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Saturday, August 1st, 2009 12:38 am
After several hours of white-knuckled night driving through the Rockies tonight, I have a suggestion: Car headlights should be polarized, so you could selectively filter out the oncoming lights. Except it would also filter out your OWN headlights, though the reflections back should be less strictly polarized. So the polarization should be defendant on the direction you are going, with a rotating filter hooked up to GPS. That wouldn't be too hard.

Once this idea saves the American auto industry, a thank you in the form of an abandoned industrial plant (with its own rail spur, please) will be sufficient.
Saturday, August 1st, 2009 11:17 pm (UTC)
I've never seen one, and I've looked.
However, it seems stupid to me that nobody's stuck a standard welding-style LCD filter over a mirror. It's about $20 of parts and the LCD has adjustable darkness from 0 down to #12, which I can't convert into optical density off the top of my head but it's about 1:100, far more than you'd need. Setting it up with a light sensor so it'd auto-darken at night, would be $25.
Sunday, August 2nd, 2009 04:05 am (UTC)
They certainly have auto-darkening rear view mirrors, but they don't act as quickly as a welding mask. Not sure that would be a good thing, since nighttime tends to be a systemic problem...