply be more considerate with their driving, it's a privilege not a right and what you do to your vehicle affects others.

My last car I bought had those super bright blue lights that are supposed to be better for you to see but blind anyone coming the other direction. First thing I did is went to Walmart and bought some cheap, normal headlight bulbs. I don't want to see them coming at me, so why would I want them in my car?
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I go to work early, and I live in the rural area of our county, and this happens all the time to me. It is awful.
 
Lots of people talking about light bars and aftermarket add-ons etc. That's not what this is about however, so let's not derail the discussion.

The issue raised is factory LED headlights. I have a car with these myself, and love them, but can appreciate the concern. BMW LED headlights seem to be especially problematic when coming the other way. Mercedes/VW/Audi etc. I don't seem to have much of an issue with.
 
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Yeah, they're too bright. I get blinded on a weekly basis, especially the bubba tubs who think they need the power of the sun for night driving.
 
I have 220 watts in the form of 2 55 watt HIDs and 2 65 watt HIRs for my high beams that I use on obnoxious people. My low beams are 55 watt HIDs in FX-R 3.0s in a C5 Corvette, the super sharp cutoff isn't going to blind anyone.
 
thesmokingman said:
The LED tail lights are obnoxious too.
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They can be obnoxious but they do serve their purpose without creating a debilitating scenario for your eyes. There are some modern vehicles that are clearly pushing the line of what is tastefully acceptable on our roads. Other mitigating factors include the operators age and eye health. Older individuals experience burn out in the bulbs of their own eyes which causes a much more prolonged ghosting of the bright spots across your vision that can fade much slower than a teenagers. While the higher output LED lights won't cause a lot of people to have issues, there is a massive segment of our population that would be at a much higher risk of potential temporary blind spots in the vision associated with brief exposures. When I was younger and we all tricked out our cars, police routinely gave out tickets to anything they perceived to be slightly brighter than a shitty old yellow headlight bulb. I'm pretty sure that policy no longer works since most of the cars I see have brighter lights than we did with our aftermarket lights in the late 90s, early 2000s.

However this is more of an argument for Manufacturer supplied Headlights and their potential for creating dangerous scenarios on the road. While I'm all for brighter headlights, my own mother has a lot of trouble driving at night due to the reflexes in her eye's bulbs and their ability to bounce back from bright exposures, and I'd rather she make it home safe, than someone else see an extra few feet in a different shade of light.

Semantics said:
Installing auto-dimming mirrors on your car help out a lot but nothing you can really do about on coming traffic; polarized film can only do so much plus you do need to see at night out of your car.
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Newer cars have features for night driving including actually displaying a video image on the mid rearview mirror on a lcd screen that filters out the bright light that could potentially effect a drivers eyes from behind. Cars like BMWs have had optional color filtering glass on their side mirrors for decades. While it's not the solution, since you're still blinded from oncoming headlights, it is nice not to worry about being scorched unsuspectingly after driving 3 straight hours in the total dark.
 
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What really bothers me are the god damn trucks with strips of super bright LED lights on their grills. These these trucks are typically lifted high and they blind the shit out of you from behind. Sure the reflector on the rear-view mirror helps but nothing I can do for the side mirrors. A person side swiped me cause he was blinded by one of these damn trucks rolled up behind us.
 
oldmanbal said:
They can be obnoxious but they do serve their purpose without creating a debilitating scenario for your eyes.
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I'd say most of them are LED for the bling. I hate sitting there having this mass of LED brake lights burning into my retinas and then the persistence of the image is burned into my visions for seconds after the light turns green. I don't recall tail light brightness ever being a concern in all my years. It's never entered my mind, man wtf tail lights are too dim its unsafe!
 
I think a lot of the problem is the old style sealed beam halogens had a small metal shield blocking the direct light from the filament from going forward. So all of the light the oncoming driver sees is spread out reflected light. A lot of the LED bulbs skip the shield so the oncoming driver gets the full brilliance of the small LED emitter + reflected light. A lot of the damn LED DRLs leave spots in my eyes even in the daytime as they are just pure bright LEDs pointed forward.

The really sad thing is you couple this report with other reports about how a lot of these super bright headlights are so poorly focused that the driver has a hard time seeing down the road and you have cars that don't help their own drivers but do a wonderful job of blinding oncoming drivers.
 
In my experience, it's more of a problem that many forget to turn on headlights than headlights that are to bright.
 
From tests I've seen on youtube, LEDs are actually less bright than the HID / xenons that they replaced - just more energy efficient. My current car is my first with LED headlights and they came with 1) projector housings and 2) auto leveling in the suspension. People running aftermarket setups skip either one or both of those. That's why the bad glare. If they are a newish car and they were properly setup you could look directly at them coming at you with no problems at all - since they would be pointing down.
 
ecmaster76 said:
and xenon still sucks. Bad example
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Tell that to my FX-R 3.0s. They are much better than the stock headlights I've replaced them with.

dvsman said:
From tests I've seen on youtube, LEDs are actually less bright than the HID / xenons that they replaced - just more energy efficient. My current car is my first with LED headlights and they came with 1) projector housings and 2) auto leveling in the suspension. People running aftermarket setups skip either one or both of those. That's why the bad glare. If they are a newish car and they were properly setup you could look directly at them coming at you with no problems at all - since they would be pointing down.
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This is true. And it can't be any projector housing, it has to be HID specific housings. A lot of people think they can just throw HID setups into aftermarket projector housings without realizing that those use extremely crappy halogen projectors that can't even focus the halogen bulb correctly, let alone HIDs. And then there are the dumbasses that just throw LED bulbs and HID bulbs into halogen reflectors.
 
