Oh boy a old man topic I can rant about

Some LED headlights in newer cars and more specifically, LED retrofit bulbs for older cars don’t provide focused beams of light in the same way that halogen or laser projector headlights do. This has the unfortunate side effect of throwing enough light up at the eye level of other drivers so it looks like their brights are on all the time.

The folks in this thread talking about it getting worse in the last 5 years are correct - that’s around when LEDs became essentially ubiquitous in new cars and kits to retrofit them into basically any older car became very cheap. LED light usually has a completely white or blue color temp, which kills your night vision almost instantly and causes it to feel more blinding compared to a car with halogen headlights or a brighter warm light source like a streetlight.

There’s also basically no way to win the brightness game other than also having bright LED headlights or owning a car that has expensive xenon or projector assemblies. I used this knowledge for good and realized that I was being a dickhead driving a lifted SUV with cheap LED bulbs I got on Amazon. Most cars give you some amount of adjustability to aim the headlights correctly. We just got rid of vehicle safety inspections in Texas and common decency is all but dead here, but if you’ve still got some, make sure your car isn’t blinding people and don’t drive with your brights on.