![]() In vehicles so-equipped, your forward-facing camera tracks oncoming vehicles and black them out so that you are shining almost no light in the drivers' eyes, while keeping full illumination everywhere else. These lamps are capable of selectively illuminating arbitrary areas. The ne plus ultra these days is LED pattern projection. That is why there is little difference between high and low beams on leading-edge vehicles. This, combined with a "shutter" allows them to define very precise patterns of illumination, so that the light is going to the road without a significant umbra shining into other drivers' eyes. ![]() Instead of an imprecise reflector behind the bulb, there is a lens in FRONT of the bulb. The real change is in the introduction of so-called "projector" headlights. The newer technologies mostly just save power. You can make any kind of light pretty much as bright as you want. The light source and its absolute brightness is no longer in itself all that important. The situation these days is way more complex than you might think. In vehicles so-equipped, your forward-facing camera tracks oncoming vehicles and blacks them out so that you are shining almost no light in the drivers' eyes, while keeping full illumination everywhere else. ![]() ![]() Of course, I doubt most of the modifiers ever thought through all this. A Miata’s or Porsche’s headlight can be aimed “higher” than a lifted truck’s or semi’s without shining up into an oncoming driver’s eyes. The higher the bulb off the ground, the more it is supposed to be aimed downward. One thing I learned from Daniel Stern, is headlight aiming “rules” change depending on the height of the bulb above the pavement. And lastly, there are the “leveled” pickups, or lifted, where no attention has been paid to the effect on headlight aiming. Another common “offender” would be the truck pulling a fifth wheel or whatever, where the hitch weight is causing the rear bumper to be lower, which has the affect of changing the effective aim of the lights…you guessed it…up into oncoming drivers’ eyes. Increasingly, 18-wheelers have the offending illegal headlights, which is worse, because they are mounted so high off the ground. One more part of the rant…I just returned from Oregon / Washington to Texas, and a fair amount of this was at night.
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