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Highway Hazard: Blinded by brighter headlights? It’s not your imagination
The light-emitting diodes in the headlights of oncoming traffic became so intense for Shawn DeVries that he started habitually closing his left eye and keeping his right one open as he drove.
Washington
That was in 2019. Since then, he said, his right eye “hurts so bad, sometimes I just want to pop it out.” He said he developed intermittent pain and a light sensitivity that has affected his social life and his driving habits.
DeVries, 48, of Doon, Iowa, said he does not have diabetes or high blood pressure, which could affect his vision, nor does he engage in risky behavior that could harm his eyes. “I didn’t weld without a helmet,” he said. “I didn’t stare at the sun with binoculars.”Advances in lighting technology have improved nighttime driving for many, but the introduction of brighter lights that also sit higher on S.U.V.s and pickups has given rise to widespread criticism that headlights have become overpoweringly intense.
“If you’ve not been affected by them, you will be,” DeVries said, referring to LED headlights. “You wait. You’re next. It’s only a matter of time.”DeVries is not imagining things. Matt Kossoff, chief product officer of The Retrofit Source, an Atlanta-based distributor of lights for cars and trucks, said headlights had “abso-lutely gotten brighter.”“Sealed-beam” headlights were used from the 1950s through the 1980s, and generally offered poor light output.
Halogens, with tungsten filaments and better output, appeared in the late 1980s and early 1990s. High-intensity discharge lights, which cast a bright glow that approximates the spectrum of daylight, came in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
In the 2010s, LEDs became popular because they were longer-lasting, energy-efficient and perceived by automakers as sexy and modern. But they also prompted complaints that they were too much of a good thing. There is even a Facebook group and an online petition dedicated to ban-ning blinding headlights.
“The balance we are always trying to strike is what is the mitigation and what are the unintended consequences?” said Eric Kennedy, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pa.The trend toward improved headlight illumination has been fuelled in part by manufacturers seeking higher safety ratings from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, Professor Kennedy said.
When the institute, an independent, non-profit research group, re-leased its first headlight ratings in 2016, only one headlight system of more than 80 that were evaluated received a “good” rating. As of March, more than a quarter of those tested received such a rating, the institute said.Complaints about headlight glare are not new, and date back at least 20 years.
After the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration sought comments from the public in 2001 about glare, it issued a report that said the 4,000 responses it received “was larger than those that NHTSA received on other safety concerns.” About 30 percent of respondents said they had experienced “disturbing” night-time headlight glare from oncoming traffic or from cars whose lights appeared in their rear-view mirrors.
The report described that percentage as a “sizable number” that “cannot be ignored.” It was not just older drivers complaining, either. The report said 11 percent of those who rated oncoming glare as disturbing were older than 65, and 45 percent were be-tween 35 and 54 years old. Drivers 18 to 24 years old complained the most about glare from vehicles behind them.
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