Anyone else pissed off at Ford's quad headlights?

Headlights have been weaponized recently and it's just getting worse.

I cringe every time I see a CR article reviewing a new car and they complain that the " 3C 273 Quasar" lights are only available on the highest spec models, and should be available for everyone, because it increases "safety" for the driver. Never mind the driver coming from the other direction.

It's the same with increasing the ride height of the vehicle to offer a, and I quote, "Commanding view of the road." Never mind that all it really does is kill pedestrians way better while offering the illusion of safety.

You could, you know, slow the berkeley down, just a bit, at night so you're not outrunning your headlights instead of trying to divide by zero constantly.

The silly thing to do would be to lower headlights on the front of trucks and get rid of LEDs for highway use. The obvious thing to do is add an extra foot of grill height to trucks and raise the ride height of vehicles to put people higher. Of course, this raises headlights for aesthetic appeal and that extra .1MPG in aero so they just need to keep raising ride height to compensate. This would encourage new car buying to try and stay ahead of being blinded by every Nissan, Lexus, BMW, Ford, and Jeep out there. It's a win win for "Detroit". (Isn't that the city in Mexico where those 'Murican icons are made?)

In reply to Ian F :

Just run HID or LED light through the search... there are plenty of threads. 

Tom_Spangler said:

The ironic thing is that my 2011 F-150 had terrible headlights. They were regular halogens, this was a couple of years before they started offering HIDs. This is a picture I took with the high beams on:

It was like driving by candlelight on the rural roads around here. The F-150 forums were full of complaints about the terrible headlights at the time.

Now I guess they've gone too far the other way.

The thing is, you should not be looking at the spot of white in front of the car, you should be looking at the horizon.  Super bright lights change the contrast so much that you can't see anything but the spot of light 20 feet in front of you.

Best headlights I ever had were in my Golf.  They didn't hardly light up the road at ALL.  This meant that I could see things far off just fine.

tester said:

In reply to Ian F :

Just run HID or LED light through the search... there are plenty of threads. 

I'm the resident post hog (well, one of them) and I don't recall ever seeing one.

I would have been in there mocking mercilessly at their poor choices in lighting 

Knurled. said:

The thing is, you should not be looking at the spot of white in front of the car, you should be looking at the horizon.  Super bright lights change the contrast so much that you can't see anything but the spot of light 20 feet in front of you.

Huh? I may be misunderstanding you, but that makes no sense to me. Brighter lights are... brighter. They light up more of the area in front of you. I'm well aware of the downsides for oncoming drivers, but to say that dimmer lights actually light up distant objects better is very counterintuitive.

As evidence, here's the "after" shot with after I added two small LED driving lights:

Same spot, same night, but now you can see the fence, barn, and trailer that were invisible in the first one. 

Tom_Spangler said:

Knurled. said:

The thing is, you should not be looking at the spot of white in front of the car, you should be looking at the horizon.  Super bright lights change the contrast so much that you can't see anything but the spot of light 20 feet in front of you.

Huh? I may be misunderstanding you, but that makes no sense to me. Brighter lights are... brighter. They light up more of the area in front of you. I'm well aware of the downsides for oncoming drivers, but to say that dimmer lights actually light up distant objects better is very counterintuitive.

As evidence, here's the "after" shot with after I added two small LED driving lights:

Same spot, same night, but now you can see the fence, barn, and trailer that were invisible in the first one. 

I don't know about you, but that fence is waaaay closer than I'm looking when driving.

You know for how "bright" they are, a some of LED headlights receive poor ratings from the IIHS. 

First hand experience with owning a car with LED headlights. The 2020 Civic Si received this as an "upgrade" for 2020; however, they suck and the IIHS agrees. They also state the the F-150 LED headlights are poor as well. 

I still prefer HIDs with a proper projector and aimed well. I retrofitted a set of Hi/Low beam HID projectors into my Sequoia because the halogens weren't cutting it. Parked both my S2000 and M3 in front of it at a distance of 25ft and made sure when they were aimed properly they weren't blinding in the mirrors or cab. You can do a really proper setup with the projectors as well, get a nice cutoff color, see much more of the road while also not blinding everyone. 

My only gripe is that manufacturers aren't doing much research into lighting, it's more of the same in lets throw the flavor of the week headlights in as an upper tier package so people buy it kind of deal. As shown below a lot of LED headlights get Poor ratings from the IIHS....while not being the gospel it is one of the few entities out there actually testing headlights these days. 

