Aftermarket HIDs should be banned.

Been blinded by ridiculously blue headlights recently? Then it's happened to you too... There are cheap aftermarket HID kits available on eBay and so on that allow you to place a HID 'bulb' in the place of your standard bulb in your headlights. While these lights, like the factory fitted options, output 3 times as much light as standard halogen bulbs, they are not managed in the same manner, hence the dangerous illegal glare they produce. Factory-fit HID lights use different reflectors to handle the different size, shape and orientation of the light source (it is an arc in a HID light, not a filament) to avoid glare and ensure a clean, correct beam pattern. They are also required, by law, to have a self-levelling system installed to stop them blinding other motorists due to longitudinal car attitude. This normally consists of either automatically-levelling headlights, or self-levelling rear suspension. Now compare this to the aftermarket installation. You take out your halogen filament bulb, with the filament a certain length and orientation, and replace it with a HID capsule that has a light source in a completely different location, and you expect the existing reflector to somehow produce the same, legal, beam pattern? Well, of course it doesn't. Light gets scattered everywhere. And to compound this error, the headlights don't self-level either. I was behind a car fitted with these HIDs recently, and when he was driving behind a white truck no beam cut-off was visible on the rear of the truck, just a complete wash of blue-white light. The poor truck driver was probably being blinded by his rear view mirrors. The Garda need to do the sensible thing and start giving these people points on their licence. They could also do something about the illegal numberplates while they were at it! You know, the yellow rear plates you see everywhere, even though the car is NOT from the UK; or the scripted fonts that make the plate unreadable...