And here I was thinking how unnecessarily bright US headlights have gotten these last few years, to the point where you never actually need to turn on your high-beams even on unlit country roads. Just the regular beams, if your car was made any time in the last two and a half decades or so since the popularization of halogens, are enough that you can see objects *in color* at a quarter of a mile (provided the road is sufficiently straight and flat that you have line-of-sight down the road to anything that distant, which in some parts of the US goes without saying, and in other areas would be rather unusual).

IMO, if you think US headlights are too dim, you probably should make an appointment with an ophthalmologist and get yourself checked for cataracts.

> those blue eye-searing lights

Those things *definitely* ought to be illegal for low-beams. (For high-beams it isn't as much of a problem, provided the law against shining the high-beams into oncoming traffic is enforced. You seldom need high beams in central Ohio, because there's almost always oncoming traffic, but in places like northern Indiana you do use the high beams sometimes, and a bit of extra brightness doesn't really hurt anything there, even if it isn't strictly necessary.)

(Just setting them up for a plain symmetric beam is actually likely to be illegal; low-beam headlights are actually meant to give an asymmetrical beam, illuminating less of the side of the road with oncoming traffic. So they favour the left, here in Australia; the right, in the USA. This is one of the several things that can bite you if you insist on driving a left-hand-drive vehicle in a right-hand-drive country, or vice versa.)

The popularity of SUVs is another problem, here; if you're not driving a vehicle that's just as tall as they are, your eyes will probably be below their headlights, which makes glare an issue again.

That being said I've been trying to find a retrofit HID bulb for my motorcycle - where I actually want to cause oncoming drivers some annoyance. An annoyed driver is one who's aware of you after all. I've already wired up 2-watt leds (8 of em) into my taillight and rigged em to flash from normal to "holy cow, what the hell was that?!?!" for the first 10 seconds after I engage the brakes. I wish I could leave 'em on super bright but the cops frown upon tail lights brighter than many headlights. Ah well.

If so then count your blessing....unless you are a tosser in an X5, in which just ef-orf with your rediculous low beams.

evilspoons, the Mystake (Mondeo) is a '97... hmmmm.

FuzzyPlushroom: can't you replace your bulbs with better ones while staying inside the legal limit?

I installed sealed-beam to H4 conversion bulbs and have rectified some of the absurdly bad high beam problem, but the beam pattern of these conversion units is lousy and installing brighter bulbs will just mean a larger lousy mess.

Incidentally, this H1 bulb you speak of (from 1962) only became legal in the United States (and therefore Canada) in 1997.