ALSO - Honda S2000/Acura TSX HID projectors are still the best headlights hands down. 

I find it odd that there seems to be an expectation among most drivers to travel all roads at the same speeds, in daytime or at night. The problem is, when there's oncoming traffic or traffic in front of you, you can't safely run a light that lets you see far enough ahead without simultaneously blinding all other drivers. To me it seems logical to lower speeds at night and use an appropriate powered light. For inner city driving I barely need any light at all, just enough to make my car visible to others. For isolated rural driving you want as much power as you can get, but only when there's no traffic to worry about. Most cars are designed for customers who expect to safely travel at 70+ miles an hour on open interstate in the dead of night, and to do so on low beam because high beams are illegal in traffic. To me that's not a logical expectation.

So far in my Miata I can't tell the difference between a Super Duty or a Corolla, they all blind me.

I have JW Speaker LED's on my JK.  It's like one of those old Soviet Russia jokes when I drive past a road sign on high beam.  In Soviet Russia your high beam blinds you.

Tony Sestito said:

I was just thinking to myself this morning that the newest Super Duty trucks are freakin' HUGE. You practically need a step ladder to get into one at stock height! The front end is basically a rolling brick wall with giant lights, so yeah, if you are driving a normal car, they are super annoying. That said, I think they are a good looking truck. I haven't seen one of those eye bleach-inducing Chevy HD's yet, but I'm guessing that they will be even worse, especially when the dudebros inevitably jam HID/LED lighting into their reflector housings.

And one more thing on quad headlights...


My Power Wagon has the optional quad-sealed beam halogen headlight package, which was the equivalent of getting LED lighting in 1979. Believe it or not, I can gee GREAT with these things even on a pitch black country road, even without the highs. Shocked the hell out of me the first time I drove at night.

Yes.  I've driven plenty of modern cars and trucks...I travel for work and rent whatever I choose.  Favorite lights of all from behind the wheel?  Dad's '74 Chevy C10.  Those just work so darn well.

wae said:

penultimeta said:

Jumper K Balls (Trent) said:

But again. It is not a logic thing, it is a comfort thing and humans will choose what makes them feel safe over what actually is safe every time. Manufacturers have chosen to make drivers feel comfortable over actual safety and the consumers are lapping it up.

That's an interesting point. I've talked to ex pats from europe before and when the subject comes up of driving habits of europeans vs. united states-ians, there's a distinct rift. Europeans seem to be taught accident avoidance, defensive driving techniques, and proper management of speed. In the US conversely we're taught how to survive an accident and blindly obey road signs. This  dichotomy leads to US people buying large trucks and SUVs with no intention of doing truck things with them while europeans are happy towing a camper with a jetta. I suspect a lot of our complaints about modern vehicles are a culture thing and not a logic thing. 

Don't be ridiculous.  90% of driver education in America is doing math on what your BAC is based on time and number of drinks.

My employer moved me up to the Messabi iron range several years ago.  I was there long enough that I had to get a MN drivers license.  90% of it was just that.  You weigh X and are a 40 year old male, how if I have 2 beers with an alcohol content of Y, which of the below will be my approximate BAC?

In reply to Brett_Murphy :

Or leveling kits/slide in campers/overloaded trailer tongue weight.

Off highway lights for off highway.... 

I just had an encounter with one of the SuperDuty Ford this week and am glad to know I'm not the only one who hates these things.

Given the horrible combination of ultra-bright, white LEDs and the ludicrous ride height on modern cars/trucks, I was wondering a few weeks ago (after a harrowing drive to the store and back in the middle of the night during heavy rain) whether we've come full circle to considering using the old French yellow headlight system.  Apparently they were used to prevent a dazzling effect, but by the 80s and 90s more modern halogen lights had made that unnecessary compared to what came before.  Now, it's blinding even on a clear night for anyone at nearly any ride-height.

I agree, and I'm really glad (and relieved) to be reading this thread. I had a bad experience with one of these trucks last week.

I made a left turn across the front of a new Ford Super Duty that was stopped at a traffic light. I remember specifically noticing that it was a new Ford and the the lights were ungodly bright. And this was about 3:00 in the afternoon. My left eye would just not readjust to normal. The image and shape of the light stack was burned into my field of vision, similar to how you continue to see a blue circle for a few moments after accidentally looking directly at the Sun. It was only my left eye, and the image was about a third of the way into my field of vision. Everything to the left of that image was sort of pixilated.

