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Originally Posted by CanadianGatorBacon
I didn't have time to post the more detailed results for each BMW test, but you can click through from the IIHS site to see why they came to the conclusions they did for each test. From a TV news story I heard this morning, a lot of the cars didn't project light nearly far enough at higher speeds.
Seems like the IIHS considers optimal low beam distance to be about 200 ft left and 320 ft right, and optimal high beam distance to be about 500 ft left and right. For both 2s and 3s xenon and LED did better than halogen, and adaptive headlights did better than non-adaptive. All adaptive headlights did good on right turns, but not on left turns (which I think BMW does on purpose to avoid blinding oncoming traffic). All headlights were short on the straightaway.
Adjusting the aim of the low beams may help alleviate the issue, although I don't know what aiming low beams does to high beam aim on bi-xenon and LED headlights. And would that make the beam pattern too high on right turns?
I would be interested to see what the results would be with a car having the not DOT approved VDL coded in.
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I think that's basically the gist of the BMW response.
" We got some cool shit that would work better but your crappy laws don't let us use our cool tech so we have to dumb the stuff down and yeah... well... It's dumb alright.... But maybe you'll come around... "
And honestly.. It doesn't really make sense for BMW to spend a ton of time engineering headlights of yesteryear for the US.