Automotive headlights started out burning acetylene, before regular electric lightbulbs made them obsolete. In due time, halogen bulbs took over, before the industry began to explore even newer technologies like HID lamps for greater brightness. Laser headlights stood as the next leap forward, promising greater visibility and better light distribution.
Only, the fairytale didn’t last. Just over a decade after laser headlights hit the market, they’re already being abandoned by the manufacturers that brought them to fruition. Laser headlights would end up fighting with one hand behind their back, and ultimately became irrelevant before they ever became the norm.
Bright Lights
Laser headlights were first announced by BMW in 2013, with the German company promising the technology would be available on its new halo car, the i8. Fellow German rivals Audi would end up pipping the Bavarians to the punch, launching the limited-production Audi R8 LMX with laser headlights just months before the i8 entered production. Both brands would later bring the technology to a range of luxury models, including sedans and SUVs.
The prime selling point of laser headlights was that they could project a very bright, very focused beam a long way down the road. As we’ve explored previously, they achieved this by using blue lasers to illuminate yellow phosphors, creating a vibrant white light that could be bounced off a reflector and directed up to 600 m ahead of the vehicle. They weren’t so useful for low-beams, with that duty usually passed off to LEDs. However, they were perfect to serve as an ultra-efficient long-throw high beam that wouldn’t disrupt other road users, albeit with the aid of steerable headlamp assemblies and camera-based tracking systems.
Laser headlights were more expensive to produce, but were also far more capable than any conventional bulb in terms of throw distance. They were also more compact than just about any other automotive lighting technology, giving automotive designers far more freedom when creating a car’s front end. They were even able to outperform LEDs in the efficiency stakes. And yet, both Audi and BMW would come to abandon the technology.
The culprit? Regulations. In particular, headlight rules enforced in the United States. The Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard rule 108 deems that headlight intensity must not exceed 150,000 candela, while beam range must not exceed 250 meters. These rules effectively mean that laser headlights can’t outperform older technologies without falling afoul of US regulations. The rules stand in stark contrast to European regulations, which allow headlights to reach up to 430,000 candela. In an echo of the sealed beam era, US regulations were once again stymying European innovation by being firmly stuck in the past.
Of course, US regulations don’t apply everywhere. European automakers could have kept pursuing laser headlight technology, however, other factors have also come into play. LED headlight technology has continued to improve, with newer models improving brightness and light distribution. Adaptive matrix LED headlights also allow sections of the headlight beam to be turned on and off at will to provide the best illumination without dazzling other road users.
To that end, laser headlights are facing decline. While a few models in the Audi and BMW lineups still feature the headlights, both automakers are phasing them out for the future. Speaking on the matter last year, BMW’s large-car product manager, Andreas Suhrer, noted that solely LED-based designs were the future. “At the moment, we still have laser lighting on the G26 and the X7, but we don’t have future plans,” Suhrer stated. “The G60 and G61 do not have it, and the new 7 Series does not have it. I don’t think it’s completely done, but for the next models, we are making the LED Matrix lights our focus. The laser lights are pretty good with absolute range but the latest generation of Matrix LED lights does a better distribution.” Meanwhile, Audi released statements in 2024 noting that there were no plans to implement laser lighting modules in future product.
Ultimately, laser headlights were an expensive, fancy solution to a minor problem. Better high beams are surely a good thing, but given how rarely most motorists use them, they’re hardly a critical feature. Combine their high price and limited usability with the fact that one of the world’s largest car markets just made them useless, and it hardly made sense for Audi or BMW to continue pursuing this unique technology. They will go down as a luxury car curio, to be written about by bloggers every few decades as a reminder of what was once deemed cutting edge.
“Better high beams are surely a good thing, but given how rarely most motorists use them, they’re hardly a critical feature.”
Those in rural areas might differ.
Hah! You beat me to it by two minutes. I shouldn’t have taken so long to check my punctuation :)
“Most” motorists aren’t in rural areas. It is a factual statement.
