The solution proposed in the article is a high tech one that might help, but the real solution should be that misaligned headlights fail inspection. Inspection needs to be updated to incorporate measurement standards, and the standards need to be followed.
If your headlights are at the same level as my car's roof, there is no alignment that will both a) not blind me, and b) actually illuminate the road in front of you. It is geometrically impossible.
But I agree to some extent that adaptive headlights are a band-aid. The real problem is the American auto market's fetish for ever-larger vehicles with ever-brighter headlights. We are a nation of adult children bereft of restraint, unable to grasp (or, alternately, unconcerned by) the fact that these vain indulgences are killing people.
> If your headlights are at the same level as my car's roof
That is the pain of driving a Miata :). For a regular car, for example a Toyota Camry, even the topmost headlight on a Super Duty FX4 is close to a foot below the roofline of the car.
Which is good for me, because nobody ever flashes me when I'm driving my pickup, but I do occasionally get flashed in my Model 3.
Where I am in Europe they will test and adjust them for you. My headlights can only be adjusted from behind, and I thought there was no way to do it without removing them. The inspector knew of a plastic gromit in the rain tray above the hood that can be removed to access the adjustment point.
Common issues are bulbs, tire inflation, tire wear, shock performance, and alignment.
Personally, with an old (2006, 200-300K km) car that we had to NCT every year, we would pass about half the time on the first time, and half of the failures were for BS reasons (e.g., one of the removable seats wasn't installed, it was in storage, or a tent peg dropped into one of the 3rd row seats when they opened it, and couldn't close it again).
Even with that NCT, when winter rolls around, 5-10% of cars have obviously broken headlights on any given dog walk.
I'm in BC, Canada and car inspections simply aren't a thing. In Germany where I grew up back in the day you had to get your car checked every 2 years or so and checking the alignment of headlights was one of the checks. Sure that would never fly in North America and it wouldn't help here anyway. Trucks are way too high by design.
As a European, this is yet another aspect of American life that surprises me... although perhaps it shouldn't be surprising.
British cars need to pass a yearly inspection (called the MOT) to be legally allowed on the road, and if you drive around with a failed or expired MOT then you WILL get caught and the punishment will hurt.
It's quick and easy to get the test done yearly and it's not a big deal; the system works well. You can even go online and look up the MOT history of any car, which is handy if you're about to buy the car as it'll let you know about any historical faults.
I assume there's something similar in most developed countries... why does America not do this?
Part of America doesn't have vehicle inspections, and in those places, the reason is often because it balances the ability of people to afford transportation in places where there are not alternatives.
It is worth noting that mechanical failure is not a leading cause of crashes, even in places without inspections.
This is the first time I have heard affordability of transportation as a reason. I am a 51 year lifelong Floridian. I remember sitting in the vehicle inspection line as a kid. When Florida discontinued the statewide inspections in 1981, it was pitched as being due to the costs of the tests and long wait times. I see it as more of a populist measure as most voters don't really care about safety or pollution. They just did not want the hassle.
Maybe poor people paying for an annual inspection is the affordability argument. But I cannot see it as anything other than typical myopia as I see many automobiles in Florida that should not be on the road.
(I vividly remember that we had to take a work truck to be inspected. It was a truck that rarely left the fish house where my father kept his commercial fishing boat. It mostly moved nets around the property. It had to be inspected and was going to fail because there was a crack in the windshield. As there was no requirement that a truck have a windshield, my father removed the windshield right there and allowed the truck to pass.)
>Maybe poor people paying for an annual inspection is the affordability argument
The affordability argument is that shops have an incentive to sell work and they have an incentive to not draw the ire of some capricious regulator by passing questionable cars so they sell all sorts of work that doesn't strictly need to be done and over the life of a car this amounts to thousands mostly concentrated toward end of life at which point the car will be owned by someone least able to afford it.
My state, Colorado, requires a annual or bi-annual emissions test. No inspection for safety/operability is required though there are a lot of laws on the books for things like good tires and functioning headlights.
You answered your own question. Snark aside, in the US, the idea of restricting yourself for the purpose of vague benefits to others is known as "Socialism" to at a minimum 60 million people.
Hilariously enough it can even vary within states. EG: AFAIK, only two counties in Washington state require emissions testing on a semi-regular basis, and nowhere requires safety inspections.
I got burned by this by moving to one of the two counties with an otherwise innocuous check engine light that would have failed the emissions test so I had to get it fixed.
By now I'd have expected most people on HN to understand the relative roles of the US federal and state governments, and not make gross generalizations that are easily disproven. But, you're a green account, maybe you really are new.
