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
I had a (US) 2018 Acura MDX that had the best headlights I’ve ever been behind. They have a very sharp vertical cut-off, and if adjusted correctly (and on ours, they never drifted out of alignment), that cutoff was below the beltline of just about anything taller than a Miata. They did a great job of illuminating the pavement. Unfortunately, the MDX also had auto-dimming high beams. I always turned it off, but my wife drove it about 90% of the time and managed to get it re-engaged.
Of all the safety/drive-assist items out there, I think auto-dimming is about the dumbest. Seriously, how hard is it to manage high beam engagement ourselves?
I hated driving at night in Texas where the ubiquitous F-150/250 trucks roam and glare.
Jow mich of this can be attributed to headlight misalignment?
I know there are people strongly for and against regular testing if vehicles for road safety but a misaligned headlamp is something the driver may not even notice but is definitely detrimental to ongoing traffic.
“Headlights are too bright” is the absolute dumbest fucking take of the problem and it’s ridiculous how many people think it.
It’s about aim and location. (and shitty auto-high beams)
People want to go back to lightning bugs in jar because some jackass in a lifted truck stuck temu LEDs in halogen housings and think the solution to that is ban all LEDs
In an older Carmudgeon podcast Jason Camisa pointed out that automakers are cheating in order to get these blindingly bright lights. You can listen to this on youtube (episode is called: Automakers Are Cheating Again! — The Carmudgeon Show) that topic starts around 7 minutes in I believe.
https://youtu.be/MkwjMV2of_8?si=7Hg5digVBYsIkEiK&t=421
Have you ever noticed the little dark spots on the headlight beam pattern, My GR86 has them. Well thats the spot the DOT (?) measures the brightness in order to be certified. He was talking with automotive engineers and played dumb mentioning these dark spots and they laughed and proudly expained and admitted to this practice.
Simple move would be adopting the ECE regulations as many countries around the world have implemented the ECE regulations in their regulations, including Australia and Japan.
I don’t understand why NHTSA and Transport Canada haven’t addressed the newer technologies for the last thirty years. I’ve said many times that NHTSA is nothing but a colossal waste of taxpayer’s money in the last fifty-eight years. Congress and lawsuits had forced NHTSA to revise its FMVSS at a very glacial speed…and throw in lot of caveats. I think it’s best to shut down NHTSA and to revise the FMVSS to harmonise with the ECE regulations.