#(which are also godawful for glare if conditions aren't perfect)

[industrial-meat]

What really boils my piss about this is, there's no need for the damn things to be so bright *just because they're LED*; they could've switched out the halogen lights for a similar intensity LED and it would have been just fine!

...but apparently every goddamn manufacturer decided that, once they were free of the shackles of inefficient incandescent lamps, they were gonna *keep using just as much goddamn power, but now in the name of producing 1.61 Gigalumens of retina-searing blue-white*

"But just align them properly..." only helps on flat and straight roads. You're still fucked if there's a hill, or approaching a right-hand bend (left-hand bend, if you're in the rest of the world), where the headlight pattern won't save you. And I regret to inform you, both hills *and* bends exist -- and are commonplace -- in real-world roads; including ones without street-lighting, where the brightness difference is at its worst!

Like, goddamn, there's plenty of cars running round with one headlight out and the other aimed into oncoming traffic and as much as that's still *annoying* with incandescent headlights, they aren't as out and out blindingly bright so they don't trash your dark vision quite as badly.

I know we're locked in a fucking arms-race of seeing who can make the brightest goddamn headlights that push things as close to legal limits on pattern as they can, in the name of turning everything into daylight in front of the driver; but along with the arms-race of who can make the biggest, tallest, just-barely-legally-compliant SUVs, it's just a fucking safety hazard.

There's no need for it! I will die on this hill; mostly because I can't see the road because I've been blinded by some dickhead with 8000lumens of blue-white LED headlight cresting the hill in the opposite direction, and couldn't see the bend.

if anyone needs me i’ll be ripping the LED headlights out of every vehicle in the country