In '95, while in the AF I was sent off to an RAF base for a couple of months, yes, it was fantastic. I had to rent a car at Gatwick airport. It was a Vauxhaull econobox, nothing great. But it had a roller switch that let the driver aim the headlights up and down. I really liked that. Even in fog I could get optimal view, without being a dick. If somebody was coming towards me I could quickly just point the headlights down a bit. And since, ya know, there are a lot of people over in the UK who drive on the wrong side of the road, whatever I could do to lessen the amount of cars honking at me, the better.

The problem with a roller headlight adjuster here in the US is that we have too many assholes, rednecks, dumb people, etc. Only 14% of people would use it properly. 82% would be oblivious, and 4% would use it as a weapon, due to their hate towards other humans.
 
Wyodiver said:
The problem with a roller headlight adjuster here in the US is that we have too many assholes, rednecks, dumb people, etc. Only 14% of people would use it properly. 82% would be oblivious, and 4% would use it as a weapon, due to their hate towards other humans.
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100% true, am in the uk but it seems everyone has lights be it led/hid configured to blind peeps
 
Who cares about LED lights, half the morons around here forget to turn them on at all and the others just run hi beams all the time because fuck you thats why.
 
ecmaster76 said:
better for you or for everyone else?
we are talking about being blinded by other peoples headlights
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Let's put it this way. If you stand in front of my car, you will get more glare from the switchbacks I have installed than my headlights. My marker lights are brighter than my headlights above the headlights' cutoff line. And yes, my headlights are properly aimed, and they're in a car that is as low as it gets, a C5 Corvette.

Wyodiver said:
In '95, while in the AF I was sent off to an RAF base for a couple of months, yes, it was fantastic. I had to rent a car at Gatwick airport. It was a Vauxhaull econobox, nothing great. But it had a roller switch that let the driver aim the headlights up and down. I really liked that. Even in fog I could get optimal view, without being a dick. If somebody was coming towards me I could quickly just point the headlights down a bit. And since, ya know, there are a lot of people over in the UK who drive on the wrong side of the road, whatever I could do to lessen the amount of cars honking at me, the better.

The problem with a roller headlight adjuster here in the US is that we have too many assholes, rednecks, dumb people, etc. Only 14% of people would use it properly. 82% would be oblivious, and 4% would use it as a weapon, due to their hate towards other humans.
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Sounds about right. 90% of people around here don't even know how to use their fog lights properly.
 
I hate this too. Yes I know the stock headlights on my car are a joke, but today's LED lights in cars are blindingly bright. I live in farmland USA, so every dickhead with a lifted truck that also thinks its cool to have their 10 billion lumen off-roaders on, blinding everyone going the opposite direction. But hey, they can spot a deer from 5 miles out now, and if they go on a steep enough hill they might be seen from space. So who cares, right?

I wish I could just install/mount about five of these, wire them up, push a button to activate all at once, and return the favor.
 
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The desire to retaliate is strong, trust me. But it would never lead to a "win," unfortunately. Collateral damage isn't worth it.
 
tesfaye said:
Glad I'm not the only one to notice. It's out of control where I'm at. LED light bars on vehicles, improperly installed after market lights (doesn't matter if LED or not). It's the worst on trucks -- the lights are too high up if you're in a sedan/coupe.
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As the driver of a truck, I have the opposite problem. I get blinded by sedans with super bright headlights every day. The type of vehicle doesn't matter, the problem is the lights are not pointed at the damned ground. I don't know if its diy-ers, or dealers that don't know WTF they are doing.
 
Shmee said:
I go to work early, and I live in the rural area of our county, and this happens all the time to me. It is awful.
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Yeah me too for living in rural. more times than I can remember getting a person behind me doing that.

Maybe I am just getting old, but for Pete's sake wtf is up with having fog lights on with no fog? I see people with them on during the day time. Are they hard wired into their vehicles to be on when the car is on? Or is this one of those "look at me, I have something extra"?
 
wizdum said:
As the driver of a truck, I have the opposite problem. I get blinded by sedans with super bright headlights every day. The type of vehicle doesn't matter, the problem is the lights are not pointed at the damned ground. I don't know if its diy-ers, or dealers that don't know WTF they are doing.
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Usually it's people putting HIDs and LEDs into halogen reflectors. Halogen reflectors can only properly focus halogen bulbs, anything else will cause scatter and glare. Projectors are a little more forgiving in that the shield reduces glare, but light dispersion will still be abysmal in halogen projectors. And then there are the dumbasses that simply drive around with their high beams on. Factory HID and LED systems are required to have auto-leveling, at least in Europe, so that wouldn't be the cause on European cars.

azuza001 said:
Yeah me too for living in rural. more times than I can remember getting a person behind me doing that.

Maybe I am just getting old, but for Pete's sake wtf is up with having fog lights on with no fog? I see people with them on during the day time. Are they hard wired into their vehicles to be on when the car is on? Or is this one of those "look at me, I have something extra"?
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There's also the idiots who drive European cars with the rear fog light on, and that is annoying as hell as they are as bright as the brake lights. Most of the time they just think it improves their vision when it really does the opposite (more foreground light = reduced long range vision). Daniel Stern has a website dedicated to the topic of headlights.
 
Lol, are they 55/65 watt or ambiguously equivelant?

I drive a am a sedan and I avoid might driving now because of uber bright factory lights that are brighter than my high beams and after market azzhats
 
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