Even city dwellers occasionally need high beams, they aren’t just for seeing a cow in the middle of the road at 150 meters. I fail to see how urban vs rural populations should dictate a safety and indicator feature all vehicles should have.
Why should I be forced to pay for this a product? I’m more than happy with my halogen bulbs. Ditto for the extra airbags and over zealous emissions equipment making a vehicle way more costly than I can afford.
IF they don’t create a blinding problem for other drivers then I would say the question is why shouldn’t they be ALLOWED. Who said anything about them being REQUIRED? You are using an anti-regulation argument to support strict regulation. Very Texas of you!
@Panondorf Because US manufacturers can’t make them, obviously…
Yeah cos everything has to be about YOU 🙄
Work harder and get a decent (meaning non-American) car…
That feels like a selfish take.
Had the US allowed for more than 150,000 candela and more than 250m throw distance, what then?
I came to say I use my high beams maybe 2 days a year, unless you count flashing them on other road idiots (and I wouldn’t want to use high powered lasers for that).
Actually, flashing high powered lasers at road idiots sounds great!
but they are to smart to actually flash on aimed target :)
You mean those idiots who don’t go at least twice the speed limit?
(I often feel like a mental patient – massively impaired in cognitive faculties, because after 20 years of owning a driver’s license, I still stay within 5km/h of the speed limit. Yes. EVERYONE absolutely hates me for that. And I keep seeing people going way less than the speed limit slamming their brakes when a speed trap comes up)
But why do that in the left lane?
Not an issue if you keep left.
This is a way to actually cause an accident, seriously consider what you are saying.
The ONLY way for an accident to happen in that scenario is the scumbag behind you was following too closely !! TAILGATING – the scourge of obeying the speed limit – some cretin feels the law doesn’t apply to them. One nitwit paid for my 54′ SeaRay sports yacht that way…..hehehe …. keep a safe following distance and there’s no problem. Situational awareness also helps.
Not as good as flashing sharks at them.
I use them every other day on my way home.
And then people like me get completely blinded with current headlights. Vastly brighter headlights would make it difficult for me to drive at all at night, I already use polarised sunglasses to deal with much of it.
You get blinded by headlights with unsiffuciently sharp and focused beams, most often because they are out of alignment and their owner doesn’t give a flying f*ck.
You are not blinded by the intensity, but by light that gets thrown where it has no business to be.
Or by a slightly rising and fallng road surface which puts the beam right where it’s intended – relative to the car body, but alas not the terrain. And the more intense that beam, the more damage it can do even in brief flashes.
Which is exactly why high power main beams are adaptive.
At this point the are almost closer to a dip projector that head lights of yester year..
The adaptive beams don’t work perfectly and the systems eventually break down, making the beams fixed. Then it’s either blinding other drivers, or a very expensive repair for the owner, depending on whether the MOT decides to bounce the car in the yearly inspection.
Nope, people regularly get blinded by headlights on a new car fresh out of the factory.
Agreed on that. Anyone that’s driven on a major highway for hours at night without seeing even 1 other vehical will agree that seeing that deer on the road a bit sooner is a good thing
I have never seen a deer standing in the middle of the road. They almost always jump out from the side at the last second.
“Better high beams are surely a good thing, but given how rarely most motorists use them, they’re hardly a critical feature”
In crowded Europe, perhaps. When I lived in the UK, it was rare that I could keep my high-beams on for more than a few seconds at a time, even on long motorway stretches at ungodly hours of the night.
But which major consumer economy elsewhere on earth has famously wide-open, sparsely-populated states (there’s a clue) wherein one can drive for miles along arrow-straight roads without seeing any other cars, but having to keep a close eye out for wildlife leaping into the road? Hmm, that’s a puzzler :)
I remember reading/downloading from Usenet about 30 years ago a long essay on the dire state of the US automobile lighting regulations, and how Federal standards, with their setting of minimum and maximum capabilities, had condemned the country (in those days) to feeble sealed-beam units while the rest of the world raced ahead with halogens, HIDs, and fancy shapes/designs.
