A recent article in the AARP magazine advised that its constituents should use high beams whenever possible. I took issue with this statement.
For instance, my son and his family live about 150 miles from us. When we return from a visit, the last 70 miles are on a super-two highway, which is busy during the day, but traffic decreases at night. Because of the decrease in oncoming traffic, a fair percentage of drivers flip on their high beams when there’s no oncoming traffic. But what invariably happens is, when meeting another car, they forget to flip back to low-beam until warned by the oncoming car, which I usually have to do 2 or 3 times during the hour we’re on the two-lane road. For this reason, I NEVER use my high beams on this stretch of highway.
I think in a lot of older cars, it was multiple filaments inside one bulb - the placement of the filaments was such that they would be reflected at different angles
I used to work with a woman who would say stuff like that all the time. For instance, if you were sitting in the break room reading a book, she wouldn’t ask what you were reading, she’d say “Oh, reading a book?” One of my coworkers dubbed her “The New Master of the Obvious”.
Occasionally, my wife moves from the bed to the living room couch, for part of the night, if she can’t sleep. I go downstairs in the morning and see the remnants of couch sleeping. When my wife gets up, I say “Did you sleep downstairs last night?” and she give me the “master of the obvious” comment.
Hello! I’m making conversation! It’s an opening for you to tell me about your difficulty sleeping, and for me to then empathize with your sleeping difficulties. It’s better than “You didn’t put away your pillows from last night.”
Yes, you’re right, I was just going from how the lights are arranged in my current car. Now I remember that former cars of mine had multi-filament bulbs.
– to the left of the clutch pedal. A car with that setup was probably what used to be called a “standard” shift.
You’re also far more likely to see a deer (or in some parts of the country elk) in time to avoid it, or at least to hit it at a much slower speed. Or, for that matter, a cat or dog or lots of other creatures; or a pedestrian or bicyclist or tractor or buggy running without lights or with insufficient lights; or the rare but not impossible cow or horse etc. loose in the road. Yes, if your high beams are blinding any of those you should dim them as soon as you see whoever you’re blinding – but it can matter a very great deal that you saw them before you dimmed the lights.
Yeah, I just guessed from context; and apparently guessed correctly.
It seems to me that you should use your high beams, and just be mindful about dipping/dimming them. You are much less likely to hit a deer (it whatever hazards are on your roads) if you do that.
And the new card that do it automatically when they sense an oncoming vehicle are terrific. Although i don’t know if they work for pedestrians and dogs.
But the way, i also encounter pedestrians who appear to be going someplace, but that’s mostly during the day. At night it’s mostly dog walkers and, for whatever reason, people just standing there shooting the breeze.
I might take issue, depending on what they meant by “whenever possible”. If I’m driving in an area that’s not well lit, I’ll use the high beams if I can. But I don’t use the high beams on brightly lit roads/streets even if there isn’t any other traffic for a mile in either direction. It’s possible to use the high beams then, but not necessary since the places I’m talking about are so brightly lit that it’s fairly common for people to not realize their headlights are off altogether.
Pro-tip: as soon as the chitchat starts, look pained, and say, “Sorry, I’m trying really hard not to fart, and I have to concentrate.” Works everywhere, but especially in an elevator.
Yeah, where I live, it’s mostly so bright I could probably drive with my headlights off with no loss of vision…for me. All the talk of little villages is making me think of Miss Marple tottering around St. Mary Mead.
I haven’t managed to find an example, but I have a clear (possibly false) memory of seeing a car where the headlight control was labelled with the text ‘Dip/Dazzle’
This might have been on a car that was already out of production back in the 70s (which is when my memory insists it saw it)