> I'd have expected most people on HN to understand the relative roles of the US federal and state governments
You probably didn’t mean it that way, but man, that’s some ‘Murica fuck yeah material.
I know that different US states have some degree of autonomy, and I think they have a similar system in Brazil, and I’m pretty sure Switzerland also does it. Why exactly do you expect me to know anything but the bare minimum about the different levels of government in a country seven thousand kilometers away?
Your car is only regulated by where you have it registered. So, if you are in Tennessee as an example, Davidson Co residents pay higher plate fee and also must pass inspection. Residents in Rutherford Co pay a slightly lower plate fee and no longer have to pass inspection. Inspections in the US are largely emissions. Some counties have dropped this because they found it ineffective or not cost efficient.
If your vehicle doesn't meet obvious road standards, you'll simply be pulled over and ticketed.
Interesting that it's done at the county level in TN. In my experience (which, to be fair, is mostly in the Northeast where counties are pretty much irrelevant) these laws are usually made at the state level, not the county level, though your point stands when comparing states.
Since cars typically drive on state funded highways it would make sense to package car inspections along with the "you better set your state drinking age to 21 or you'll lose all highway funding" bill.
I don't necessarily disagree. It is pretty wild if you think about how unregulated a vehicle is after the manufacturer hands it to the customer, but that's not how -most- states operate. I guess you could just focus on states that are higher population density and hope it just rolls downhill. However, a lot of people game the system by just registering in different states or counties...it's not new at all. That is very popular with plate fees, even in liberal states like California that use certain counties to avoid higher plate fees.
Yeah, I was going to mention this. Indiana for example does not require any inspection except maybe for some sort of VIN inspection for cars titled outside of the state. And I think there might be one or two counties that have some sort of emissions inspection (out of 92 total counties).
I haven't really looked into this for other states, but I suspect we're not alone.
Most cars are, but it’s generally not statewide and just focused on areas with high local pollution.
More to the point, it’s just an emissions test. It usually doesn’t test every car and (at least in the states I’ve done it) it’s just a computer checking that the cars computer is giving a normal report. There’s no safety inspection in most states and there’s no way to fail emissions for a safety issue if they did see something
You will theoretically fail an inspection in Massachusetts for misaligned headlights, but I've never once heard of anybody actually failing because of it.
It's typically a simple fix if it's just an alignment issue. That on most cars takes 5 minutes, pop the hood, grab the right screw driver and adjust the beams. A mechanics might charge $20 for this. Now in newer cars with active headlights this method probably won't work, but the active headlights most likely have self leveling and a test to see if they are within spec.
Yeah, as you say, the old "drive up to garage wall, mark centers of where lights hit the wall, pull back 25 feet and adjust the headlights to the center of the marks" doesn't work on most modern cars any longer.
I'd like to see traffic enforcement separated from crime enforcement, in the same way we do with parking enforcement, code enforcement, etc. No one really worries about these forms of law enforcement.
There's no reason a guy with a rifle in the trunk and a bullet proof vest needs to spend most of their day dealing with minor traffic code things on the highway.
I would much rather armed cops be much better trained, and much fewer in number, and only activated on the rare occasion that there is a need for them. Traffic cops should be better trained on things like headlight aiming, illegal lift kits and tire modifications, exhaust rules etc...
Most places already have plenty of laws around these things (many of them federal) but cops will never go after someone for having a dangerously lifted truck with illegal exhaust for some reason, even though they are happy to cite someone for a burnt out license plate bulb.
The worst part about this crap is that back in "the day" (so like 70yr ago and before) stops (both of pedestrians and motorists) were known to be discretionary and treated as such. If an officer exercised poor discretion that was a legitimate gripe you could air in court. Now with all the laws everyone violates all the time over the course of being a normal person and behaving normally they have a pretext with which to justify any stop they want.
Would they actually execute, though? They don't for speeders. And i define speeding here as ~4mph+-speed_limit. Not that i'm advocating pulling people over for "speeding" 5mph, but i often imagine cops allow 9mph without a glance because it allows them to pull over anyone for speeding.
I fear adding yet more rules they don't enforce just adds tools to a questionable toolbag.
I'd love for things like this to be enforced, though. Often feels like the roadways are a warzone heh.
Safety inspection will do zero to solve a problem that is dominated by new vehicles that are working as intended. Lights these days are just crazy bright yet within the current federal specs for where light can be shined and where on the vehicle it can be shined from. You might kick a few cars with shitty flickering bottom dollar LED bulbs off the road but that's a small slice of the overall problem pie.
was going to ask this. In France you fail inspection (4 years then every 2 years) if your headlights are misaligned, I guess it's the same the whole of Europe.
