I live in a place where everyone drives a pickup truck with aftermarket HID and LED lights installed. I'm always blinded by them and there is no law enforcement on these illegal kits.
Enforcement varies, although I've yet to hear much praise of how
well any given state or locality is doing. Living in the Dallas area - one of many regional capitals of
Truckistan - I feel your pain; it's a steady series of jacked-up trucks with fleabay HID kits spewing glare everywhere but where it's needed on the road. For those dudes that put these into incandescent housings, there's the additional party trick of cooked reflector bowls and clouded lenses that further enhance the scatter while markedly reducing the useful output. Suspect that the market is transitioning to cheaper LED bulbs - which glare like HID "kits" but at least don't degrade housings since they cast off roughly zero UV - which is probably a lot of what I'm seeing now.
Honestly, LED lightbars and pods as low beams seem to be easier on other motorists since they have a
snowball's chance of a cutoff given that they're at least designed around their LED light sources and use multiple sources rather than a single point source per side. Of course that assumes some semblance of proper aim which is often not the case.
Heck, enforcement is so non-existent that I'm seeing garbage trucks and other
fleet heavy vehicles equipped with what seems to be a semi-standard
(read: probably the exact same product available from a steadily-rotating series of suppliers on ther 'bay, the 'zon, and the like) 5x7 LED headlamp with 13 discrete emitters in a 4-5-4 pattern that don't look particularly FMVSS 108 compliant.
Even factory led lights are blinding. If these are OEM then why am I blinded? I know sunlight is about 6000k but why is it horrible in headlights?
Furthermore what is exactly happening to my pupils when I look into these lights? I have so many questions.
As -Virgil- has stated,
them's the regulations that the OEMs live within. Be nice if adaptive lighting would arrive in the mass market Stateside sooner rather than later, but one suspects that it will linger in the upper tiers of the market for the better part of a decade and will ultimately fail to be the panacea we'd like it to be.
High CCT is probably around to stay in automotive lighting since that's the sweet spot in terms of maximum overlap of lumens per watt and yield in the LED production business. Be nice if the OEMs would push for ≤5000K rather than >6000K, but what
sells is often different than what
satisfies and the former is more important to the OEMs than the latter; the market has desired higher CCTs since HID first appeared decades ago thus a very real commercial imperative exists.
