Now I commute 150km each day, most often in darkness or semi darkness. If a vehicle is coming towards me with "bright" lights, without a doubt, and I mean 99% of the time, it will be a tradie ute or somebody towing a trailer. I just look to the left and try not to focus on their lights. I learnt long ago not to flash them because they will just flash back and most likely use their oversized spotties as well.
KB
Yes, that's exactly right as far as I'm concerned also. Sometimes I tend to "take a hit" these days when people forget to dip their lights, but also, if the lights are bight, but not super bright, I reckon that it it more likely to be a tradie.
As the story goes with my vehicle, I swapped out the bulbs, and adjusted the lights. As it turns out, I probably didn't have to swap out the bulbs (but I don't much care at this stage) but adjusting the lights was what I believe was desperately required.
I adjusted them "by eye" in the daytime. (I'm used to doing this with the driving lights, as when we work "under the hood" they get pushed out of alignment every time... too much MacDonalds...) I was very generous with "pointing them down". I have adjusted lights using a wall and tape, but I thought that I would do something quicker this time by adjusting in the light (if you have ever done it, you know that light can be a problem) and then actually drive past it myself in the dark. This is better than guessing, I thought.
I got a mate to drive the Hilux to a nice straight and quiet bit of road that night. (we played about for 30 minutes, and no other cars showed up) and got him to "park" in the road while I drove past him in my other car to see myself how bearable the lights were. My vehicles have CB radios in them, so we could chit chat without doing more walking than driving. I didn't check them this way before I adjusted them. I found that driving past them, they were were now more than acceptable, and looked "normal". After that, I pulled up along side the Hilux, and we switched the lights of the car off, and checked the distance of the low beam on the Hilux, and it matched the car's lights. About 20 metres. Then we saw which car hat the better driving lights just for fun as we were side by side. I guess I won seeing as I owned both vehicles
What I
really want to point out here that others might find useful is that if you adjust your low beams correctly, you have better high beams. The lights are way more effective on my Hilux now than they were before when they were out of adjustment (they were complete rubbish before). I highly recommend that you adjust your lights properly not only for oncoming traffic, but also you are doing yourself a huge favour by making your high beams much more effective. I couldn't recommend it more.
(Apologies for spelling and grammatical errors if any, this was written very quickly)
