Just discovered that the Nissan Murano (2007?) has adjustable headlights. There is a knob on the left side of the dash for this function. Is this wh y so many headlights are aimed irritatingly too high? California used to h and out tickets for mis-adjusted lights. Do all newer cars have this horr ible feature?
50 years ago, in my service station days, we used to adjust lights to tight specs. Customers who got tickets would have to have lights adjusted by a certified station before the fine would be waived. Now proper aiming doesn 't matter? Please educate me. What gives.
BTW, a relative owns the above car. I asked him why he never uses the high beams on dark treed country roads. Turns out that he is lighting the tops of trees about 25 feet off the ground.
People have been gradually "educated" not to care about anything related to road safety other than speeding, drinking and driving, and perhaps red light running.
Other than that, the message passed by pretty much every part of the system is that nothing else is ever responsible for a problem.
I don't think they all have it. The one thing variable is load. If they are adjusted with no load, full load will change position, so being adjusted right is a good thing. 9 out of 10 people will get it wrong. Higher vehicles have an advantage if getting a longer beam.
When used properly, it's to compensate for heavy loads.
formatting link
Page 2-25 (98 of 345)
- - Headlight aiming control (if so equipped)
- Depending on the number of occupants in the vehicle and the load it is carrying,
- the headlight axis may be higher than desired. If the vehicle is traveling on a hilly
- road, the headlights may directly hit the rearview mirror of the vehicle ahead or
- the windshield of the oncoming vehicle.
- The light axis can be lowered with the operation of the switch.
- The larger the number designated on the switch, the lower the axis.
- When traveling with no heavy load or on a flat road, select position 0.
Unfortunately, the operator's manual is usually still safely shrink-wrapped in the glovebox, and the owners are totally clueless about how their cars work.
According to the manual, the lights can only be adjusted "flat", or lower. If they're pointing up, there's something else wrong. Maybe someone had the knob at 3 (full down) without noticing, and "adjusted" them so they were aimed "properly", and now that the knob is back at zero (is it?) the lights are aimed way too high.
Up here in Canada, the usual cause of too-high aim is Daytime Running Lights. The drivers (you know, those clueless ones), figure that since there's light on the road in front of them, and the dash is lit up, that their lights are "automatic", not realizing that the sides and rear of the car are totally dark, and the headlights are on high beam (usually half-power, giving that semi-bright yellow colour).
There is a knob on the left side of the dash for this function. Is t his why so many headlights are aimed irritatingly too high? California u sed to hand out tickets for mis-adjusted lights. Do all newer cars ha ve this horrible feature?
With the advent of HID it seems to me that all the cars with HID destined for the american market have the auto adjustment feature. My A4 probably can be had with the manual adjustment in the otherworldly parts.
As other posters said this driver accessible manual leveling adjustment is to compensate for the varying vehicle load.
It's all about money. Years ago you had to take a written test every
4 years to renew your license. The DMV's figured out that they could save/make money by eliminating the tests. The politicians loved it because they could reduce staff, or at least not increase staff, because renews were so much faster. And many states went from 4 year renewals to 15 years. So the "gvt" constantly whines about poor drivers and how people need to drive safer but they eliminated to only opportunity they had to actually provide some form of training thru the renewal tests.
i think you're overlooking the vehicle repair industry. "gvt" learned very quickly in the early 80's when they had their 5mph no damage bumper laws, that auto manufacturers and the shops that do the work, make billions from repairing fender benders. that sudden cessation of revenue stream had them getting on the phone to d.c. and complaining like stuck pigs. so the laws were wound back to 2.5mph, painted bumpers and lights flush to the deformation line that sustain thousands of dollars of damage from a shopping cart.
incompetents with driving licenses means detroit and the repair industry gets to make a whole bunch of money. simple. and the more the better.
The ugly 5mph were proven to do almost nothing with regards to repair costs, saving far less than they cost and were making achiving CAFE more difficult. That's why the 5mph bumpers were repealed. The bumpers need to be covered to achieve the fuel economy, most people don't want ugly unpainted black*, and even if they were uncovered chrome plating has environmental issues that force the automakers to turn away from it.
*which has turned up on the lowest trim levels of low price point cars from time to time.
More frequent meaningless tests that a dead cat can pass when driver training consists of lessons on crashing slowly and sober are not going to do anything more than less frequent tests of the same. The problem is that there is no focus on right of way and general competence at all, it's about driving slow and sober. Entire focus is on crash survival not avoiding crashes by not being on a collision course in the first place.
The system is 'drive slow to stop when someone pulls out in front of you from a side street' not 'don't pull out in front of people and force them to brake to avoid a collision'. It is all summed up by a woman who screamed at me that I was driving too fast when she was running a stop sign. I was going the posted 25mph speed, but see, she had been taught that 'speed kills' so it was my fault that there was a near miss, not hers because she was moving slower. That's the north american driving system. It's assbackwards from the start.
The only test I remember having to take for a renewal was a vision test. Are there any states where you actually have to retake the written test to renew?
Brent wrote in news:kcpf9r$t3q$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:
The promise of cost savings was what drove the Insurance Institute to lobby for them in the early-'70s. I remember the propaganda of the time, up to and including the articles in Consumer Reports, who were an early, big booster of bumper laws.
However, the law was written as a /"safety"/ measure: The new bumpers were meant to protect the vehicle's "safety systems", specifically the lights and signals. The idea was that, when subject to the "ram" test, the safety systems must be unaffected by the impact. It didn't matter how much damage there was to the bumper so long as the systems survived the official ram test.
That's why the first bumper to be covered under the new law was the FRONT one, in 1973: Protect the headlights first. The rear bumper was not required to be energy-absorbing until 1974.
The Insurance Institute has since discovered (as you pointed out) that the cost savings are actually negative. It turned out that most real-world collisions involve impacts that the official "ram" tests do not replicate. Thus the new bumpers create damage that is MORE expensive to fix than their predecessors, in addition to being more expensive to fix, themselves. But it's too late now, and they'd look like idiots if they lobbied to repeal the bumper law, so it stays on the books.
It is very significant that The US (and Canada, which mimics US law almost exactly) are the ONLY countries in the world with bumper laws.
There is no new law that can't be twisted to f*ck us even harder -- assuming it wasn't designed from the gitgo for a harder f*ck. I think that's, like, the 4th Law of Thermodynamics?
I esp. loved the $2,500 oh-so theft-ready headlights on the early-2000 Maxima's... "Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, we want super-brite high-intensity headlights ...... wit dat blue hue .... " "Suuuuuuuure, here ya go........" "Hello, Toyoter? Someone just stole my $2,500 super-brite high-intensity blue-hued headlights....." "Not our fukn pro'leng....."
Don't complain about people not signaling when proper signaling was always part of the driving test. Sure, the test was very easy but instead of dropping it they COULD have made it more meaningful.
Wikipedia doesn't count as I recall you telling me once upon a time. Furthermore consumer groups complaining is not proof of anything. Nor is the IIHS nonsense.
Produce some real numbers then. Meanwhile big heavy chrome bumpers don't do fuel economy any good.
By adding more weight and the painted covers that cause the repair costs to go up.
Because of safety standards.
It makes a big deal for -cost-. Both initial cost and repair cost.
I take you don't realize that most of the repair cost you are complaining about _IS_ the cosmetics. It's about dealing with the tears and dents in the covers. It's about painting the covers. If you want something that can take 5mph smacks and not require repair then you want steel. And not painted steel, but plated steel. Plated in something that can clean up with rag and little polish. Chrome or something like it. Or perhaps use stainless steel.
MotorsForum website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.