Since this is HN I'll mention how this reminds me of the blue-LED invasion.

Of course a much less serious issue (no lives at stake), but it will never cease to mystify me why they still put these blinding blue LEDs into everything (even my toaster has them).

I don't know anyone (including non-technical people) who likes them. I know many people who put tape over them or paint them with nail polish (a great tip btw).

I've heard arguments that they look good in shops, resulting in more sales, but I have trouble believing that since everyone I know actively avoids them...

The problem isn't the color per se, it's the brightness. Blue LEDs are very efficient, and if run at the same current levels as red or green ones that used to be more popular, are insanely bright.

About 15 years ago, when blue LEDs were rare and expensive, I built a piece of equipment and decided to use one as a power indicator. As I said above, driving it with the same current (about 10 milliamps) as I was used to doing with a red LED, basically lit up the whole room. Dropping the current to a fraction of that gave it a nice, almost subtle blue/purple glow that it still maintains to this day.

I think the underlying problem is an engineer somewhere was taught to drive indicator LEDs at 10 mA and then saying, "screw it, it's good enough to ship." People just don't care about aesthetics anymore.

As blue LEDs are much brighter (at least perceptually), they need to be dimmed down a lot to be reasonable in many applications.

Unfortunately when the OMG-blue-LED fad first hit, many manufacturers apparently just treated them like other colors, and didn't modify their designs to account for the brightness difference, resulting in the searchlight-in-the-eye experience.

My perception is that things seem to have gotten a bit better since, with designs being modified to make blue LEDs less blinding, or manuf.s just switching back to more traditional colors....

I bought a pack of 400 small round black stickers because of blue leds. For some of the leds it takes two to cover them fully, or one will dim it enough to be acceptable.

I put them on "everything"

Always high "projector" headlights have been common for a decade[1]. They use a flap to block the top half of the beam, creating a strong line below which the headlights are always full power. When a car with these headlights goes over a bump or is on a strong incline, other drivers are exposed to the full high beams. The height of the line is also adjustable, and it is often adjusted to always be too high.

[1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headlamp#Projector_.28polyellip...]

> Now, for a while I was driving a lowly car without auto-dimming... mirrors. Being sensitive to light, I was cursing every second car behind me.

In my experience every car without an auto-dimming rearview has a manual-dimming one. You flip the toggle at the bottom that tilts the mirror so that a second, less reflective mirror situated behind the main one is now angled for proper use. Obviously you don't have this on the sideviews, though.

It might not be perfect yet, but we can fix things! It's likely possible to tweak various threshold distances based on country specifics, laws, user preferences, and further testing.

The car can track other cars now! I expect the trend to continue: with time it will accurately track bikers, cyclists, joggers, wild animals of all sizes, stationary obstacles, holes in road etc.

Joggers and cyclists might not be as affected as one might think. They sit higher than car drivers and avoid the beam so. On the other hand, high-powered LED bike lights, 2000 lumen and around, with no optics to form a beam, can easily blind a driver...

When I'm riding my bicycle at night on a street without streetlights (or with widely spaced streetlights), I can't see where I'm going if there's an oncoming vehicle. I just go straight and hope there's nothing in the way.

It gets even worse out in the country where I live. Driving in pitch darkness in a sports car that's low to the ground and having every other oncoming vehicle be a full-size pickup truck is a recipe for almost constant blindness because their headlights are exactly at my eye level. That's when you automatically look away to the side and hope a deer hasn't just jumped out behind that truck, into the road.

Same here! (I tend to use my left hand as a shade/blind.) I especially hate it when I have a migraine. Once at a traffic light a semi-tractor trailer rig pulled in behind me. He actually turned his headlights off until we started moving again. Very unusual courtesy.

Is this any worse than driving in car? Why?

In my experience it's similar with a bike and a car: as the oncoming vehicle approaches, it actually helps light up the road from their end. But the exact moment it passes, well, for few moments there's no way to see anything.

It scares me too. What happens when this car is 15 years old and the third owner is to broke to fix things when they go wrong? Will they be driving blind, or blinding everybody else?

Then the car probably won't pass vehicle inspection anymore and thus cannot be driven legally.

You are someone who hasn't lived in many of the 50 US states, apparently: there are no state car inspections in most places. Ever. I know it seems amazing to those of us who are accustomed to them.

Maybe not but you can get a fix it ticket from the police.

You seriously expect your car's auto-headlight-dimming feature to be regularly inspected?

No doubt in California this would show up as a trouble item in the OBD-II diagnostic and that would immediately fail its "smog" check.

Actually, you would probably not get away with having failed auto-headlight-dimming because you would annoy a cop going the other way and get a ticket. But features that aren't so obvious will go uninspected in many locations.