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A week ago New York received just about the best test of vehicle headlamp technology you could shove a car through. Only about 2 inches of rain from a mainland storm,... but the 2 inches came down all within about a three hour period.
Starting half an hour before full nighttime began.
In MARCH, when the Winter thaw has ripped potholes open like small pox plague through every expressway and service road across all five boroughs.
At the 5pm driving rush hour, when tempers and driver judgment are the worst they can be.
My car is classified by Insurance companies as "old" by now, and MOST cars on the road around me are 2021 model SUVs and Crossovers. From nearly every car maker that does business in the US, so we can't say Japanese cars or Korean cars or Mercs or Fords are the "only ones this happens on".
My XE touched the wet street out of the Manhattan parking garage 20 minutes after the heavy rain started hitting the roofs. But the street was already wet with showers since morning. The first vehicles I noticed having judgment and lane-changing difficulties were Cadillac SUV and Toyota Camry models. The streets in the first 30 minutes of my drive were clear and open, no traffic, but the cars were SLOWING way down and tapping there brake lights so much that you could thread and weave a big school bus in between these folks without scratching a single fender. Everyone seemed to be behaving,... weird in this rain. And I spent these first 45 minutes without my headlamps on at all, breaking the Law, since full darkness hadn't hit the streets yet and I know from experience how vivid bright my J-blade DRLs are---I was driving with wipers on auto and just DRLs, clear uptown and over the Brooklyn Bridge, no problem. Pouring rain!
By the time I reached the opposite end of the bridge, all roads off the bridge were clogged. I reached the nearest expressway, and my Nav system told me it was a disaster---overturned vehicle 3 miles ahead, a SECOND overturned vehicle 5 miles ahead---get off the expressway. I took the service road beneath the elevated expressway--it was covered with 60 potholes and craters, but I could see them on the pouring wet street, and I could dance neatly around them in the pouring rain.
The car behind me must have slammed through half of those potholes (whaa--can't you see them?!) before he finally decided to just imitate me and try to swerve where I swerve. I turned onto a two-lane one-way street, and the cars in front of me were leaving FIVE car lengths of space between them. FIVE car-lengths is nearly half a block of empty street---the delivery boys on their mopeds aren't leaving that much safety space around them---something must be wrong!
Halfway through Brooklyn along Atlantic Avenue, I could finally drive ALONGSIDE other drivers in our three-lane road, and "SEE" what was going on. The SUV beside me forgot to put his headlights on, I thought. But when we reached a red light I was able to crawl up enough to "see", he GOT his headlight on---the street in front of him just isn't getting lit up. Why the hell not? Apart from the spot ahead of my car and a few others, the street in front of most people's headlights were crappy poor and dark. "How can you even see driving like that?"---Of course,... you CAN'T see very well. Most drivers were poking ahead in the dark, unsure and losing reasonable speed in the pouring rain.
Very few headlights were actually making the street bright enough to see the road. They did a great job lighting up the tailgate of the car right in front of them (bright white through half the poor guy's rear windscreen. (My car's headlamps barely shine above the top of someone's bumper ahead of me, but they lit up the street sweet and easy, even a soaking street. I remember the forums before 2020 about how every other owner wanted to swap his headlights out for "those snazzy white LED lights, so much "brighter" than dim Halogen,... and some Halogen owners who insisted the gold glow is the light they love and with the right reflector and the right halogen bulb, you have no problem shining up the road,... and HID/Xenon owners like myself planted somewhere in the middle of two changing technologies. Over the course of LED headlight technology,... did drivers just get suckered?.
I had to read through a few different lamp designers' sites to understand that your car maker has to decide to provide a good COMBO of components to get you headlights that will do for you what a headlight needs to do. The headlight's DESIGN is what improves your visibility the most,...but production costs will make the manufacturer aim for the less expensive design in most models: The Reflector design. I didn't know that frequencies of light are vulnerable to water (3500 and 4700K are still nice and reflective under snow storm or rain--5800 and 6500K are partially absorbed by water and don't reflect well enough to define surfaces in bad weather. Bulbs with the whitest frequency of light (LEDs by far) get subdued when the wet and snow are coming down, so they help your vision the LEAST in the conditions when your vision needs them the most. But manufacturers sell the most cars by advertizing the most imagination-catching lights: the L E D lights. AND, manufacturers will deliver those LEDs in the cheapest fabrication color range.... 6 0 0 0 K.
To read the "tech experts" (experts?...you've got to be +&^ing me), is to walk away laughing, the ones that want to make a sale, the ones who want to sell only their highest stock Kelvin light to customers, somewhere among them he ones who actually tell the facts, and the ones who go all opposite to the facts.
Down on the streets, my XE headlamps must look like a throwback these days. The car's got its light concentrated so tight and low off the top of the street, that I can never compete with those polished blasting-white headlights from the newer cars around me. And you'd never think my lamps are "bright" until you stand 30 feet out in front the car and stoop down---then you suddenly say "Ow, jeez, those things are freakin painful bright!" But I'm calmly rolling down the streets, dodging craters and bits of wreckage off the cars that were scraped up in collisions half an hour ahead of us. Around me, MOST (not all, but most) Kias, Cadillacs, VWs, Acuras, SUVs or Sportbacks, have WHITER BRIGHTER lighting than me,...But NOTHING was brightening up the slick street with all the cracks and craters. Now I realize that explains why normally in a dry night drive I get headlights behind me lighting up the entire fabric ceiling inside my car,... but on rainy nights, I don't get any of the bright light filling my cabin at all---the falling rain drinks up half of everyone's LED glare (along with a critical amount of the light they need to see with).
Even taking off the personal favoritism I have for my Prestige Trim XE, I'm still left OBJECTIVELY admiring the Xenon headlamp design on this car. It's arguably 4600-4800 color range instead of the 6000 range that gets obstructed in rain/snow, it's a Projector-style lamp instead of Reflector-style, so it's drilling as much of it's light as possible onto the roadway and trying not to beam up into the sky and into 2nd story bird's nests, and it even adaptively tilts into the direction or your turns to make up for being stingy with the sides of the drive path, and even pops on a tiny white LED just to illuminate that hidden sidewalk as you corner the block. Sweet Louise, it's a setup that grabs the best from all the latest lighting tech, and the damn thing was made nearly ten years ago.
Wow, the headlights on all your new cars!
