Anyone else fed up with those ridiculously bright car headlights that seem to be standard issue these days? You know, the ones of an intensity better suited to vaporising diamond than illuminating a dark road.
They are annoying not just because even on low-beam they are completely dazzling - whether on oncoming traffic or via the wing-mirrors when they are behind you - but also because as the car behind you goes over a bump you get a super-halogen burst of intense blue (or purple or green, if the offender is really poncey) light searing your retinas.
Is my memory fooling me, or was it possible only five or so years ago to drive at night without utterly ruining your night vision? And, heaven forfend, to actually be able to see the edge of the road when a car was coming in the other direction, without being forced to brake hard or risk ending up in a ditch or getting intimate with an oak tree?
Are you sure that it is the xenon bulbs that bother you? I live near a couple of wealthy neighborhoods and never had a problem with the purple xenons, even on dark back roads.
However, the halogen manufacturers tried to scoop up some of that business and they started putting out those silly blue lights (that shine more glare into oncoming traffic while, ironically, providing less on-the-road illumination for the driver than a white halogen).
I don’t know the commercial name of the super-bright bulbs that are responsible for blinding me, I just mostly hiss obscenities every time I’m blinkingly faced with them.
I thought it had to be just me because I just couldn’t fathom the thought process of the folks who buy them:
“Hey, those bulbs are blindingly bright! Where can I get me some?”
I don’t know exactly what they are, tomndebb, I just know that they hurt.
The first few times I encountered them, I thought the other driver had forgotten to dip his full-beams as I approached, so I gave him a quick flash of my brights to remind him. He responded by turning his up to full beam and my eyes nearly melted.
I have the Xenon bulbs. I like them because the standard headlights on my car (1994 Dodge Intrepid) are shitty to the max. The Xenon bulbs really do help light up the road better. I used to never want to drive at night because my headlights were so poor that it was hard to see the road. Plus they’re only like $20-25 dollars if you know where to get them. It’s become kind of a fad in my town, probably 30-40 people have them and it’s a pretty small town. I like them because whenever I see them I know it’s one of my friends!
My boyfriend pretty much started the whole thing in my town because he was the first to have them (aside from the people who have cars that come standard with them), so I got mine for free. You can also get Xenon fog lights too.
The very intense car lights are high-intensity discharge (HID) bulbs. Xenon bulbs are quite bright, but have been around for quite a while. HID lights are not actually blue, but your eyes perceive them that way because they’re much less yellow than conventional lights. There are aftermarket imitation bulbs that use a blue filter so that they look a little like HID headlights, but they are far less intense.
My car came with HID headlights, and I’m ambivalent about them. I really like how much more I can see with them as a driver, but I’m also aware that they can be a bit too intense for other drivers. I keep them properly angled, which hopefully lessens any problems they cause other drivers.
HID - that’s the name I was looking for, thank you.
They’re especially bad when mounted on 4x4s (SUVs), as they are then that much higher. (FYI, I drive a very small Renault which will be 20 years old come November. It has a couple of gas lanterns duct-taped to the front.)
What pisses me off is that they do occasionally appear to flash blue as the car bounces, which often makes me think I’m being followed by an angry cop.
Not to rain on veryone’s pit parade, but HID lights are not any brighter than halogen lights. You just think they are because the color temperature of the light is different.
HIDs are substantially more efficient, so a lower wattage bulb will produce the same amount of lumens as a higher wttage halogen, but that doesn’t men they bump up the wattage to match the halongen wttage. They use lower wattage, thus extending life.
I’m sorry, it’s not solely color temperature making the difference. HIDs also have a different spectral range and more uniformity than halogen bulbs. Still, they travel no further than normal halogens. Correctly aimed HID bulbs should not be any more objectively blinding than normal bulbs.
Which kind of bulbs they are doesn’t matter to me, what matters is that there are a lot of headlights out on the road now that make driving more hazardous. What good does it do the driver who sees the road better when he has blinded oncoming traffic so badly that they might run into him or someone else?
The aim of the lights doesn’t solve the problem. Bumps, hills and turns can end up aiming the lights straight into other driver’s eyes.
I heard that some localities are trying to enact legislation to ban them. PLEASE!