Seems like maybe, in the immortal words of the Propellerheads, history’s repeating?
https://youtu.be/yzLT6_TQmq8
i don’t actually understand if/how the laser headlights aim but it seems like they get their long ‘throw’ distance by not ‘wasting’ light illuminating the sides. so if you’re looking for deer, i’m not sure the laser headlights really help
yeh, they had to integrate IR camera to detect animals in woods, pedestrians behind bushes in cities and light them up (with laser of course! ) so you see them. But this problem is also present with anything else but halogen, probably intensity is problem, you eye cannot adjust to that lightning difference so when you are checking surrounding of road you are simply light blinded like that deer which you are about to make flat :)
The one that has no manufacturers to actually make them and would have to import them, helping drive their own manufacturers out of business.
I want the bulb headlights to come back
I like my retinas, I don’t want 9 billion lumen headlights to burn them
This.
yeah it’s infuriating that the US regulators are not focused on any of our real problems. headlights that are too bright in you eyes, and turn signals that are invisible from most angles. absolute deluge of both problems at the moment, and the regulators are standing still
same here in europe. nobody seems to understand that the contrast at night is way too high with the current overpowered headlights of modern cars. so actually you see less, not more with powerfull headlights.
every dark grey form just out of the beams becomes black as your eyes as driver are adapting to the higher light levels, sacrifising the darker parts of your vision. but for people on the business end of the lights its even worse. and then the use lenses to project the light beam and forget that not every street is flat, blinding every else on the street when a change in elevation is passed. laser lights were just the first step of the LUS ( League of Under cover Sadists)
And of course nowadays cars have a bajillion screen flashing the driver’s eyes, so to compensate they need super bright headlights. I first started noticing this issue on my Audi like 20 years ago, nowadays some cars are better, others… not so much.
FYI: there are a smal knob which adjusts the instruments cluster’s illumination…
No there isn’t. It’s hidden in the software options if it exists at all.
No physical buttons because it costs money.
On the Prius I inherited from my mom, there’s a knob that adjusts the dashboard illumination when the headlights are on. But not when they are off for some reason. You can even turn the dashboard completely off, which I like to do, I can look out the window to see how fast I am going. Once my mom called me when she had the headlights on and the dashboard off because she thought the car was unsafe to drive without a speedometer. I’m not sure why since she usually drove about 90mph anyway, fitting because she was about 90years old at the time. Anyway, that’s how I found out about that feature.
And even if the light throw is as flat as it can be, with headlights creeping up more and more because everyone absolutely needs to drive fckn SUVs that will soon reach dimensions of a tour bus, if you drive a sane car, the upper rim of the headlights are right under your ceiling…
Most SUVs are in categories called “compact SUVs” and “subcompact SUVs”. Full size SUVs, aka passenger vans, like the Chevy Suburban, are relatively uncommon and can barely accept a 4×8 plywood sheet. In the 1960s, a standard station wagon had as much cargo area (not volume).
That said, the high headlights on SUVs and pickups have always been a problem for passenger cars, as have the headlights on commercial trucks.
The worst crime IMHO is mandatory running lights on the front but not the back, so everyone’s driving round with illuminated front & the dashboard lit up as if the lights are on, but when rain or fog arrives they are invisible from the rear and don’t even realise it.
And of course if the situation is “bright but zero visibility” the automatic lights don’t come on and people are so used to automatic lights now they never think to touch the switch and turn them on manually.
They are under legal obligation to make their vehicle visible by turning on appropriate lighting.
That means they are required to adjust vehicle lighting to road and weather condition, they just don’t bother to do it, and rely on an automat that only knows the difference between a night and day.
cop cars with 1 billion lumen blue light strobe lights on them while they stand in the middle of the road wondering why you can’t see them
You are aware you are legally required to SLOW DOWN enough to by able to stop before you crash into an obstacle you SHOULD anticipate to be there somewhere, aren’t you?
