this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2026
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Don't blame LEDs, it's because of the alignment of the headlights. Any type of headlight can be misaligned.
Yeah, but the LEDs really.... highlight the situation.
To be fair, depending on the housing, alignment is nearly impossible. Many housings are simply not designed to have a sharp cut off. As far as I'm concerned, LEDs should only be allowed in projector housings with projector lenses. Those are the ones that have a damn near razor blade level of light cutoff, so when you aim them to just below the windshield level of most vehicles, it's not going to blind them at all.
That is what I have done with my car, I have LEDs brighter than the sun, but I have them in projector housings with projector lenses, and I have them aimed to be below the windshield level of a typical sedan, not a stupid SUV or truck. So nobody ever flashes me or gets annoyed and I have tested by having a friend Drive towards me on a road in the car while I am in a different car
It has the added benefit of my high beams are still mostly road level rather than up in the trees like many peoples so for like a mile in front of me it is just daytime which is very helpful out where I live in the middle of absolute nowhere rural where streetlights are just a myth and the deer are plentiful.
I really appreciate your attention to properly aligning your lights... but doesn't that only help with very level roadways? Where I drive with lots of gentle hills, a car with a razor thin cut-off looks like its constantly flashing its high-beams at me. I feel like a headlight with a gradual transition would be less blinding for other drivers.
Yep every little hill and it is blinding.
Mild unlevelness is taken into account with my aiming, obviously I can't do anything about us going opposing directions on a steep incline, but that's true of any headlight type.
...which is exactly why you shouldn't be allowed to have the intense, blinding lights on your vehicle.
"It's unavoidable but fuck y'all, i like the bright lights" is a wild stance to take.
As I mentioned, that's true regardless of light type. I am just as blinded by the people with standard lights on an incline as they are by my LEDs. That's just part of driving on an incline at night. People that have driven at night more than once in their life just learn to hold up one of their hands on a steep incline.
It's less I like the bright lights and more the whole there is no other source of light anywhere near me. I'm on a rural highway and I would like to be able to see the deer before I'm on top of them.
Incandescant headlights are not dim, the tyranny of the inverse square law is unavoidable. If you stare into them head on, say, as a product of a hill, you will be unsighted regardless.
And this is ignoring the fact that just because LEDs can be brighter doesn’t mean they have to be. Trying to attribute this issue to technology instead of insufficent regulation is harmful.
Yes, halogen housings. Which is why halogen headlights CAN in fact blind you more than proper factory LEDs, but people here usually won't listen to that.
I have yet to see HID or LED headlights installed from the factory that don't have sharp cutoffs.
If you retrofitted those, that's most likely still illegal in the EU. The LEDs that you're allowed to retrofit to halogen projectors are pretty dim actually. And headlights above a certain lumen count have to be auto-adjusting for when you've got a load and the rear end is sagging for example. Which is why it's difficult for me to share in LED hate. HIDs and LEDs literally legally require proper aiming and cutoffs, whereas halogens are "do whatever the fuck you want" outside of having to make sure the aim is right for the annual inspection (which sometimes they'll just adjust for you anyway and nobody's stopping you from aiming it wrong again after you leave).
Not in the EU but no the car came with projectors already i just changed the bulbs
In that case, I hope you either have bulbs that are legal for halogen projectors, or you were very particular about how you aimed them, because LED, HID and halogen projectors all work a little bit differently as I understand it.
But if there's nobody blinking at you at night when you're using your low beams, then it's probably fine.
Yeah, somewhere in this ridiculous thread I mentioned I also used a different vehicle to do a pass by of each other to make sure it was good. It's also just pretty easy to see where the light is. The cutoff is quite sharp and defined. It's fairly clear what it's hitting and what it's not.
They should be behind diffusers to break up the laser like focus of them.
Oh man I had never thought about a laser array for headlights. New goal unlocked.
LEDs are so point source and intense that any misalignment, which is very common, is going to be an issue. Plus they blind you much more when a car's nose is elevated relative to you. Put HID or LED lights on trucks and they are always in your face, and it feels like 50% of the vehicles are massive trucks.
