The Ben Mulroney Show - Are new rules needed for LED headlights?

Episode Date: March 13, 2026

GUEST:  Daniel Stern  / Chief Editor of Driving Vision News, and vehicle lighting and regulation subject matter expert, based in Vancouver If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://link.chtbl.com/bms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Also, on youtube -- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@BenMulroneyShow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Insta: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Executive Producer:  Mike Drolet Reach out to Mike with story ideas or tips at [e-mail] Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast is brought to you by the National Payroll Institute, the leader for the payroll profession in Canada, setting the standard of professional excellence, delivering critical expertise, and providing resources that over 45,000 payroll professionals rely on. You're listening to the Ben Mulroney Show. So by my house, when I'm driving towards my house, I'm at the intersection that leads to my house, and I'm driving east, and I'm at a stoplight. If there is a car going west at the other stoplight, I feel like. I'm blinded at night because there's a little bit of a raise in the street and therefore the lights are angled just a little bit too high and I cannot see anything. And as I've been driving around the city of Toronto, increasingly it feels like people are driving with their high beams on. But then when I hear that there are these new LED light emitting diode headlights

that have this high intensity discharge, it's becoming increasingly common in new cars. I understand why I feel that way. These things are blinding and the stories on the news of how, how dangerous they can be, especially when there is water or snow or ice on your windshield, there's light bleed that can go everywhere. And next thing you know, before your eyes have a chance to adjust, there's a pedestrian right in front of you and you've got to swerve to miss that guy. So we're going to be talking about this as well as kudos to the.

the city of Vancouver. I will tell you about that in a moment with Daniel Stern. He's the chief editor of Driving Vision News and Vehicle Lighting and Regulation Subject Matter expert. I mean, you're the perfect person to talk about this with Daniel. I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me on. Okay. So talk to me about the, I guess it's a fairly new technology. How is it different than the generation of lights that preceded it? Well, I think everybody's sort of more or less familiar with LEDs. We've bought LED bulbs for our dining rooms, for our garage. You know, we've got LED flashlights and camera flashes in our phones, right?

They're all around us. The first car, the first mass market car to get LED low-beam headlights of standard equipment was the Toyota Corolla in 2014 or 2015. And all previous headlights tended to be comparatively large, larger than they are today. For a long time, it was glowing filaments, like regular light bulbs that we used to use in our houses. Yeah. And then there was a technology called high-intensity discharge, which was like stadium lights used to be. It was a miniature version of that.

And that was sort of a stepping stone. Now we have white LEDs being designed in as the headlamp light source in virtually all new cars. So there weren't a lot of prevalence of the high-intensity discharge headlights. Those were mostly on very high-end premium cars. And they never sort of really exceeded maybe 20, 25% of the fleet. It was all incandescent halogen headlights until the LED revolution. But what's different about LEDs? Well, LEDs can put out a whole lot more light per watt of electricity in, so they're a lot more efficient.

And the optics that go along with them are such that the lamps can be a whole lot smaller. You used to have to have sort of a look, more or less, excuse me, more or less round or rectangular box. with a light bulb in the middle. You don't have to have that anymore. Now you can have these tiny little sort of thumbnail size. Like slits. Yeah, exactly. And so the stylists love it because they can go in directions that they could never do before.

The thing is, there's a quantity called luminance. You can think of it sort of like light density. That is, in essence, any given intensity coming from a smaller lit area feels a lot more glaring. has higher luminance than that same intensity coming from a larger litter. Right. Yeah. Well, because, yeah, go on. But that, you know, the same intensity part of that equation isn't real because as LEDs get better and better, they're getting brighter and brighter. So the intensity is going up and the luminance is going up. And headlights are getting not only smaller and smaller and brighter,

