Cars - For Car Enthusiasts

The problem used to be blamed on aftermarket bulbs in cars not designed for them. But now, completely factory cars have insane, nuclear fusion reactors for headlights. I mostly get blinded by tall trucks and SUVs. Almost all stock headlights.

I improved things a bit by having my rear window tinted as dark as legally allowed. It helps take the edge off the brightness of trucks behind me. Can't really do much about the on-comming traffic.

You might be able to put good bulbs in the fog light position and then aim them...most fog lights I've seem don't project light very far out though.

Depending on what you drive, you might be able to aim your low beams down a bit after installing some LED replacement bulbs. I'll line my car up to a big painted wall to see the bulb projection pattern. This will get my left and right even with each other. Then when you drive, make sure the light is projected under people's rear windows on level ground.

So it's not really high beams, at least that's what I've read, and also in my personal experience.
Low beam in modern cars has a height/angle adjustment, and cunts just pop it all the way up. It's not really "misalignment" so it never gets flagged by things like MOT in the UK. It's really just ignorance and being a dick mixed with newer cars having xenon or LED headlights.

I'm not sure fog lights will make the road any easier to see, but my car doesn't have any 😭 so idk for sure.
I have quite good low light vision, so oncoming headlights dazzle me pretty badly. What I find helps is looking at the passenger side of the road or lane, it gives me enough view to stay in my lane, and I'm not looking directly at oncoming cars so my vision isn't fucked.

The only other thing I can suggest is getting a taller vehicle, or a massive lift kit 🤣

Edit: Before buying aftermarket bulbs check what kind of lights you have, reflector or projector, and make sure you buy bulbs for the type you have. Also, aftermarket bulbs may not be legal in your area

There was a technology connections video on this exact topic. I believe its a number of reasons, but the one I remember is the angle of the lights themselves.

Thank you! ...and death to all jeep owners. And the clown that invented those perfectly blinding-height head lamps.

Oh look, a headlight question. I love headlights. I love good headlights. I hate bad headlights. I hate the user-errors I see every other car. So here's a whole info dump from my head because I want to answer your question, offer solutions, explain why everyone else is blinding you, and explain why people still make these errors. I'm glad you're asking before acting. This is a USA-based response.

Part 1 and 2 _____ you and your fog lights
Yes, LEDs thrown in fogs would glare, about as badly as they do in headlights. There is no truly compliant LED drop-in bulb for halogen housings. While you can get some that work very well (and glare no worse than a hazy 90s headlight with the proper bulb), fog housings are much more compact and more prone to issues with the minor differences in "filament" placement.

On top of that, fog lights that have the proper beam pattern should only add a minor amount of forward lighting to proper low beams. They are meant to have a flat beam (not upwards, not downwards), a wide beam, and no central hot spot (so it doesn't throw very far). However, the added width nearly always does extend farther to the sides than most headlights. For that reason, I've upgraded mine to true LED fog housings. These are not some bug-eyed bullshit unregulated "fog" lights from Amazon (which are really just shitty high beams), but rather true fogs from a few places that talk about SAE fog patterns. I have used Diode Dynamics Luxeons and Morimoto Evos. They add a good doubt of light to the sides, so they're great for residential driving.

Between the two companies, they make the standard fog light housings along with many for popular models (NC miata, ford pickup rectangles, dodge ram verticals, Honda ovals, etc) so there's a good chance your vehicle has a replacement available.

Anything that projects a flood beam is just a glaring, shitty high beam. Driving lights are high beams. Flood lights are worse high beams. Shitty tall fog lights are shitty high beams. LED/HID bulbs in halogen bulb formats are shitty high beams.

Part 3 ____ everyone is blinding me There's multiple reasons.

Hazy housings were the original issue, with plastic lenses only coming around en masses in the 1990s. 50s-80s had sealed beam glass housings. 80s saw the spread of replaceable bulb housings, but the Germans and Japanese largely used glass fronts. So it's jot really until the 90s that plastic lenses took off. The clearcoat wears off, the polycarbonate degrades in uv, and scratches diffuse the light. This is the classic reason for glare.

The HIDs came along. HID housings are designed for HID bulbs. They have different filament placement and shape. But, some smart ass figured out they could re-base the HIDs and throw them in halogen gousings. For both additional lumens and for clout, they took off.

HIDs have largely dropped off in favor of LEDs. They don't require external ballasts and offer a mor plug and play application. While they can be designed fairly well (diode dynamics SL1, GTR lighting) the vast, vast majority are utter trash. Being off by a millimeter can ruin a beam pattern and some of these are off by an inch.

