I have become an aggressive counter-flasher. This has yielded in some cases new knowledge - that the low beams of a lot of cars these days look like high beams (indicated when they flash back, and it's the brightness of a thousand suns).

For those behind me, I've discovered that my side mirror has an angle where it reliably bounces the beams back. I've gotten more than a couple of drivers to turn their beams down with this method (but they have to be tailgating for it to work, which usually means we're already in an adversarial situation).

I might just be getting old, but more and more I see people not using indicators and not understanding the rules of junctions. Tail gating also really annoying.

I was in a mates car recently and it scared the hell out of me, he was tail gating for most of a 3 hour journey. Eventually we got to a bit with chevrons and he wasn't obeying the rule staying N chevrons away from the car in front. I told him and he replied "nonsense, my car beeps if I'm too close to the car in front" I didn't have the energy to point out that is a collision warning not a safe distance measurer type device.

My other pet peeve is the opposite - they've got LED daytime running lights, and use those instead of headlights. They're driving around at 11pm with no taillights and abysmal forward lighting, but there's enough of a glow from the DRLs that they assume their lights are on.

Or worse, they're accustomed to "automatic" lights and don't even know where the switch is, so they're driving around at dusk or in fog, rain, or snow in a white, gray, or black vehicle without their lights on.

I have also been tempted to purchase digital billboard space, but not on the side of the road. I want LED signs on my roof rack (one forward, one back) with column or two of buttons on the dash to call up a slate of messages:

1. TURN YOUR BRIGHTS OFF! BLUE MEANS BLINDING.

1b. OW! YOUR HEADLIGHTS ARE MISALIGNED.

2. TURN YOUR HEADLIGHTS ON! THOSE ARE DRLs.

3. TURN LIGHTS ON TO BE SEEN EVEN IF IT'S NOT DARK.

4. MY SAFE FOLLOWING DISTANCE IS NOT A SPOT FOR YOU.

5. YOU ARE TAILGATING. I WILL NOT SPEED FOR YOU.

6. YIELD DOES NOT MEAN STOP.

7. I AM ZIPPER MERGING, NOT CUTTING THE LINE.

8. DRIVE CAREFULLY! I JUST SAW A DEER.

9. GO AHEAD, I SEE YOU.

10. YOU HAVE A PROBLEM WITH YOUR VEHICLE, PULL OVER.

11. THANK YOU!

Plus a few spare slots to be implemented as needs arise.

I've been unimpressed with the automatic high-beams on my wife's newer Toyota and on other rentals I've driven, they usually depend on a direct line-of-sight to the other car's headlights, which means they stay on just long enough to hit the windshield of another car cresting a hill and blind them. Then they courteously turn off a few camera frames and vision analyses after the low beams become visible. If a __competent__ driver is controlling the high/low beams manually, they'll see the headlights of the other car illuminating the trees and such and turn off the high beams a couple critical seconds earlier. But I admit that the automatic systems are miles better at managing it than the __incompetent__ drivers who are all too common.

> I've been tempted to purchase digital billboard space to raise awareness.

Ironically, digital billboards are often 10x more obnoxious than even LED high beams in my area (and those are plenty awful, FWIW). We've got a few nearby that are so bright they could be used as stadium lighting when they're set to white. Naturally, half the ads running on them feature a white background, so it's like a stadium light that flips on and off every 15 seconds. Considering they're pointed directly at drivers' faces, I genuinely don't understand why there isn't more opposition to them; they're absolutely blinding. I'm seriously considering bugging local and state reps about it until they pass light intensity ordinances in my area.

> Mostly I'm hoping that automatic high-beams, like some Ford trucks I've seen do well, proliferate more!

I have a 2021 Tacoma, and its automatic high-beam adjustment is terrible. It does a reasonable job of turning high beams off when a car approaches, but it has a number of problems that make it unusable. After the car passes it waits too long to reactivate the high beams. That's when they're needed most; my eyes have already adjusted to the other car's headlights, now the road is dark again, and I'm still on low beams.

It's way too sensitive. When a car approaches from a long ways away, it sometimes turns high beams off for minutes at a time. It turns them off when there are widely-spaced streetlights on long empty rural highways.

I finally took the time to figure out where the switch is to turn off automatic high-beam adjustment. I do a much better job knowing when to dim and reactive the lights than the vehicle does.

RE ".... get a mirror on my trunk that I can adjust the angle of from inside the cabin to reflect back high-beams at the driver. ...." I had this idea too this annoyance too - but never implemented it.