I expect inspection requirements to be eliminated going forward, rather than tightened, due to the standard government mantra: "This policy may disproportionately impact disadvantaged and minority communities". Personally I'm guessing that California has about another 5 years before smog testing goes away.
You think woke will beat corrupt/lobbying? I have an older car that needs the smog check every year, and for the last 5 years that's entailed paying a mechanic the better half of a thousand dollars to get the check engine light to go away (for the same issue) each time. The whole thing is an utter scam that only the poor people deal with.
I don't think being poor makes you a minority in this country, except in the offices where the laws are being made.
Washington state eliminated smog testing a couple years ago. I'm not sure how big the smog test station operator's lobby is, and if the state determines that having smog testing is a net drain on the budget, they'll eventually eliminate it. Whether they say "it's too expensive for us to run", "cars are way cleaner these days", or "we're doing this for poor people" remains to be seen.
Now, I don't know if California makes or loses money on smog testing (does the state get a cut?), but I'm still guessing it's going to go away at some point before too long.
> paying a mechanic the better half of a thousand dollars to get the check engine light to go away (for the same issue) each time. The whole thing is an utter scam that only the poor people deal with.
And a hell of a lot of people as well as the entire insurance industry want to economically incentivize those people to stop driving (for both good and bad reasons) so they're on the same side. Every dealer and manufacturer wants to sell cars so they'll also be on that side.
God bless my state of Michigan: zero inspections, no front license plates. I’ve lived in states with the opposite and it’s oppressive (as an automotive enthusiast)
There is a balance. I’ve lived all over the US and I appreciate the fact that MI is less user hostile than other states in this regard. We still have regulations. California and Virginia are oppressive.
Meanwhile I've seen people crash their cars every single week during my stay in the US because they drove on tires they should have replaced literal years earlier.
In SV as soon as it rain google maps becomes a Christmas tree because there are hundreds of red icons signalling accident, 10%+ of cars over there have diy slick tires
If any Europeans or Asians are wondering "why are America's vehicle standards so lax", here's your answer. There are a LOT of people that think the way this poster does.
And entirely corrupt and inconsistent. I know people who get the inspections stickers withheld so the shop can try to talk you into paying for maintenance or given out for free to friends.
In my state, shops have a strict 3 strikes policy for ANY inspection related infraction, including charging less than $12.50 (presumably to prevent shops from cutting corners to undercut the competition) and giving out stickers to failed vehicles. This can result in shops with two strikes being EXTREMELY conservative in their recommendations to not lose their license. I don't think that's a bad thing, because you have to be EXTREMELY sketchy to get those strikes in the first place. Many shops will give out stickers to people with mostly safe but maybe has a simple item kind of failing, but that likely depends on how "visible" the issue is because they have to sign their name on every single sticker.
It works really really well. I've been very buddy buddy with shops and they will still give me a thorough inspection. It's also a pretty basic inspection, meaning if you fail it you should probably not be on the road.
Yep - I have a mechanic I trust - he doesn't do inspections, asked him to check my tires before I brought it in to get inspected and he said they should pass - unless the place I bring it for the inspection, also sells tires.
Its mind boggling to me that the place the does the inspections, is also the same place that can sell you the repairs - repairs that you may or may not actually need.
Shops that also run small time (usually BHPH) dealerships or get a lot of income from tire sales are the worst about it due to the obvious conflict of interests.
In my state the emissions and safety inspections are combined under the same license. As recently as the 2010s the 3rd party that the training was contracted out to would straight up tell you in the PowerPoint slides that the state's #1 priority is emissions and that the point of the safety inspection was to make holding the license lucrative to remove incentive to circumvent emissions inspection process. At least they're honest...<sigh>
It was baffling to me when I was in Florida and rented a car. I was driving on the highways and no matter where I was, every highway was littered with abandoned cars. I had things fly off from a car into mine (splash shield). And then I realized its most likely because Florida has no safety inspections.
As a car enthusiast myself, I'm glad Mass has safety regulations and I don't have to jeopardize my safety or breathe pollution from cars rolling coal. Safety and car hobbies can go hand in hand.
GM and Ford have been trying to shed their dealer networks for the better part of a century, but even in Michigan, dealerships have more lobbying power than they do.
They're obviously not going to stand for Tesla doing what they're banned from doing. Even if they'd rather be doing it themselves.
