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It’s not your imagination. The car’s headlights are bright. They are also blue and often higher.
All three factors increase the glare of the road from approaching vehicles and endure you with the rearview mirror.
The older model vehicle used halogen bulbs and produced approximately 1,000 lumens, a visible measurement of light. But that began to change in the mid-2000s when automakers shifted gears, led technology, and met the demand for increased road visibility.
The factory-installed LED bulbs shine about four times the brightness of approximately 4,000 lumens. However, aftermarket LED lights that can be easily purchased on sites like Amazon boast over 10,000 lumens of students.
According to Jillian Young of AAA Northeast, new technology will make the human eye even worse.
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“They’re not warm light,” Young said. “As humans, we naturally find it extremely uncomfortable to see bright, whitish light.”
As the vehicle height has increased along with Americans’ preference for larger SUVs and trucks, these bright blue lights have directly impacted brighter blue lights at eye level.
“We have bright lights that shine on people a little higher than before,” Young said. “It’s something that everyone feels like they might be getting a little crazy, but it’s not.”
Coventry, Rhode Island resident Alan Silva is one of those who lament the state of headlight brightness.
“Sometimes I get blind,” Silva told Nexuster’s WPRI that he buried the pickup at a gas station. “It definitely affects you, especially as you drive on the dark roads of Coventry.”
Sabrina Doyle of Newport, Rhode Island wants to see the regulatory crackdown on blind beams.
“I think it’s definitely beneficial to limit how bright the lights are when they reach a point that’s distracting and dangerous for other drivers,” Doyle said.
In Rhode Island, there are no regulations governing the overall brightness of headlamps.
State law prohibits aftermarket headlights that “incline to change the original design or performance,” but are rarely enforced. A WPRI review of court records found that police officers have only issued six tickets under that law since 2016.
Young said the regulations could be used during vehicle inspections.
“The problem is that people shouldn’t be making changes to lights that change the original design or intention of the bulb,” she said. “That should lead to inspectors failing the vehicle in Rhode Island.”
Some states have sought to address road glare by limiting legal restrictions on headlight brightness, including in Texas. A similar bill was introduced in Rhode Island in 2020 but died before it passed.
The online petition by the nonprofit Softlight Foundation has nearly 80,000 signatures urging federal regulators to “take this issue seriously and properly regulate LEDs.”
In fact, Young said that carmakers will respond to changes at the federal level, rather than trying to navigate the patchwork of state law.
“Automobile manufacturers operate on a national and international scale,” she said.
The changes to regulations by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in 2022 have opened the door for potential solutions through technologies already popular in Europe. This technology, called adaptive drive beams, relies on sensors that detect oncoming vehicles and either reduce the amount of light or shift the light down.
“Some of them have shutters, so they actually distract the light from oncoming vehicles,” Young said.
A 2019 survey by AAA said the technology was supported as a solution to road glare, with a balance between improved visibility and detours of blinding. This study helped open the door to change for NHTSA.
However, Young said the change to the regulations was “relatively recent” in the area of automobile manufacturing, and could take some time before technology is retained on a large scale. Furthermore, it only affects cars coming out of the assembly line now and in the future, but not cars already on the road.
For now, Young said it’s up to the driver to see cars with bright lights coming to them.
“We don’t benefit ourselves in this aspect because we want to see something bright,” Young said. “The best thing you can do when a bright light comes to you is to actually keep your eyes away from the light. It helps with that glare.”
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