Driving after dark used to be a haven. Late at night, there’s no rush-hour traffic, just the meditative hum of the passing miles. But these days, my eyes can’t take it anymore. Even on a lonely road in the middle of the night, I can’t seem to escape the glare of obnoxiously bright headlights. A pickup truck tailgating me blinds my rearview mirror with searing headlights. Even at a distance—and even when without the brights on—the beams of a vehicle in an oncoming lane make me instinctively squint. America’s roads are now full of tactical-grade headlights, and no one is happy about it. Just look at any of the viral screeds on the Reddit forum “r/fuckyourheadlights.”
Other people’s lights are a pet peeve nearly as old as the automobile: Everyone’s beams are too bright, too aggressive, and purposefully pointed into your eyes. But the problem really is worse than ever, and that’s because of the LED headlights that have taken over car design during the past decade or so. Not only can they crank out more lumens than the halogen lamps of old, but their light is also sharper and bluer, which makes it feel like an assault on the eyeballs. Car companies have an incentive to install bright headlights that make drivers think “Oh man, you can see everything,” Jonathan Elfalan, the director of vehicle testing at Edmunds, told me. The wincing driver in the opposite lane isn’t their problem.
Across the world, high-powered headlights are far less menacing. That’s partly because of America’s obsession with crossovers, SUVs, and pickup trucks. New cars are taller and bigger than ever before, which means they are blasting light everywhere but down at the road ahead. “There’s a pretty good chance that the car behind you is shining its headlights right into your mirror,” Sean Tucker, a managing editor of Kelley Blue Book, told me. Still, other countries have long had something we don’t: high-tech headlights that can brilliantly illuminate the road in front of them without simultaneously burning another driver’s retinas. Although American cars are loaded with technology—plenty of new models now come with self-driving features and AI assistants—we’ve been missing out on a simple feature that would ease the problem of blinding headlights.
This technology is called “adaptive driving beam,” or ADB. Adaptive beams scan the road ahead of you and adjust accordingly: On a curvy stretch, the lights will track the road rather than shining straight ahead. They also can detect cars coming your way and dim just the light that’s pointed right at your fellow motorists. This is possible because an LED headlight is not a single light bulb that’s on or off, but is made of a multitude of individual pixels. Adaptive beams have been popular in Europe for more than a decade and are in use in Asia and Canada. In the United States, just a handful of vehicles have them.
Blame the often strict and strange world of American car regulations. Decades ago, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration mandated that cars need to have separate low and high beams. Adaptive beams—which are variable in nature—don’t fit into that binary. Congress finally amended the rules in 2021, a move meant to legalize the better method. That didn’t happen. NHTSA got to write the new regulations, and instead of adopting the international standard, it drew up a separate set of stricter rules. (An NHTSA spokesperson pointed me to the stance that the agency outlined a few years ago, which says that Europe’s test for adaptive bulbs lacks the “objective performance criteria” necessary for approving car tech in the U.S.
The result of this confusion is that although new cars in America have the technology in place to shine less blinding beams—possibly activated via a simple, over-the-air software update, Tucker said—that’s illegal. This gets even more absurd when you consider how simple fixes have solved previous headlight woes. Even new entry-level cars come with an auto-dimming feature to deactivate the brights when another car approaches, minimizing breaches of headlight etiquette.
Instead of turning on technology that already exists, the pathway for car companies to fix American headlight glare involves reinventing their smart headlights. In 2024, Rivian put the tech into its pickups and SUVs and became the first automaker to activate compliant adaptive beams in the U.S. That happened only after Rivian redesigned the entire electronics-and-computing setup in its vehicles, a move that gave the company enough control over the LED headlights’ pixels to satisfy American regulators. “The standard is genuinely demanding,” Carlos Montes Relanzon, Rivian’s senior manager for lighting systems, told me.
The solution is powerful, if eerie. When I test-drove Rivian’s R1S SUV up the California coast last summer, I couldn’t stop staring at the intermittent hole in my headlight beam—a dark spot that would appear as if part of the lamp had burned out, then vanish. At first unaware that Rivian had rolled out the feature, I wondered whether the car might be defective. When I finally realized what the SUV was up to and began to track the tech’s performance, I was reassured by the fact that the Rivian could recognize other cars and turn down the lights while they were still several seconds away, rather than waiting until an oncoming driver was right next to me.
The rest of America’s car industry is slowly coming around. Last year, Tesla introduced adaptive beams in its updated Model Y crossover. And last month, Audi announced that it would put adaptive beams in the 2027 Q9 SUV, set to debut in the U.S. later this year. An Audi spokesperson told me that the company is holding out hope that the NHTSA will come around and agree to adopt the international standard. For now, other car companies will also have to suck it up and sink money into rebuilding adaptive headlights for their American cars. (I asked Ford, Chevrolet, Toyota, and Mercedes about when the automakers might introduce adaptive bulbs, but did not receive more information.)
Unless America suddenly lets carmakers turn on the tech that’s already sitting dormant in plenty of vehicles, today’s glaring lights are going to stick around. Cars now stay on the road longer than ever—13 years on average—so even if every new vehicle today began offering adaptive beams, the journey to replace old cars with new ones that have friendlier headlights would be long. Cool feature or not, adaptive beams are unlikely to persuade many drivers to trade in an older vehicle for a new one. After all, they improve the lives of other drivers more than they help the car owner themselves.
This becomes clear when you’re the highway Good Samaritan. As I meandered through the blackness of Route 101 in the Rivian, passing roadside outposts such as King City and Soledad, my vehicle auto-dimmed its lights for one oncoming driver after the next. Mile after mile, their lights still kept me squinting.
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