Stop making lame excuses.
These lights are just to be noticed.
Not to dazzle and blind motorists.
Not at all. They’re there exactly to make people intimidated and act erratically, so the police could have a reason to stop and search anyone they like.
The old yellow headlights were the most comfortable, for the driver, and for the other users. They are now only allowed for historic cars originally fitted with those.
I think same. Had one in my bedroom when I was little, as a nightlight. It was comfortable and warm. So romantic. It got me sunshine at home.
That was before the blue, angry Xenon headlights came into fashion. And then, LED headlights. Sigh. Cold, sterile, efficient..
1000% this. Many motorists are “me first” resulting in high-beams all the time – adding to this the height difference between truck and car headlights and you have even low beams blinding people. It’s super dangerous.
I live in a rural area and I’m tired of clueless people with their high beams on behind me, too. Sorry, when your headlights on the signs ahead are brighter than mine and you think that 2 car lengths in enough following distance at highway speed and you’re blinding me so I can’t see deer trying to intercept I’m very tempted to do a serious brake check. (and no, “dim” settings on rearview mirrors aren’t dim enough to deal with it.)
For the record, U.S. regulations do give a minimum and maximum height for headlights and a “lit area” maximum (i.e. intensity).
I “accidentally” turn on my cab lights until the idiots behind me turn on the low beams. Somehow they all figure it out after a while.
I’ve found that if I use the latching switch to engage the high beams, I’ll forget they’re on for a few seconds when I encounter another car. Obviously this isn’t a good thing. I’ve taken to manually holding the “flash” lever, so that the moment I see another car, I can just let go. I don’t have to think about it first, or reach for it, and the fact that I’m holding it on keeps them in the forefront of my mind while I’m using them.
I suspect most people have this problem, but haven’t bothered to even notice it’s a problem, much less try and find a solution. “It’s really dark, must need to turn them on!” and that’s the end of it, it never crosses their mind again.
It might not be applicable to your case (depends on the light design, separate high beam vs. dual filament), but to anyone doing this (holding the momentary high beam switch) make sure it’s not activating two ~50W filaments inside a single bulb envelope. It’s fine for short periods of time but tends to get hot really fast (can burn out quickly and possibly melt the holder).
Rear foglamps and a thorough windshield wash works just fine.
Don’t brake-check. It’s an attempted manslaughter and many countries prosecute is as that.
I agree. I see far too many people drive with annoying super bright or tinted aftermarket headlights.
I’d say a good chunk of the problem is that modern cars are increasingly SUV’s and crossovers (and “light duty” trucks in America), which all have much taller headlight placement than conventional non-compensating automobiles.
Hell, it was a problem with those before laser or powerful LED’s were popular for headlight use, it’s just that those things have severly exacerbated the problem.
Same. I hate meeting oncoming cars that leave their high beams glaring. Now to counter that with freaking laser beams even Doctor Evil would be proud.
As a compact-car driver who REGULARLY finds himself staring into the opposite traffic SUV’s acetylene torches (aka “LED headlights”) square at my eye level all I can say “regulations is a GOOD THING”.
Try doing that (staring at the bright LEDs of the opposite traffic) on some long unlit stretches of, say, PA Turnpike (some stretches have two lanes – no exits – though, thankfully, same sane thinking forced to have a barrier separating the two – but not tall enough for the ubertall SUVs to shine their torches over the barrirer.
Also, try country roads with no shoulder and two lane traffic whilst driving a compact car.
The last thing we need (in the US) complement those Conestoga Wagons of the cars with freaking laser beams shining straight into my eyes. (Look up Conestoga Wagon while you are at it – the SUVs of the Wild West pioneers).
Speaking of freaking lasers, they DO gradually fry one’s retire, albeit, unnoticeably, right? Because quantum dots. Even in the unfocused ones (like in the humble laser pointers).