Or if they're loose and the car's engine vibration shakes them at you.
Headlights didn't use to blind me.
Then came LEDs.
Now headlights blind me.
I blame LEDs.
Halogens blind me just as much as LED and there are LED lights that don't blind me.
It's strange though since LED lights are extremely much more powerful, and this is a current and ongoing and big complaint by hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
Maybe you have a rare genetic eye disorder that makes you impervious to being blinded. Good for you. The rest of us get blinded by LEDs.
Lucky I've been blinded by lights pre led. It is way more common know.
If your eyesight has gotten bad because of old age, perhaps you shouldn't be driving.
I see zero correlation between what you said and I said. Yes you are right. If you can't see, don't drive.
Also, if you drive, don't blind people on and off the road.
I don't blind people, I have HIDs and the projectors are still functioning well enough to get a razor sharp cutoff. Current ones aren't even that bright, still on the original Hella E55s which are a lousy projector and burn out quickly.
But I also don't get blinded by oncoming factory LEDs like, ever. It happens about as often as with old pre-projector halogens that spew their (admittedly dimmer) light all over the place. Which is to say, never.
Which leads me to think that perhaps the people who say they used to get blinded less back in the day and can barely see now, have gotten worse eyesight over the years, rather than LEDs in particular being the problem.
OR maybe it's yet another North America special, where everyone's driving tall as fuck trucks with their low beams aimed straight forward, especially in retrofitted LED lights. Doing any of that near me would be highly illegal, which is why pretty much the only times I get blinded by LEDs, it's some asshole's lightbar they decided to install to supplement their high beams instead of fixing whatever is fucked up with their headlights. Somehow that's the one loophole we have: You can have super bright additional lighting on your car as long as it's ONLY high beam.
I actually was asked one time why I didn't do that myself when I had crappy burnt out headlights and decided to go the more expensive route of getting brand new bi-xenon projectors installed in a car I had (~500€ all in for parts, installation, polishing, and of course it came with a pair of new high-end bulbs, also included in that price, compared to ~100€ for a super bright stupid fucking LED lightbar). My answer was that I wanted my low beams to be good too, so I don't have to switch over at the last possible moment and blind everyone with a light bar. I was right, too. I barely even felt the need to use the high beams, and NOBODY flashed at me for my low beams, which were about 20x brighter than the burnt out OE projectors. Like those HIDs were brighter than many people's LEDs after that, compared to the old E55s (as you can probably tell, I hate the Hella E55, super common bi-xenon projectors in 00s German cars and even some Japanese ones), which made my old 1992 Audi 80's halogens look bright. And not a single time did anyone flash at me. I even asked a friend to drive towards me and tell me if I was blinding him. Nope. Two days later, said headlight restoration/upgrade actually saved me from hitting a couple of deer hiding in bushes, so there's a point for bright headlights. I can see well enough without them, but I'm pretty sure I couldn't have seen those deer. I don't think anyone could have with dim headlights.
Also the increasing height of lights, even low beams travel fucking long
Prevailing thought on social media seems to prefer demonizing technology over discussing how to use it better.
A lot is getting pushed on us strictly out of profit motives, you shouldn't just blindly accept "new and improved" just because capitalism says so.
Yeah, being able to see animals about to jump into the road is suuuuuch a bad thing, only because of capitalism do people want it.
We were already able to do that. So what is the improvement besides blinding people?
Almost everything we buy is "pushed" on us out of profit motives, not as a public service. And yes, we shouldn't buy things just because they're "new and improved", but I'm not sure how that's relevant to aiming headlights too high - a problem as old as cars.
Food, energy, drinking water, health care, fire and police, none of those are pushed out of profit motives. They are things we need to survive and have a society. The problem is when the system itself stops being just the set of rules regulating trade to being an active participant and incentive in and of itself.
Capitalism has its own prejudice- profit, over and at any and all costs.
Humans need food, energy, water, health care and so on, and we will need that regardless of what capitalism has to say about how to provide it. And there is a lot to say about what capitalism has to say about how to provide it.