Memes

My pet peeve about headlights is that auto manufacturers used the same fittings for standard and HID bulbs and allowed users to replace them of their own accord.

So plenty of places and third parties made HID bulbs for standard bulb fixtures, and people installed them thinking they would make everything better for them when driving at night. They're the brightest and therefore the best, right? Nope.

HID bulbs should be in specific housings and fixtures which control the direction of the light better than standard bulb housings. With regular bulbs (incandescent), this isn't a problem, since the amount of misdirected light is not enough to cause problems. When you exponentially increase the amount of light with an HID bulb, that leakage is no longer trivial, and rather blinding.

This is why I'm in support of LED headlights on cars. They're still "blue" and very VERY bright when you're in the cone of light they emit, but they're usually a non-user-serviceable component. So unless someone intentionally goes and screws with their headlight alignment, they generally eliminate most issues with very bright headlights. They keep the light directed at the ground, giving the driver very good coverage of the road while not blinding oncoming drivers (mostly). The downside, IMO, is that, since the bulbs are no longer able to be changed by the user, by design, you now need to buy a whole new headlight assembly if your headlight stops working. While LEDs are generally very long lived, that life can be significantly reduced due to problems beyond your control, like manufacturing defects that can go undetected for years until suddenly the light simply stops working; costing possibly hundreds of dollars to fix, where a standard set of bulbs would be maybe $20 at most.

IMO, between this, and automatic headlights, and on some cars, automatic high beams, as long as people use those systems as intended, being blinded by headlights in most scenarios should be a thing of the past..... Of course that requires that people use the systems as intended.... Which is a bit like wishing for world peace. The populous unanimously agreeing to anything is basically impossible at this point. Even something as basic as "killing people is bad" is not something that everyone can agree on, since there are entire movements of people who think they should be seeking peace by killing all of the people who disagree with their position. I don't want to name names on that, but it's a thing that a few very notable groups fervently believe. To go into that a bit further, most would agree that anyone trying to commit the "murder, death, kill" on anyone should be stopped by any means necessary, which includes, but isn't limited to killing the person trying to kill others; this is largely considered to be an acceptable exception to the rule, but again, not everyone agrees with that. I won't go further with it, since I think the point is made... We can't, as a society of people, universally agree on anything. So there will always be exceptions.