Honestly, I may consider installing one of those trucks’ LED bars above my Nissan Versa’s roof to light up the SUV’s windshields with magna force of lightning just for the heck of it. There is plenty of cheap LED flashlights I can scavenge for pennies (relatively speaking) and almost all have “direction reflectors” to shine these well. I may even consider adding a fresnel lens to make sure all the light arrives where it should with laser precision. I am that edgy when driven to extremes with “off the market” upgrades shining straight into my eyes at night.
Autocarrot for said to type the thin GS I didn’t nintendo.
Lasers DO gradually fry one’s RETINA albeit, not really noticeably (at first), but cumulatively (over the years) to dim your vision little by little. Quantum dots (the squiggly things you see whilst shining laser into a wall), even reflected (off the wall) still arrive in you retina, because that’s what they do.
Shining while bunch of squiggly quantum dots far down the road is probably a terrible idea to start with. Because incoming traffic eventually gets near and whoever is driving the thing is gradually getting closer and closer to the source.
That’s not what quantum dots are. That’s “subjective speckle” you see in laser pointers. It’s caused by wavelength-scale imperfections in the surface causing destructive interference in the reflected light due to extremely narrow color bandwidth.
The blue laser+yellow phosphor+reflector would not exhibit the same behavior.
Is this the same thing that causes a “flare” effect from certain LED tail lights?
No, that’s PWM.
Where do all these people come from and what are they doing on Hackaday.com?
I stand corrected if I am wrong.
(my data comes from the astronomers, yes, those who stare at the stars for extended periods of time – using laser pointers, of course). To be exact, from the theoretical physics majors who hunt for things like Dark Matter. Not average Sams staring into school grade telescope in their backyards. The pros who know both far better than me.
Prepare to stand corrected. A “physics major” is a college student. Yeah no, not accepting that as an authority. Go with Christ brah!
It entirely depends on the amount of energy that reaches your eye from the light source. Lasers are notorious for eye damage because it is very easy to get a certain amount of power from the source to the target with very little attenuation because the beam is collimated and doesn’t appreciably diverge from the source over short distances. But it still depends on the output power of the laser. That why some lasers can damage your eyes, and other don’t, it entirely depends on the power of the laser. It is also possible to get a laser powerful enough that short range back scatter can cause damage but you’re talking about “within the same room” distances, not 100ft down the road.
That being said…. What You are seeing pouring out of these laser headlights isn’t laser radiation, it’s broad-spectrum white light caused by laser induced fluorescence. It’s no more dangerous to your eyes than a halogen lamp at that same brightness.
It’s a good idea to actually understand the subject matter before you post nonsense.
I can’t find the video now, but I just saw a setup where he’d flash a spotlight at drivers blinding him, then strobe it if they didn’t correct it. Mostly it just strobed every tractor trailer that passed.
My ideal would be to standardize the height off the road that headlights may be. Giant ass truck? Headlights at 24in off the road.
Or require the adaptive blocking tech that automatically shades the headlight in the range where it sees oncoming headlights. My guess is the market for hacks disabling that feature might explode though, like the people who disable daytime running lights.
For years the U.S. had headlight height specifications, required annual or biannual inspections (possibly not all states, however), and also limited auto manufacturers to four lighting designs: small round, large round, small rectangular, and large rectangular. Lighting suppliers and automobile manufacturers retaliated, mainly through regulatory capture, and here we are.
We can’t have nice things because we aren’t a nice species.
My 2019Hyundai Sonata has an Automatic high beam setting that raises and dims the high beams depending on oncoming traffic (and annoyingly, street lights).
There is a small problem in that retroreflectors work based on the small angle between the light source and the eyes as viewed from the reflector. Put them too far apart and road signs stop looking bright as you approach. I’d not mind incentivizing people to build shorter commuter vehicles in general, but it just couldn’t work safely for the big rigs and the like.
Next time take your antipsychotics before posting 🙂
Just did. Thank you for the quantum dot precision advice, it dimmed my mental retina a bit.
