Blinded by the light?

I'm getting more and more complaints about car headlights

Don’t get angry. I know there are more important issues: tariff wars, real wars, health, migration, the economy and so on.

But I’m getting more people emailing me (particularly older people) who now hate to drive at night because car headlights have got so blinding.

I’ve noticed it myself.

Basically headlights have got a lot more powerful, and headlights are higher up too, because so many people are driving SUVs.

An RAC survey last year found 89% of respondents thought at least some headlights on cars on the road today are too bright, and 28% thought most are.

7% say they find headlight glare so bad that they avoid driving at night altogether, a figure that rises to 14% for drivers aged 65 and over. Yet another reason rural pubs are dying. A similar survey by the AA found a majority in favour of tighter rules.

As part of my incredibly high-flying ministerial career I was briefly minister for parking (don’t ask) and became aware of the problem of “car obesity”: cars have got so much bigger that in standard parking spaces (and the standards were set ages ago) it is now hard for many people to get in and out the sides, particularly for older people or with kids.

Cars also got taller: average height of vehicle fronts has risen from 73 cm to 83 cm over the past 20 years (this may be the most nerdy fact that has every appeared on my substack).

So lights are higher up, but more importantly there has also been a shift to LEDs and also to High-Intensity Discharge (HID) lights – technology that produces light by passing an electric arc through a gas like Xenon.

Particularly out in the countryside, after your eyes have been blasted by these things, you whizz along unable to see much for a couple of seconds.

According to a recent piece in the Times, dazzling headlights are recorded as a factor in about 280 collisions a year, according to the Department for Transport’s figures, though campaigners say that the true figure may be much higher.

As well as the public, various road safety types are worried about this. According to a written answer from the government:

“Government has commissioned independent research to better understand the root causes of headlamp glare and develop potential countermeasures. The work is underway and is due to deliver in summer 2025.”

According to a BBC report and an announcement last year:

“Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) in Berkshire will equip a car with specialist instruments to measure light levels in the same way drivers experience them… TRL will report its findings and give recommendations to the Department of Transport next spring.”

A campaign group has started up: “There’s almost an arms race in car headlights,” John Lincoln of the campaign group LightAware told The Times. Traditional halogen lights typically emit about 1,000 lumens, a measure of their perceived brightness. “The LEDs on new cars are much more powerful — they often don’t publish that information, but we think for many it’s around 6,000 lumens.”

Pointing in the wrong direction?

We will have to see what that research project says. Some changes for new cars are in the pipeline anyway. In 2023 in a Lords debate then transport minister Baroness Vere said:

The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe’s road vehicle lighting expert group met at the end of April and agreed changes to the headlamp aim requirements to reduce the occurrence of glare. This includes the introduction of mandatory automatic headlamp levelling systems for all types of headlamps in new vehicles, most likely from 1 September 2027.”

After 14,000 people signed a parliamentary petition on this issue last year, the government provided more details about this:

“We know that lots of people raise concerns about headlight glare – but also that the police collision statistics don’t show any underlying road safety issue.

Because of that lack of evidence, the Department for Transport (DfT) raised the issue at the United Nations international expert group on vehicle lighting. Proposals to amend headlamp aiming rules were agreed in April 2023, together with requirements for mandatory automatic headlamp levelling which automatically corrects the aim of the headlamps based on the loading of the vehicle e.g. when passengers are sat on the back seat or there is luggage in the boot.

The transitional provisions permit sufficient time for vehicle manufacturers to redesign their products and adapt the manufacturing process, with the tighter tolerances expected to come into effect in September 2027.”

I’m no car expert. In fact, I can just about change the bulb in my vintage (2007) car. But that sounds like a very high tech response to me.

The industry is keen on super bright lights because they look cool, and their response to the issues this is causing is high tech too - sensors will supposedly detect oncoming cars and flip your headlights down for you.

I just wonder about this approach to a solution. The industry has long been prone to prioritise fashion over other things, and the current fashion happens to be these superduper bright headlights.

Prior to mega bright headlights becoming trendy I had never heard anyone ever complain that they couldn’t see where they were going because their headlights were too weedy.

I feel like the expert / industry conversation is heading towards presenting us with some complex solution - “mandatory automatic headlamp levelling systems” - which will break or not work.

I worry that we are missing the wood for the trees, and being dazzled by high tech solutions.

We could just try… having headlights that aren’t dazzling in the first place?