SUVs or CrossOvers have become common place and they have the lights positioned higher on the frame of the vehicle.  4 x 4s can also suffer from this issue.  Some also have self adjusting headlight beam angle.  The cause and effect is the same.  They are blinding the oncoming traffic be it vehicle or cyclist. 

The drivers of these vehicles are sometime aware as people will tell them the lights are blinding, some will have oncoming traffic flash them to make them aware.  I agree that there is a culture of people that look out for themselves and don't care about the impact they have on others. 

As a side note the road surface (lumpy and bumpy) and the amount of potholes makes the glare and blinding isssue worse.

I have the same function on mine and when I am boot heavy (especially for Scuba diving out from Portland Bill)  I will adjust the lights to not be a menace to other road users.  However most other roads users do not adjust it or even know about it.

A typical example is with 4 settings from 0 to 3.  0 is for 1 person in vehicle with half a tank of fuel.  So if they fill up the fuel tank then they should have it set to 1.

For sure MOT should adjust the lights and note in report it was wrong. 

It is not an MOT failure in my book but some unscrupulous mechanics may just fail so they can get another retest fee. 

I think there is a problem also that the beam shape rules assume a filament source and a parabolic refelctor with a glass lens, and if you define the centre of the bright part, the rest sorts itself out, but that is not really the case for LED and gas discharge lamps, nor with badly fogged plastic with any sort of lamp behind it - there can be a lot of 'splash'

Arguably such light would benefit from a peaked hat style hood to give a hard cut off to the top of the beam.

right now gas discharge lamps can  must be self levelling, but that is about it.

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But the beam patterns are intended to put most of the energy below the horizontal in 'dip' many do have quite a bit above that.

LED lamps can have a very sharply defined cut-off above a certain angle.  Which means that nobody should get dazzled on a level road.  It doesn't work so well if the road is hilly.

Certainly they can/could , but as far as I can tell, they don't.

Mike

My new (to me) car has LED lamps, and there is a very sharp cut-off line at the top of the beam.  Anything below that line is much brighter than above it.

The first MOT is when the vehicle is over 3 years old then on the anniversary of its last MOT for the UK.  Before this time the vehicle is deemed to be OK.  Some people change their car at 3 years so they don't need to get MOT.

Good, I just wish more did..... it may in fact be be a minority but you do not need that many badly adjusted vehicles to cause a problem.

That and the odd cyclists that have very bright flashing white lights that make it impossible to see what side of the road they are on  as the view  alternates between either a blinding white sheet or total darkness, changing too fast so  the eye is adapted to neither.  Probably OK in a built up area where street lighting means the contrast between the 2 states is less,  but not sensible on a country road.

M.

Cyclists are supposed to (by law I believe) have static lights on their bikes as well as flashing ones if they choose to have them as well. They shouldn't just have flashing lights, especially at the rear and definitely not at the front! How on earth can they see where they're going!