Bro somebody’s going to light you up like the sun if you do that . Plenty of us have our own light bars and spotlights . Some of us actually need our trucks and can’t use a little car . You know what road conditions are like and you still bought a compact car , that’s on you .
If you are tailgating me at night, 2 feet away from my back window, prepare to face the back of the lightbar. LEDs will be on both sides.
On a separate note, “you know what road conditions are like and you still bought a compact car , that’s on you” gives me the right to return the favor at the time/place of my choosing.
Road conditions where I live are fine, it is the HiHoSilver crowd that makes them unsafe – and I may reconsider my next car, it will be a used diesel F-150 XL. Originally (15 years back) I wanted either Unimog or surplus Hummer, but was discouraged by my wife (we went with minivan that since then died out). F-150 it is, diesel-powered, of course, and there is one I’ve been looking at just last months. Thank you for the inspiration and lightbars will be on both.
“US regulations were once again stymying European innovation by being firmly stuck in the past.”
Being stuck in the past is genuinely better for headlights though.
Bright, blue tinted lights with a sharp cutoff are hazardous for night vision, and long-term vision health in general.
Pupil constriction isn’t instantaneous and Rhodopsin photo regenerates when exposed to blue light.
This means that when you get flashed by these new mid-day tinted headlights after your eyes adjust to low light conditions your rods get overstimulated for a fraction of a second until your pupils constrict.
None of that is good for eye-strain, eye health, and low light vision.
And none of that happened with older, warmer colored headlights.
They had fuzzy light cones which didn’t cause harsh pupil reactions, and the color temperature didn’t regenerate Rhodopsin as well as the newer, cooler colored headlights.
Phototransduction, Dark Adaptation, and Rhodopsin Regeneration The Proctor Lecture:
https://iovs.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2164197
Activation of mislocalized opsin kills rod cells: A novel mechanism for rod cell death in retinal disease
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.072557799
If you need to point the sun down the road to drive, you don’t need to drive.
Stay home, get off the road, hire someone else to do it for you.
As long as you drive with safe speeds for those yellow lights everything is good. But something like 100km/h is way too much for those. I had a car with halogen lights that was not that safe in city center even if I drove below 40km/h because the light beam was not even close wide enough for seeing people approaching zebra crossings etc. Yeah there was some light but not enough to see pedestrians walking nearby.
Sharp cone edges mean you can provide maximum amount of light as widely as possible. Meaning that you have much better visibility all around. If you drive SUV or tesla (wtf is wrong with their light beam shape), that is not good because it blinds the drivers of compact cars bad. But with a compact car you get wide bright beam even without high beams that don’t make other road users blind.
If you bought the fancy BMW from 2013 and the laser dies tomorow, how expensive is to repair it? .-)
I guess this is the answer nobory likes to buy it.
$1200 to $2500 for OEM, and around $800 to $1500 for aftermarket, per headlight, plus $100 to $300 labor. If you need to replace the whole headlight housing you’d be paying upwards of $5K each.
The real problem is that standards seem to be set in terms of total output, not output per unit area, so we’ve ended up with ever-shrinking lights which are incredibly bright point sources of light that are physically painful to look at, but are still legal.
that is not how light works though. small point-sources are better because you get less diverging beam = more light down the road, less light into other drivers eyes. Etendue and so on.
But sometimes it’s what’s hiding at the side of the road that you’d be interested in. Better to see Mrs Moose before she steps onto the road in front of you.
Except of course it exactly is how light works. For a given output, luminance increases as the size of the source decreases, and luminance contributes exponentially to perceived glare.
