Drive By (Optoelectronic) Light

I bought a new car recently and have decided I generally prefer the older style headlamps. The older illumination pattern works much better for me, where I live, than the illumination pattern of the headlights on my new car.

The new headlights are great for flat roads with low % road grades and gentle curves.

I live in the foothills of the mountains and do a lot of driving on 2-lane mountain roads. Most of these roads have sharp turns, including hairpin turns, and abrupt rises and dips. The new headlights don't have a wide enough vertical or lateral beam spread to allow me to clearly see the road ahead of me. The 'adaptive' feature does 'aim' the headlights in the direction I'm turning, but not enough. I use the high beams when I can, but of course I don't want to blind oncoming cars, and there is always a steady flow of oncoming cars. The risk of a un-illuminated deer or a stopped car in the road means I occassionally have to slow to a crawl.

A nice high tech solution.

Or you could just polarize the headlights vertically and the car windshields horizontally (low tech solution) to provide good illumination for the driver without blinding oncoming drivers. This solution was proposed a long time ago.

This kind of stuff always sounds great until it effs up. Then you're dealing with crap like your PC, except it's your car, you have to have it, and it costs a fortune to fix. I bought a 2008 Jeep Grand Cherokee in good shape. I needed it for a tow vehicle among other things. It's loaded up with a lot of extra crap I don't use or care about. One of the options it came with was self aiming headlights. I noticed that when I started the car in the dark, the headlights would raster up and down before locking in to their aim. After a while, the computer "recalibrated" things and the low beams gradually got aimed so low, they only lit about 25 feet out. The car was not driveable at night over 20 mph or so. Happened to be going in for state inspection around that time, and I told the mechanic to aim the headlights properly. He calls me back that morning, and tells me it will cost $800 to aim them. A couple of level sensors on the chassis had to be replaced. I said no. Got the car back and went online, and found there was at least a mechanical rough aiming adjustment. I set them on my garage door, but used ALL of the aiming adjustment up. One of the online posts from a guy said he did that, but the computer reset them low again. Mine hasn't done that yet but if it does I'm screwed.

I don't want all this crap on a car. I just want to to work, and not cost a fortune to fix. I can't wait for the self driving cars. They can't get my headlights right, and they're going to take over driving the car? I don't think so.

jhammond

Amen. The more complicated a design is, the more likely it is to fail and the more it costs to fix. I like Rube Goldberg, but only in cartoons.

I find these type of headlights to be annoying as an oncoming driver because everytime the vehicle hits a bump, the headlight aiming circuit causes them to bounce around worse than a motorcycle's headlight. I know it's a nit, but still annoying. The manufacturer's of these things need to put in a low-pass filter to dampen out the bouncing.