Now combine either PnP bulb with hazy lenses and the problem is so much worse.

There's also an oem component to the problem. While most headlights are decent from the factory (yes, seriously), they are simply notoriously aimed high. They're aimed at the max allowable height with no gas in the tank, no passengers, and a brand new suspension. By the first oil change, the headlights are now going to be blinding drivers just 100ft ahead as the nice respectable cutoff rises into mirrors and eyes.

Part 4 ___ why do people keep doing this?

So many reasons.

Cool factor? Gotta have the latest trend. Remember drift charms? Or underglow?

Seeing factor? People don't understand headlights and think they can see better. The irony is these PnP bulbs tend to puke light in the first 50ft (foreground) which hurts down road night vision, while also killing down road throw by having a reduced "hot spot". The bright bubble in the center of your beam is intentional because throw takes exponentially more light. But people see that foreground puke and are wowed.

Self centered personalities? I see it all the time. Explaining this means nothing. Many people think either they deserve to see better than anyone else or, tit for tat, they should blind everyone because many people blind them. It's like a fucked up arms race.

Misinformation? Missing any of the above or being told contradictions to the above. Believing a thumb of LEDs can shine 30,000 lumens (a halogen h7 is like 2, 000lm). Clearly, I'm on a bender to fight this. I have been for a decade. You don't need to see the ground right in front of your car. It's useless at speed. You want the light to go out and illuminate road hazards, not the ground itself. This means deer bodies, pedestrian legs, or shadows in pot holes.

Clueless driver? Clearly, tons of drivers are driving with their high beams on. They somehow don't know what the blue light to the dash means, they can't identify how glaring their headlight beam is, or theyre just self-centered assholes. Bonus points for Nissan drivers in which highs, lows, and DRLs are all entirely different colors.

Part 5 ___ bonus, recommendations

If your headlights are hazy, that's your priority. Lenses are polycarbonate, which degrade in uv. They come from the factory with a clearcoat. Polishing them will only last a couple months. The proper solution is sanding and clear coating.

If you provide your make and model and year, there may be a halogen bulb swap you can do. 9006 bulbs can be replaced with 9012 HIR (trick of infrared coating for 50% more light from the same halogen), but that's a unique situation. Just throwing it out there.

If you want to get daring, a projector retrofit is as good as it gets. You can get a pod that takes an HID bulb (or complete LED unit) that you can shove inside your headlight for the proper headlight. There's lots of variables here but that's my ultimate solution. I've done it once before and will do it again this winter. But that is a whole different topic which varies greatly on the car

Aftermarket LED replacement bulbs are generally brighter and have a different physical location for the light source, causing the manufacturer's careful design to fail, resulting in light being aimed higher.

To complicate this, a lot of car mfgrs make it easy to put the bulb on wrong and still have it work, causing both LED aftermarket and regular Halogen bulbs to appear to flicker as they wobble in the fixture. That's one of my favorites!

Newer headlights come from the factory with HID bulbs which "Instead of relying on a heated filament, HID lights create an arc of electricity between two electrodes housed within a bulb filled with Xenon gas and other noble gases. When electricity passes through the gas, it excites the gas molecules, producing an intense and bright light." Which prompts me to ask how a person can safely drive at night with welder's goggles on.

Between aftermarket LED and HID lights being such an issue, I've chosen to wear good darker yellow polarized glasses to protect my eyesight.

I have fog lights on my car and I've opted to keep the original bulbs, because in this case, throwing an LED in there would almost certainly bork up the aiming and could illuminate actual fog in a way that could cause me a level of risk I don't want to have.

For your case, it sounds like you really want the extra light. Id recommend you get some bulbs from Amazon, find a white wall, test the aim, and if it sucks, try to adjust the aim, and if it still sucks, return em and get high intensity halogen bulbs for the fog lights.

If it isn't foggy you shouldn't be using fog lights. This is part of the issue, a lot of people use them in conditions that aren't foggy and they blind oncoming road users because they don't have a pattern of light that is designed to be angled away from the opposite side of the road, they instead flood the road with light. This can be helpful in fog but shouldn't be used in not foggy conditions, and definitely not to try and out light other peoples lights.

Granted the other half of the problem is the absurdly bright lights they put in vehicle headlights these days as well but you would be better off getting some glasses with some lenses that take that glare away so as to be able to drive around in a safer manner rather than trying to have brighter lights than the other person, you are just perpetuating the problem doing that.