“The introduction of LED headlights with increasingly sophisticated optics has resulted in the same or greater amount of light being emitted from a significantly smaller area. As a result, the luminance of headlights (perceived as brightness) has increased significantly, leading to the need for regulation.”
https://lightaware.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Vehicle-headlight-glare.pdf
“Respondents almost unanimously mention that they bothered by, or even suffer from, the brighter light of modern vehicle lightning. The brightness is caused by the smaller dimensions of headlight units. We think there should be a minimal dimension for these lights to stop this.”
https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2024-04/GRE-90-20e-reduced.pdf
Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkb1zeoXIug
Again that is not how things work. Laser pointers have huge luminance, but if you look at them off-axis you are not getting huge amount of glare. And same applies to headlights, you can’t ignore the beam pattern. Just because the light source has high luminance does not in itself cause glare. The relevant question is how much (stray) light ends up in your eyes, and that depends on the entire lamp assembly and especially the optics and whatever beam pattern they generate.
I’m not saying that modern headlights are flawless by any means, but attempting to pin the problems on the light source size is completely misguided and not based on any engineering or science.
It’s apparently escaped your notice that car headlights are not laser pointers, and that in the worst glare situations (an approaching car on a single-lane road) you are often exactly on axis. None of the reports I referenced said light size was the only cause of glare but they did call it out as a major contributor. Whereas you’ve provided no evidence whatsoever.
And if you do look at them on-axis, you’re completely blinded.
That’s the point. If your eyes land in the tight beam of a modern car headlight, you are blinded with after-images that make it impossible to see.
We need regulations for those stupid bicycle lights that are so bright you have to stop in the middle of the road because you absolutely can’t see anything. Those stupid bicyclers are gonna kill someone.
Those lights need to point down, not up.
Yeah but they are brilliant as slowing speeding drivers down.
They work even better if you have a few pointing backwards.
Drivers crawl past you giving you plenty of room.
Its the same with all safety devices.
Want to make all cars safe for everyone.
Install spikes in the centre of the steering wheel that just touches the drivers chest.
All road deaths would stop immediately.
Self deleting of those bave enough would increase for a short time before the gene pool adjusts.
Amusing, BUT, that would also incentivize tanks with no brakes :D
I loved the Xenon headlights the Opels I drove some 10-15 years ago had. They were bright, had great throw, and looked ahead in turns (they moved with your steering and when indicating). Whatever happened to that technology?
Probably gonna make a comeback in new fancier cars with LED matrix headlights.
My newest car has Tucker lights, so they can go up or down but in practice they don’t. I don’t know why when I’m cresting a hill the things don’t just go down a little bit thus not blinding the person coming the other way.
But far more interesting than any of this was the idea of projector headlights, which were literally DLP projectors that could darken or highlight certain areas in front of you. Oncoming car? Darkens most light that would fall on their windshield. IR detect a deer? highlight it. Road sweeps to the right? Left? (my Tuckers do do this, but only resultant of steering input)
If you make them color you could do some interesting things with classifying dangers; deer people, etc. and, if it flooded people with red light rather than white it wouldn’t ruin their night sight.
Great idea all around, not sure what happened to it.
WRT Bicycle lights that actually is a problem on trails at night where it’s mostly pedestrians. I’ve learned to either turn the light off if I don’t need it or put my hand over it when passing people so all the see is the red from my fingers.
“To that end…” What end? I read to the end and there was no end. Where is end? Show me end!
Of course no one wants other people’s lights in their eyes but one’s own lights can do no wrong, Shirley!
This explains why bicycles now have 400K candela headlights, they are finding new markets for their LASER tech.
What we need are partially polarized headlights and polarized windshields so people can use their high beams without dazzling others.
I’ve wondered this before – say, vertically polarised headlights and horizontally polarised windscreens/backscreens. Would it work?
How does polarization change in reflection? I think that could be dangerous.
How about LH circularly polarized beams, RH windshields? Then you only lose 3dB when it reflects off of something?
The discussion about polarizing filters always forgets that it’s basically wearing sunglasses at night. Polarizing filters lose a lot of light.