they're also getting bluer and bluer. And why does that matter? Well, because, again, for any given intensity, white light that is bluer produces a whole lot more discomfort clear, 40, 50, 60 percent more discomfort clear than that same intensity with a warmer white, sort of less blue white light. So, Daniel, I got to ask, how do we get to a point where these lights become, if they're not standard, but they're certainly in use and accepted, how do we get to a point where they can be so intense? and so blue that they cause real problems for oncoming traffic. I thought every aspect of a car had to go through a battery of tests. I mean, I've seen all the crash test footage. People love watching crashes. They crash hundreds of versions of a car to make sure that the crumple zones are okay

and that the airbags deploy and that little kids don't get hurt and everyone's necks are okay. How is this something that seems to receive less scrutiny? Well, that's a little bit of a complex answer. I'll try to do my best. There are definitely, there are headlight regulations that control how much intensity is allowed at various parts of the beam. You have to have a large amount of intensity to let you see down the road, but you have to have controlled intensity towards other driver's eyes. The thing is, with all previous light sources before LEDs, we could only move light around in sort of large blobs.

So if we had this glare control point within the beam and the regulation said we can only have this low amount of intensity over here where oncoming drivers eyes are, the only way to meet that was to shift a large amount of light away from that point. So that one little point wound up creating sort of a large low intensity zone. Now with LEDs we have very granular, very close control of where the light is. We can move around very small amounts of light. So we can meet that glare-restricting. test point and only that glare restricting test point and all around it is high intensity. Now that's great if the only goal is seeing because obviously the more light you have directed in a useful direction, the more you can see.

But headlight beams are getting brighter. They're getting wider. And the glare controlled zone is getting smaller. So you know how roads are, especially in Toronto. There are potholes and speed bumps and everything. you know, a headlight doesn't stay static. It moves around as the car moves around. You mentioned, you know, I have a junction right near my house that's just like the one

you described where if I'm waiting for the traffic light and there's a car across the junction from me, they're pointing uphill. So, you know, that raises up their beams and I'm in the high intensity zone below the horizontal. Not a thing I can do about it. But even on level road, relatively level road, the moving around that cars do means that with today's beams, you're just more likely, your eyes are more likely to intersect a high intensity part of a beam. Now, back to your question of why isn't, you know, what's with the

regulations? The regulations haven't really changed as far as Glair is concerned for many decades, and Canada kind of handcuffed itself to the U.S. regulations a long time ago. And that made sense because the two countries had for a long time a very integrated auto industry. But we had the daylight, the daytime running lights that they didn't have. Yeah, that's right. Little changes where DRLs are mandatory up here and they're optional down there. But no big departure. Yeah.

The two big departures, relatively speaking, are, yeah, we require the daytime running lights. And also, we permit the rest of world United Nations spec headlamps, which the U.S. alone in the world does not. The UN headlamp spec, it pays a lot more attention to glare. Okay. On low beam. So let me ask you a question. because we don't have a lot of time left, but I want to talk about how it feels to me.

You know, a lot of times we talk about the news coming out of British Columbia isn't necessarily the greatest. But in this case, I think we got to give city council a big thumbs up because they've recognized the high-intensity discharge as a hazard and the council unanimously passed a motion calling on the feds to create regulations to restrict them. What kind of weight does a city council vote like that have, do you think? by itself none and the Victoria City Council did likewise a few days later but I think it's a very important development yeah I think what it points to is I sort of regard glare like air pollution

it's a social ill yeah but nothing gets done about it until the political will develops to do something like happened with air pollution in the 60s and 70s people said enough we're not having this anymore I think the fact that city councils are passing these unanimous resolutions when it's so far outside their area of jurisdiction I think that's a good indicator that political will is developing to do something about headlight glare. And, you know, it's unfortunately, what's going to speed this up is going to be if a bad accident happens, which of course we don't want to see happen. But sometimes that's the only thing that gets the needle to move.

Daniel Stern, thanks for walking us through this. I appreciate it. Sure thing. We'll go anywhere. This is the Ben Mulroney show. Getting ready for a game means being ready for anything. Like packing a spare stick. I like to be prepared.

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