It’s not your imagination. Car headlights are brighter. They’re also bluer and, in many cases, higher.
All three factors have increased road glare from oncoming vehicles, and those bearing down on you in your rear-view mirror.
Older-model vehicles used halogen bulbs, which put out about 1,000 lumens, a measurement of visible light. But that began to change in the mid-2000s when car manufacturers shifted gears to LED technology, responding to demand for better road visibility.
LED bulbs installed at the factory shine roughly four times brighter, around 4,000 lumens. But aftermarket LED lights, easily purchased on sites like Amazon, boast a pupil-blasting 10,000 lumens or more.
The new technology also aggravates the human eye more, according to Jillian Young of AAA Northeast.
“They’re not a warm light,” Young said. “We as humans naturally find that bright, whitish-bluish light very uncomfortable to look at.”
Increasingly, those brighter, bluer lights are hitting motorists directly at eye level, because vehicle height has increased with Americans’ preferences for larger SUVs and trucks.
“We’ve got brighter lights that are shining at people a little higher than they used to be,” Young said. “It’s leaving everyone feeling like they might be going a little crazy, but they’re not.”
Coventry, Rhode Island, resident Alan Silva is among those who lament the state of headlight brightness.
“Sometimes I get blinded,” Silva told Nexstar’s WPRI as he filled his pickup at a gas station. “Driving around, especially in Coventry, dark roads, it definitely affects you.”
Sabrina Doyle of Newport, Rhode Island, would like to see a regulatory crackdown on blinding beams.
“If it gets to a point where it’s distracting and becoming dangerous for other drivers, I think it would definitely be beneficial to restrict how bright your lights can be,” Doyle said.
In Rhode Island, there is no regulation that governs the overall brightness of headlamps.
A state law prohibits aftermarket headlights “which tend to change the original design or performance,” but it’s rarely been enforced. A WPRI review of court records found police officers have issued only six tickets under that law since 2016.
Young said the regulation can be used during a motor vehicle inspection.
“The issue is that people aren’t supposed to be doing any modifications to their lights that change the original design or intent of the bulb,” she said. “So that is something that in Rhode Island should cause an inspector to fail a vehicle.”
Some states have tried to address road glare by capping the legal limit for headlight brightness, including in Texas. A similar bill was introduced in Rhode Island in 2020 but died before passage.
An online petition by the nonprofit Soft Lights Foundation has nearly 80,000 signatures urging federal regulators “to take this matter seriously and properly regulate LEDs.”
Indeed, Young said motor vehicle manufacturers respond to changes at the federal level, rather than trying to navigate a patchwork of state laws.
“Automakers operate on a national and international scale,” she said.
A change to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration regulations in 2022 opened the door for a potential solution through a technology that’s already popular in Europe. Called adaptive driving beams, the technology relies on sensors that detect oncoming cars and lower the amount of light or shift the light downward.
“Some have shutters, so they actually divert the light away from the oncoming traffic,” Young said.
A 2019 study by AAA supported the technology as a solution to road glare, finding a balance between better visibility and diverting blinding beams. The study helped open the door to NHTSA’s change.
But Young said the rule change is “relatively recent” in the realm of car manufacturing and it could take some time for the technology to take hold on a large scale. Additionally, it only affects some cars coming off the assembly line now and in the future, not those already on the road.
For now, Young said, it’s up to motorists when a car with bright lights is coming at them.
“We don’t do ourselves any favors on this front because we are tempted to look at bright things,” Young said. “The best thing that you can do when bright lights are coming at you is to actually divert your eyes away from the light, and that’s going to help with that glare.”
The post Yes, car headlights keep getting brighter: Here’s why appeared first on KTLA.