A shallow reflection off of a surface would tend to polarize the light along the surface. I.e. light bouncing off of a puddle of water on the road would become horizontally polarized.
http://www.hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/phyopt/polar.html#c2
Somewhat recent Tesla’s have adaptive matrix headlights. My 2021 M3 had a firmware update about late last year to enable the matrix headlight hardware my car always had. A change in the US laws allowed this. Anytime I’m doing more than about 30 mph the high beams are on, with the front camera and self driving computer determining which headlight pixels to illuminate. Visibility is much improved and nobody has ever flashed their light back to indicate they are being blinded. The high beam pixels are not brighter than the low beam they are just angled higher. I find matrix headlights a great improvement, especially since they were enabled with a software update at no cost. I’m not surprised non-matrix laser high beams are going away. Now I want matrix lighting for outdoor lights on my house, perhaps controlled by IR or radar motion detection.
Ridicuously bright headlights are already too bright in the Untied States, yet here the author is passing judgement and suggesting that they’re not bright enough?
Perhaps EU regulations are good about making sure that extra brightness isn’t directed straight in to the eyes of oncoming traffic, but so long as that’s obviously the case in the US, limits are good.
Heck, they should be MORE limited. If people can’t pay attention to the road and therefore need ridiculously bright headlights to make up for their lack of attention, the problem isn’t the headlights.
I was hoping to read more about the blinding problem.
Yes, making headlights brighter makes the other drivers blinder. But lasers are more focused. Do laser headlights perhaps direct more light down at road level while directing less light up by head level of an oncoming car? If so maybe these would actually reduce the blinding problem.
Or is it just another way to throw far too much light energy indiscriminately? I have not seen these and am curious.
my 2022 Ford Escape uses the camera to determine when high beams are on or off when the system is set for automatic headlight mode. Works pretty well, I only have to override when something trips up the automatic features.
“In an echo of the sealed beam era, US regulations were once again stymying European innovation by being firmly stuck in the past.”
Whether or not this actually has to do with regulatory capture, anyone who’s driven in winter in the US in any remotely populated area can tell you US drivers cannot be trusted with even brighter high beams with even greater throws.
Covering all of this most likely is plastic getting crazed and yellowed. Internal optical spaces getting regular hurricane force supermarine water intrusion conditions. Sealed glass beams had a lot of pluses.
It’s getting where we might use what the musical group Glass Beams uses! Maybe a retro reflector version with a big frown.
Sealed beams are great IMHO. Cheap, standardized, new reflectors every time you change.
I have a second car now with automatic High Beams. They come on too early and turn off too late. At least in my latest car I can disable them. The Van on the other hand is sprung for weight and most of the time its empty so the low beams don’t go very far.
It sounds expensive to buy, and to maintain/repair. And if the camera based tracking system guesses wrong, the long throw bright beams could be steered right into someone’s eyes.
Also, a lot of the things that are important to see are not directly ahead by 600m, they are to the side somewhat. So the comments from manufacturers about optimal distribution being better handled with LED matricies may be apropos; throw distance is not the only thing to optimize for.
Have matrix LEDs on our car, and they’re great precisely because they throw wide and illuminate the critters in the woods.
They also seem to dynamically blank out the opposing traffic fairly well, in that nobody has ever flashed their highbeams back at us, but that’s as far as my survey goes: I’m not in the other car. It’s really fun watching it cone-out the other side when there’s a little fog or mist.
They must work in tandem with the front camera, but I’d be really interested in seeing how their algorithm determines where to throw shade.
Let’s all just drive round in the dark with night vision googles, problem solved?
No, problem would actually be increase
Y’all are loosers, sealed beem still lead the way. I been retrofitting my r150 with sealed beem there are kits on eBay. And trust me I been driving for 47 years and the output of light is astaggering
Modern cool-white LED headlights are almost like high beams in terms of brightness. I often think about how some of them could temporarily blind another driver who could kill you in a flash!
Headlights are too darn bright these days and tend to be harsh cool colours.
I much prefer selective yellow halogens.
So blue lasers were just used to excite white phosphors? How is that effectively different than a blue led with white phosphors attached to directly to the led, which is pretty much what the white leds now in use are? I can imagine some cooling and packaging differences but not advantages. There are certainly no optical differences.
What am I missing here?