Notices by Isocat (isocat@tiggi.es)

@tk @baralheia @sun Unfortunately, though, Cybertruck. And it's only a matter of probably not much time before the F-150 is the smallest in Ford's Lightning pickup line.

This can be viewed entire by putting the URL in at 12ft.io:

https://www.wired.com/story/the-uk-now-has-its-own-illegal-rubberized-cybertruck-on-the-road/

@sun @tk @baralheia Exactly right.

@tk @baralheia You're many kinds of right. I fervently wish US regs weren't deliberately configured to cater to the market-control preferences of the American automakers (+ those international ones who pay the steep cover charge to participate in this market), at the expense of things like pedestrian safety (and many other kinds) and on-road fleet fuel economy, but that's the fetid reality we live with here on the North American regulatory island of Ferenginar.

There's also more nuance and complexity to it, though. Road and traffic conditions in Japan really are significantly different to those in North America in ways that heavily affect the practical safety of a Kei truck. That would still be the case even if LHD Kei trucks were a thing, and the fact that privately-imported Keis are RHD makes them significantly more unsafe and incompatible with North American traffic.

Some states and provinces are now refusing to register Japanese-specification vehicles imported under the 25-year-old cutoff exempting imported vehicles from US safety standards, the 21-year cutoff for US emissions standards, and the 15-year rule for Canadian safety and emissions standards. That really is a sound decision by those states and provinces, bitter though it be for those who think a Kei truck best meets their needs.

It also sucks that the Australian-type "ute" (formally "coupé utility", a station wagon but with a truck bed instead of enclosed rear cabin + wayback) withered and died in North America after the Chev El Camino and Ford Ranchero went away by the late '70s, as nudge/wink CAFE regulations spurred automakers to pivot to trucks and truck-based SUVs (and miscategorize certain cars as "trucks"). A ute would much better, more safely, and more economically serve a great many North Americans' needs than the F-990 Super Duty King Ranch Canyonero types they're more or less forced into. Subaru's Baja was a more recent halfassed effort at at ute, but as a 4-door its bed was too small to be useful for more than Harry Homeowner's smaller pickups at the garden centre.

Yeah…no.

It's clickbait, meriting a C+ at best. I'm sloppily quoted in it, and we also learn the loud simpletons insisting headlight glare is a simple, easy-to-fix conspiracy (it's none of those) amuse themselves by drawing a penis on a picture of me.

Altered photographs aside, I'm a subject matter expert in this field. I spent the first part of this year writing an exhaustively thorough report on headlight glare, commissioned by a national government. 38,000 words, 243 references, 37 figures. Headlight glare is real, and it is getting worse, but:

This is not at all like Dieselgate.

Headlight beams are defined by test points and zones: places in the beam with a specified minimum required and/or maximum allowed intensity. A low beam has to balance seeing for the equipped driver versus glare for others, so there are test points requiring high intensity just below the horizontal and just to the right (or left, in left-traffic countries) of the vertical centreline of the lamp. And there are upward-leftward (rightward, in left-traffic countries) test points limiting intensity directed toward oncoming drivers.

Past technology was such that a single glare-control point or small zone in the low beam specification effectively served to create a large low-intensity glare-controlled region covering most of the angles corresponding to the areas most frequently occupied by other drivers' eyes. Today's technology means high-intensity light can be put much closer to the test point without violating the intensity limit at the point or zone itself, so the glare-controlled low-intensity region is much smaller. This isn't cheating; it's fully compliant with the regulations.

And today's low beam patterns are much wider than those of the past; in particular, today's low beams extend a lot further over to the left. There is a lot more light in today's beam patterns—the highest-intensity part of a low beam of today can equal or exceed the peak intensity of past-model high beams.

So any given road user's eyes are more likely to be within a high-intensity area of any vehicle's beams.

Also, the light-emitting areas of the headlamps are smaller, and the light sources are bluer. More about that in a moment.

Today's headlamps are much more sensitive to aim in terms of both how well the driver can see and how much glare they are causing for other traffic participants. Unfortunately, in North America almost no attention is paid to headlamp aim. Most places don't have periodic aim inspections, and it's very difficult to get a good, correct aim job done even if you try hard and call around to shops. Even if you find a shop willing to take your money to aim the headlamps, they usually won't do anything like a proper job of it.

The types of headlight beams in use today were developed with the assumption that vehicles would be equipped with systems to keep the lamps aimed correctly even when the vehicle is loaded down (passengers, cargo, towing/hauling) or going over road bumps. But the regulations do not require such systems; most vehicles don't have them.

The rules on headlamp mount height are permissive in the US and Canada, and high headlamp mount height on trucks, vans, and SUVs, relative to driver eye height and sideview mirror height in smaller vehicles, is another cause of glare.

All of these listed factors (and more besides) add up to a lot more headlight glare than there used to be.

The relevant US/Canada safety standard (№ 108) does not even once mention glare, or any synonym for it. The same is true of the relevant SAE technical standards, which go out of their way to avoid the G-word. That's not new; for most of a century, the North American headlight regs have heavily prioritized maximum seeing light, while the European (more recently rest-of-world) headlight regs contain explicit and stringent glare-limiting provisions.

Neither approach is correct or wrong; it is impossible to point to a particular spot on the seeing light/glare light tradeoff as the perfect balance. As we age, we need more light to see any given thing, and at the same time we grow more sensitive to glare, which makes this a really thorny knot.

But glare complaints are sharply rising even in countries with much more stringent glare regulations, not just on the laxly-regulated American island. That points at unregulated factors common around the world: smaller, brighter, bluer. There's sturdy science implicating those aspects of headlamps in increased glare, but stylists and marketers want the lights as small and as blue as can be, and stylists and marketers have long tended to win this kind of battle against scientists and engineers. Too, consumer-oriented headlight tests heavily prioritize seeing, and high star ratings spur car sales, but "Hey, the headlamps on this model won't piss off other drivers as much as headlamps on other cars" is not an effective sales pitch.

@CAWguy @troublewithwords @Niall

"Unauthorized Bread", by Cory Doctorow.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

@ploum @Florian @Unixbigot @pluralistic