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Headlights are blinding us. Here’s why it’s mostly an American problem
[Submitter's note] The 'lite' version of CNN is text-only.
Imagine if you could drive at night with your high beams on all the time, bathing the road ahead in bright light but without ever blinding other drivers. In Europe and Asia, many cars offer adaptive driving beam [ADB] headlights that can do this.
It can actually shape the light coming from headlights rather than scattering it all over the road. If there’s a car coming in the other direction, or one driving ahead in the same lane, the light stays precisely away from that vehicle. The rest of the road is still covered in bright light with just a pocket of dimmer light around the other vehicles. This way a deer, pedestrian or bicyclist by the side of the road can still be seen clearly while other drivers sharing the road can see, too.
In America, the closest we can get to that today are automatic high beams, a feature available on many new cars that automatically flicks off the high beams if another vehicle is detected ahead. But that still means driving much – or most – of the time using only low beam headlights that don’t reach very far.
ADB-enabled headlights already are sold on some luxury cars in America. They just lack the software to perform the way they were designed to.
Some automakers and safety groups, including Ford, Volkswagen and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, are asking NHTSA [National Highway Traffic Safety Administration] to reconsider the regulations to make it easier and less costly to offer these headlights in the US.
“We wish the regulation and testing would be reconsidered to accept what has already been proven around the world, including Canada, and was informed and supported by [the Society of Automotive Engineers],” Audi, VW’s luxury brand, wrote in a statement provided to CNN. “Many of our cars equipped with matrix design or digital matrix design lighting on US roads today could be turned on to provide greater visibility and less glare which means safer roads for all.”
NHTSA’s rules require the ADB headlights to respond extremely swiftly after detecting another vehicle within reach of the lights, much faster than other standards require in the EU and Canada. Also much faster than a human could switch off an ordinary high beam headlight. They also dictate extreme narrow lines between bright and dark regions.
Ultimately, the NHTSA regulations require completely new headlamp designs for the US, Larsen said. This means the ADB capabilities engineered into headlights already on Audi and Mercedes cars in the US, for instance, will probably never get switched on.