One way to implement would be to mount a thin object , like a toothpick thickness and 1 or 2 cm long say on the mirror 90 degrees vertically to mirror surface , then (auto? ) adjust so their is no shadow from car's headlights that is behind.

Like lots of my other ideas , when i search for them , they already exist .maybe this one too

Found similar ideas already exist for car rear view mirrors .... ie Google finds ... ".... auto-dimming rearview mirror automatically adjusts to reduce glare from incident light by using sensors and an electrochromic gel layer...." However my google of words "...auto adjust reflecting mirror to face incident light...." FInd there is much discussion on Faceboot and REddit for people asking for "...mirrors that reflect very bright high been lights BACK at the driver BEHIND ...: Could not find a implementation though ... Maybe it should be an Arduino project ....

Automatic high beams only dip for other cars. They don’t dip for bicycles or pedestrians. Those walking or cycling by the road do not even register. Pure hubris.

You must never drive on a curvy roads then. Every car I driven waits until the approaching car is fully around the corner, blinding them for a full second before dimming, instead recognizing the headlights around the corner and dimming earlier.

All Teslas can do this too, as can a huge range of modern cars with so called "auto dipping headlights". Virtually all cars with this option allow you to turn it off though...

The quality of the auto-dip implementation varies enormously as well.

I am not sure that the incredibly bright Tesla Model 3 (and sometimes Model X) lights are on brights but are just stupidly bright at low-beam settings.

> I'm surprised Teslas don't do it.

They do. Also, the ones with matrix LEDs (most newer Models other than the Cybertruck) automatically create a circle of darkness around anything they detect to be another vehicle.

ours does - and it does it very reliably as you describe the bolt above.

I had the exact same issue, and Tesla sent out a service rep to my home to complete the adjustment to spec for free. You can request it through the service menu. Haven't had anyone flash me in the year since.

Thank you for your service

Thank you for being part of the 0.01% of Tesla drivers who figured this out. I think by default they set them to "maximum height" or something. As someone in a sedan, they are infuriatingly blinding at night by default. I'm sure they're illegal, but obviously Tesla doesn't care.

Source: live within a few miles of the Tesla factory, so I get more than my fair share of them. MOST of the drivers seem completely oblivious to this.

What a quality car manufacturer!

Back when sensors, electronics, and servos were unaffordable or unavailable, it made sense to have a low beam height control as the resting pitch of your car could vary by several degrees based on passenger/cargo load, trailer tongue weight, etc.

It seems vastly less necessary now to have that control in the hands of the driver.

Older cars have the height adjustment control too. Either as a physical dial or a menu entry. It's useful when transporting something heavy or when you're driving on totally wrecked roads so you can spot potholes faster etc. But most people don't know that, dial it all the way up and just leave it there.

Headlight regulation obviously stopped making any sense at all when they allowed bigger cars to put them up higher. Like you are gonna regulate all kind of beam parameters and then miss the most important thing.

As someone who's undergone LASIK correction, I have to do this semi-regularly for night highway driving. (For those unaware, the procedure gives you a mild halo effect basically for life, if you've had your eyes dilated before, imagine that, at like 25%). LED headlights are BRUTAL for this, oftentimes I can't even see the car they're attached to because of the insane amount of glare.

Adaptive headlights that actively shield oncoming drivers were finally made legal in the US in 2022 but complicated bureaucratic hoops make them hard to implement. BMW seems to have them working as I find their higher-end lighting (ex: ICON Adaptive w/ Laser Light) to be among the best to oncoming drivers—at least to my eyes.

CNN writes about why headlight brightness is worse in the US than in other countries:

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/15/cars/headlights-tech-adap...

It's "reckless", not "wreckless". Recklessness is often correlated with wreck-fullness.

At least in NA, if you only have the DRLs on, it means your rear lights aren't on.

Are you aware of what the D in DRL stands for?

Your vision may be good enough to see ahead of you by candlelight, but other drivers are not going to expect a nearly invisible car approaching at night. Turn on your headlights.

On many cars, the beam of the DRLs are more offensive to oncoming drivers when used at night.

Properly repairing your car might make it less distracting/infuriating.

> headlight beams have been misaligned and that's extremely distracting/infuriating so I hate using them anyway

One might consider taking the 5 minutes to align your headlights? Even if you're alone and don't have a helping friend with a tape measure it's not difficult to just make them a little more properly adjusted.

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