I was about fifteen minutes from home and it just wouldn't go away, in fact it seemed to get worse. I thought about pulling over and probably should have.

Then, no joke, I started to get scared, thinking that this couldn't possibly be just from headlights during the day and that I might be having a TIA. The whole event lasted about 20 or 25 minutes and then gradually got better.

I actually had an appointment scheduled with my doctor two days later for something else, and I mentioned it to him. He wanted me to schedule an appointment with an ophthalmologist asap to rule out any kind of more serious medical anomaly in my eye, though now I'm 90% certain that it was just some a-hole with his high beams on during the day.

triumph7 said:

And nobody has brought up those aftermarket LED light bars that say "not for highway use"...............

At least in my county, I routinely see Jeeps and other SUVs with light bars pulled over, likely for that. My state inspection station absolutely will NOT pass you with LED lightbars anywhere if they are uncovered. I have a big bar on my roof and 6 floods on the back of the Sequioa (for rally service at night), but they always have homemade covers on them unless I'm out in the middle of nowhere.

But yeah, they definitely enforce it here to some degree. I doubt it I went into boondock southern Va they would, where every bro-dozer has triple-stack ebay LED bars lol....

I will say, my GTI has the LED headlights and they are really excellent at night. But they have a distinct cutoff, and they "steer" with turning, and it's a low car with low headlights. I've never been flashed by oncoming traffic, and I almost never use the high-beams, because the lows have really good distance (but stay low)

Funny though...my Porsche had the headlights aimed way too high when I replaced them and fixed the pop-up mechanism. Took me a couple weeks to adjust them, so when I was on roads at night I knew they were aimed high and expected people to flash me. Nobody ever did. Even e-code Porsche H4 halogens aimed way too high don't even look bright to oncoming traffic these days compared to "normal SUV" lights.

The wife's new Volvo XC90's headlights are phenomenal without penalizing oncoming drivers, even hobbled by stupid DOT regs that don't allow the active matrix feature to be enabled here.

At speed the long distance pencil like beam of the HIDs in the 996 do a good job at showing you what is way down the road. But following behind her on a dark, wet, mountain pass for an hour was eye opening how that new Volvo turns night into day compared to old technology. Impressive. Very much not the new Ford Super Glarey.

I think the problem has more to do with poor quality reflectors than overly bright light sources. I was out last night on a four lane expressway, in open countryside. Some large SUV passed me on low beams and the thing that was very noticeable was the width of the light beam it projected. Lighting was virtually 90 degrees on each side and clearly illuminated the guardrails and ditches on both sides of the freeway. I've had headlights in the past with a very sharp cutoff on low beam and a well defined spread pattern that kept the light on the road, with enough spread to illuminate corners. I used to run 100w bulbs in my Cibie headlights and not get oncoming cars flipping their brights at me. These days all the headlights "dazzle" too much, the light is going in too many directions.

So I'm not smart enough to explain the thought behind it, but could part of the problem be the color temperature of the lights?

I know particularly in snow that yellow fog lights with the headlights shut off in my cavalier made a world of difference for my visibility.

I feel like the hyper white of some LEDS makes the problem much worse than if they were yellow even blueish tinted. 

In reply to Jcamper :

I saw a video about the active matrix lighting and that was really cool technology!!!!!

Last night, as I was leaving the train station, I noted some jerk with their high beams on behind me. Well, whaddayaknow, they were not high beams. It was a F250! How timely...

On the LED/HID retrofit thing...

I am one of those idiots. Well, I was. A couple of vehicle inspections ago, the station almost failed me for having LED retrofit bulbs in my Mazda 3. I had bought these to replace some cheap HID's I had in the car for a while that sucked. Halogen-equipped Mazda 3's have projector housings, so I figured it would be better than tossing them in regular reflector housings, and while I was right, it was still directing light all over the place. I bought these particular LED's because the light pattern attempts to mimic the H11/9005 bulbs that were in my high/low beam spots. They were a lot better than the HID's and not once did someone flash me while driving in nearly 2 years of driving with them installed, but I swapped them out for conventional bulbs when it was inspection time. I ended up getting some Hella upgrade bulbs from Rock Auto on the cheap.

And you know what? They are the best bulbs I've had in the car since I've owned it! I'll be sticking to stock from now on. That said, the factory LED's in the wife's CX-5 blow them out of the water.