- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
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cross-posted from: https://feddit.nl/post/26864473
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/184198
cross-posted from: https://feddit.nl/post/26864473
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/184198
I drive a midsize sedan an I often have my rear-view and side mirrors lit by these trucks. It’s stupid they’re even allowed.
Taller vehicles need two kinds of headlight: a higher intensity mounted low to illuminate the path, and a lower intensity mounted high to illuminate retro-reflective surfaces like traffic signs.
If a transport truck can have lights at a reasonable height and angle that don’t blind me, so can a standard pick up truck. Many transports actually have their lights mounted lower than pick up trucks and full size SUVs.
Transport trucks don’t “need” super-high ground clearance the way 4x4s do. In order to get a vehicle like this to have headlights at a reasonable height, they’d need to be mounted on the axle, LOL:
(Or vehicles modified that extensively would have to stop being street legal; that would work too.)
Edit: to be clear, this was never intended to be a defense of lifted 4x4s, only an example of just how incompatible their headlight heights can be and how difficult it could be to fix that.
Yeah, the question is not how difficult it is to do, but why that would be street legal. Of course enjoy your toys: vehicles like that are great fun. However if you can’t meet the headlight or bumper requirements to be street legal, it just shouldn’t be street legal. Keep your toy on the trail
The headlights could have been located lower on the grill where the orange turning signals are currently located.
Guess I should’ve found a pic with even bigger tires and even less front grille/bumper! (I would’ve used this as a better example, but I’m pretty sure it’s at the point where the guy trailers it to the off-road trail rather than driving it on the street.)
But seriously though, even on the Jeep pictured, even just the turn signal height is probably about the same as the roof of a Miata.
And almost nobody driving on public roads needs that kind of road clearance either.
Well then I guess a hot take… Those vehicles shouldn’t be street legal at night with those modifications unless you have some sort of alternative light system you can bolt on that brings the height down.
Plus theere are no fenders or mudflaps on that one. Which is illegal in some places as there is nothing to prevent rocks or other debris from being thrown around by the tires.
Aside from the “at night” part – I’m not sure it makes sense to make the vehicle non-street-legal only part of the time when the necessary equipment is missing entirely – I already agreed:
I wish my car had the profile settings to automatically move to prest positions, because then I would have one profile set to specifically be aligned to reflect high beams behind me to aim directly back at a truck tailgating me.
I have done this in a parking lot before to someone parked behind me.
Seriously, if you park your car, turn off your beams ffs.
Same goes for the drive thru! You don’t need your headlights to see 12 inches in front of you in a line.
For as long as I’ve owned a car I’ve dreamed of installing a flip-up mirror in my back window for this purpose
You don’t really need a second set of lights for signs. The light reflecting off the ground from your 9 trillion lumen headlights, and the efficiency of reflective signs are plenty.
Most LED lights have a VERY sharp cutoff. Without the light reflecting off other things anything outside of the line of fire is almost pitch black.
Reflective signs are specifically efficient at reflecting light back at their source and nowhere else (retroreflectivity). Obviously it’s not perfect, but the fact that that cone is so narrow is part of why it looks so bright (not dissimilar from the cutoff of the LED lights you are describing). Meaning that light reflected off the roadway before reaching the sign will generally be reflected back at the roadway. With how large some vehicle grills are being built nowadays, it may be possible for a low mounted headlight to be far enough away from the driver that retroreflective signs are no longer as effectively illuminated for the driver. Truckers probably already deal with this, I haven’t driven in one, but I suspect road signs are not as well illuminated for the driver as in other vehicles. We don’t rely solely on retroreflectivity to make our signs visible, so it’s not all or nothing, but it may be worth keeping some nominal illumination (could be like moderate flashlight levels of brightness) at driver level so we can continue to take advantage of retroreflective technology