Will you turn down the darn lights?

Headlights are too bright, and they don’t have to be

It’s not just you. Headlights are much brighter now than they have ever been, and it’s a problem. Where a halogen bulb with a tungsten filament in the 2000s would have put up 1000 lumens, a modern LED headlight will put out 3 to 4 thousand. What’s worse, the spectrum of light — heavily featuring blues in its white light — is especially sharp to the eyes. If you, like me, drive a little car — I drive a 2009 Honda Civic — the high mounted lights of modern SUVs and trucks are putting their beam straight on you. Oftentimes you can scarcely see a thing, the lights are too overwhelming.

It shows a total misunderstanding of the role which headlights play. There is a time when you need pure, unadulterated brightness, but it is rare. If you are alone on a rural road, then without a doubt you need bright lights. But when you are driving with multiple people, on a highway or on a main road, the light is not to illuminate the road, but to illuminate oneself. You’re just letting people know where you are. That is why most cars (as far as I know, all cars) have brights — it is a discourtesy to your fellow drivers to have your brights on all the time.

Light brightness is a plain example of a negative externality. If you are the only driver with super bright headlights, you will see the road better; but if everyone has super bright headlights, then everyone can see the road worse than if no one had such a device. We must act collectively to turn down the lights. The government should regulate the brightness, banning the default headlights being above a certain number of lumens.

And how did we get here? The NYTimes blames it on IIHS safety standards. Brighter is better, right? Everyone wants to see, right? So if you want to be a top safety pick, you had best make your lights as bright as possible. Your headlights are required to throw light 492 feet down the road to qualify as adequate. That is really, really far! I am hopeful, however, that we could get out of it by simply revising the standards which cars face. Yes, customers will likely be able to modify their car to be brighter, but that is a hassle which few are likely to undertake. If most people had softer, slightly dimmer, and more downward-facing lights, we would likely be safer, and certainly more comfortable.

Technology can also help us out. We can automatically detect when cars are near, and cutoff our high beams, now. Obviously this is little help when the default light is too high, but it can play a role when the brightness is turned down. A technology called “adaptive driving beam” automatically senses where other cars are, and cuts the beam which shines on them, and only them. The light is a honeycomb of smaller LED lights pointing in slightly different directions, which can be cut out and cut in to not have it shine directly on some parts.

Strangely, until 2022, this technology was not legal in the United States. The NHTSA only unbanned it in that year, slowing down its adoption in the US market. Today it is found most commonly in upscale European models, like Audis.

This shouldn’t be too hard to fix. Organizations such as Softlights advocate for softer lights, and you can call your congressman to register your support for regulating headlights. We can change the world for the better, and it is plausible that government can do this well.