If there’s one topic that’ll get anyone with a car riled up—enthusiast or not—it’s headlights. Every single person I’ve talked to about modern headlights has said they’ve experienced some level of glare or blindness due to oncoming headlights being too bright.
It’s not like I ask for these opinions, either. Almost every day, I see someone, somewhere online, voicing their opinions about how headlights on today’s cars are bright enough to cause temporary blindness and can create a dangerous condition for drivers who encounter them.
These opinions are strong and popular enough that Transport Canada, the nation’s federal department that manages the rules for the road, is now conducting a survey to find out just how detrimental today’s headlights are to its citizens. That means Canadians are getting a rare opportunity to directly tell the government how they feel about getting blinded by pointlessly bright lights from oncoming traffic.
Canada Doing It Right
As I mentioned in today’s Morning Dump, Canada borrows much of its vehicle regulations from the United States. That means when it comes to lighting, you’ll run into the same levels of brightness from today’s LED-style headlights, whether you’re north or south of the U.S.-Canada border. The issue, as Driving.ca puts it, is that while the widespread adoption of LEDs has greatly improved visibility for drivers, the regulations haven’t caught up with the glare they produce.
LEDs – which started showing up in the early to mid-2000s and have become almost an industry standard within the past five years – and the high-intensity discharge (HID) headlights that came just before them in the late 1990s are without question brighter than the halogen bulbs of yore.
But the problem at the core of the headlight brightness issue, according to B.C.-based driving-vision expert Daniel Stern, is a mismatch: automakers are eagerly embracing new technology, but regulations haven’t caught up with the glare these brighter lights produce.
Glare is not addressed in Transport Canada’s Canadian Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (CMVSS), which closely mirror U.S. regulations. The Society of Automotive Engineers technical standards also don’t mention glare.
At the beginning of the year, the Vancouver City Council unanimously passed a motion calling on the federal government to address overly bright vehicle headlights. According to CBC News, the mayor wrote a letter to Transport Canada urging the agency to take action to address citizens’ concerns. This survey, then, is the first of those actions.
The survey itself is fairly straightforward. Open from March 6 to April 20, it takes about 15 minutes to complete and asks a series of questions about how often you drive at night, whether oncoming headlight brightness has affected you, how often you experience headlight glare, and whether that glare actually impedes your ability to drive. At the end, there’s even a space where you can leave your opinion on anything related to the subject.
The survey is only open to Canadian residents, and the results are anonymous, which means that the government won’t come after you if you happen to have especially strong feelings about blinding headlights… probably. No promises.
Where’s America In All Of This?
The federal standards in the U.S. for minimum and maximum headlight brightness haven’t changed for nearly 30 years. Meanwhile, headlight tech has evolved greatly. Back in August, Washington Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez voiced her concerns at the U.S. Capitol. From KGW8:
“There is a plague in this country of headlight brightness,” she told the House Appropriations Committee in July. “It is shockingly bright. If you look back to halogen light bulbs, you’re reaching somewhere around 700 to 1200 lumens. New LED technology, these sons of b—s get to 12,000 lumens.”
[…]
“It’s not a binary choice between walking around in the dark and the fire of 1,000 suns,” she said. “The standards on this have not been reformed since before I was born.”
Since then, not much has changed. Back in October, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) released a study to see whether the huge increase in complaints about headlights actually correlated to more crashes. I wrote about this when the study came out, but as a reminder, here’s what the organization found after analyzing crash data:
Out of around 24 million total crashes, fewer than 150,000 had glare coded as a contributing factor, and a far smaller fraction were both coded for glare and occurred at night. With a few exceptions, these nighttime glare crashes accounted for only one or two out of a thousand crashes per year in all 11 states.
Moreover, while this glare rate ticked up and down a little, it remained relatively constant over the study period and certainly did not show a steady increase coinciding with the improvement in IIHS headlight ratings. In fact, the glare rate was highest in 2015 and lowest in 2020.
So basically, while the headlights are definitely brighter, there isn’t really reliable data saying they’re any more dangerous. Personally, I’m still not so sure. What I’d really like is for America to release a survey like Canada did, so people can actually voice their concerns directly to the Department of Transportation. Until that happens, I suggest phoning your congressperson every single day until they do something about the scourge of headlights ruining our roads.
Top graphic image: DepositPhotos.com
The stats for accidents coded for glare involvement are missing at least two classes, however large or small they might be:
I’m going to make some time to fill this in later, since I think it’s a tragedy of the commons and a genuine bad safety trade-off. The folks enjoying better visibility at night are less likely to crash, but everybody downrange of them is more likely to after being dazzled, including pedestrians and cyclists who disappear in the glare.
On the OEM side the incentives push the manufacturers to one-up each other on both measurable lumens and perceived/subjective brightness, and then push tech like adaptive laser beams as a profitable solution to the complaints. A lot of good could be done by just updating the test standards, especially to cover testing on hills.
Aftermarket LEDs in fixtures designed for halogen are a safety issue, have rarely been legal, and should be addressed by ticketing. Revenue should cover the cost of enforcement, enact it with a fix-it ticket scheme where it’s dismissed if you can demonstrate the lights are OEM or at least certified and legal.
There’s also a highly entertaining subreddit on this topic if you’re so inclined.
I can understand wanting to make aftermarket LED bulbs draw the same current as halogens to avoid angering the dash light god and I can understand a preference to make LED bulbs brighter rather than wasting the current through a resistor but what I cannot understand is why the threshold for that trigger can’t be dialed down via the OBD2 port to the lower current draw of LED bulbs.
I’ll add another vote for the problem being mostly people with aftermarket lights and who drive everywhere with their brights on.
Personally, my issue with newer stock lights is that the cutoff is too low. If I’m going down a hill and approaching another rise there is an almost dead flat cutoff between nice bright illumination and then nothing above that line. It can be hard to gauge what is on the other side of the rise or around a corner when modern headlights give you a binary dividing line of all or nothing.
Getting it right with the manufacturers is a great start. But it’s half (or less) of the problem.
The dumb bunnies that install LED lighting in halogen fixtures need to stop doing that. The result is often way worse than some factory LED lights.
Or the cheap aftermarket LEDs that probably are made worse by bad alignment. Or the truck leveling/lift kits installed without adjusting alignment.
“…Marie Gluesenkamp Perez voiced her concerns…”
Broken clock is right twice a day for once.
I honestly haven’t noticed any increased glare or problems with oncoming headlights. I do enjoy my newer car’s headlight coverage better than my old one and feel it is much safer. Of course, every now and again you run into someone who either doesn’t realize their brights are on, who doesn’t have their lights properly aligned, or who has some dumb aftermarket lighting thing going on. But I haven’t noticed increased problems.
I loved night driving until a couple of years ago. Now I find it really distressing because of this. The OEM LEDs are a problem, but much worse for me are the freaks who retrofit their composite housings or sealed beams with LEDs and blast searing white light directly in my eyes. Even in broad daylight the intense white light is uncomfortable. The power output is an issue but the 6500k color turns the headlights into supernovas.