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Comment by ErroneousBosh | Hacker News Reader

I think a huge part of the problem also ties into the problem of modern "Angry Robot Face" designs. Car manufacturers are trying to make headlights the size of a penny that emit as much light as "proper" ones.

In the 1980s my dad had a Citroën GSA (and indeed I had one in the mid-2000s, when it was about 20 years old) which was a low-to-mid-spec family saloon. It had headlights about a foot wide and 5" high with a bog standard H4 type halogen bulb in. They put out huge amounts of light - far better than anything else on the road at the time - without being glarey.

Get rid of Angry Robot Face cars.

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Also, the plastic headlight “lenses” on many cars tend to get cloudy and develop micro-scratches over time. This reduces the efficiency of the low beams, and instead of fixing the problem, many drivers of older cars simply drive with their high beams on, which creates even more glare for everyone else.

Nothing is really repairable, of course, so replacing these parts is out of the question — it’s prohibitively expensive for many owners of older cars to replace the whole headlight units, especially since there are no penalties for driving around like this. Polishing the lenses is risky and usually only a short-term solution.

In the UK, a car with cloudy headlight lenses will fail its annual roadworthiness check, and the owner will have to pay for the lenses to be polished.

Much alike in Hungary... theoretically. Here, unfortunately, practice is different.

> Nothing is really repairable, of course, so replacing these parts is out of the question

As regards the cloudy/micro-scratched headlamps, if one is willing to do so there are numerous polish kits that can restore that "new from the factory" clarity for either an amount of elbow grease, or some time with a drill spinning a polish wheel (depending upon which kit is purchased).

Longevity can be problematic.

This has been a really huge problem in India lately, gone are the days of cute cars with minimal edges (Volkswagen Phaeton looked amazing IMO), now everyone is buying Cybertruck Clones offered by Mahindra and TATA Example: Mahindra BE 6, New Thar, and endless other examples

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