The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Check out: On Point with Meghna Chakrabarti from WBUR!

Episode Date: October 15, 2025

We're sharing an episode of On Point with Meghna Chakrabarti. On Point is a rare public space where you hear nuanced explorations of complex topics live and in real time. Host Meghna Chakrabarti leads provocative conversations that help make sense of the world, with urgency, timeliness and depth. In this episode: If you feel like car headlights have gotten too bright, you’re not alone. The National Highway Traffic Administration receives more consumer complaints about headlight brightness than any other topic. Meghna explores: How did this happen? And can we fix it? You can hear more episodes of On Point at https://link.mgln.ai/weirdestthing Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the same. Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises, it matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. Hey everybody, today we want to share something special with you. It's a podcast you can turn to every weekday to help you uncomplicate the news and better understand what's really going on in the world. On Point offers nuanced explorations of complex topics live and in real time. Host Megna Chakrabardi leads provocative conversations that help make sense of

the world with urgency, timeliness, and depth. Each episode is a deeply researched, beautifully produced hour. Listeners get to learn, be challenged, and have some fun, too. In this episode, if you feel like car headlights have gotten too bright, you're not alone. The National Highway Traffic Administration receives more consumer complaints about headlight brightness than any other topic. Megna explores, how did this happen? And can we fix it? Okay, here comes the preview. You can hear episodes of On Point every weekday wherever you get your podcasts. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Ladies and gentlemen, we found it. Even in these divided times, we have found the one thing

I believe most Americans can agree on. Those vehicle headlights are too damn bright. Oh my gosh. Finally, someone's bringing this up. I thought I was the only one. I thought something was wrong with my eyes. I did not know there's a place I can go to complain about this. My wife says, I talk about so much that it's kind of like Grandpa Simpson like shaking his fist at the cloud. Why do they need to have six headlights on a pickup truck?

It's just nuts. Abnoxiously bright. Jeez! It's like alien abductors. In abduction levels of brightness. The streets are like traveling Christmas trees. The same effect as you would if you looked into the sun briefly. They absolutely blind me.

Totally blinding. Blinded. Blinded. Not to see the lines, the lanes, even for a split second. I've had to slow down to 30 or 40 miles an hour. Dry with my head tilted to the side. Eat carrots and other orange fruits and vegetables. some vegetables before I drive at night to make my vision better.

I've considered wearing sunglasses, although I'm not sure that's legal. It drives me insane. It gives me road rage. The yellow-colored car headlights worked fine back in the day. The highway transportation safety institute, wherever the hell it is, have done a poor job of controlling this. This is on point. I am Magnet Chakra Barthi, and that was you, Headlight Blanky. listeners from across the United States, Alabama, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon. Props to my home state. Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, Washington, DC, and Wisconsin, just to name a few.

This is literally, I believe, in the history of On Point, the greatest number of listener feedback calls we have ever received. So Nate Rogers, I cannot believe that I am imagining the after images that have been burned into my retinas. And I don't think it's possible that Americans are experiencing some kind of mass hallucination about headlight brightness. I mean, is that even possible, Nate? No, it's one of those things where if everybody is saying the same thing across the country, it must be on to something, right? I'm not even an auto journalist. I'm just a normal person, and I was probably one of the people who would have called into this show. But instead I wrote a very long article about it.

And a very excellent article, I should say. And that article is asleep at the wheel in the headlight brightness wars. And I ran into it, and I was like, immediately, like, we have to do this show. Because I'm so glad to know I am not crazy. So tell me, are headlights actually brighter now on the... vehicles in the United States than they were, I don't know, 10, 15 years ago. There really isn't a simple answer, if you can believe it, but you can just start by looking at what numbers are available. And based on certain information that has been compiled, you can

say that headlight brightness has roughly doubled in the last 10 years. But there's various ways to measure it. I mean, every headlight is a little different. They're all designed differently. Angle is really important. There's all these different factors that make it kind of hard to exactly pinpoint brightness. But at the same time, think about it. I mean, we wouldn't be having this conversation if there wasn't an increase in brightness or an increase in glare, at least, that's impacting the way that it feels to be driving at night.

You do have this chart from data that's from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. It's publicly available data. On a y-axis, it says brightness in CD. What's the CD unit? That's Candela, which is the demerits that the Insurance Institute. of highway safety have given to cars for not having enough brightness. And those have gone down at roughly the same pace as relative brightness measured from the same point in a headlight.

So you kind of have this like counteractive effect on these graphs that sort of illustrate the same thing, which is that in general, car headlights coming off the lot are just more powerful. There's more light coming out of there and they're finding less incidences of cars not having enough light. Like that's just not happening anymore. Okay. So I want to let everyone know that in putting together this show, not only did we reach out to Nate to join us because he's done terrific reporting on this, we also reached out to 11 carmakers to get their view on are their headlights brighter, why, etc. Out of those 11, only three talk to us. They are Volkswagen,

Audi, and Subaru. So here's Jerry Wright. He is the vehicle technology. manager at Subaru. LED headlights are roughly 300% brighter than the old halogen bulbs we've used. There are 2,000 to 4,000 aluminums. The average halogen bulb is only about 1,000 luminance. So much brighter. Okay, so there's confirmation at least from Subaru, Nate. So take us back to, I guess, before 2015.

Is it simply the mass adoption of LEDs that has driven this? How did we get here? Well, first of all, I want to congratulate. you on getting three car companies to talk. That's a real accomplishment. Basically, the short answer is LEDs. They existed before 2015, but they weren't rapidly implemented, but that is really the big change that just turned the dial up rapidly very quickly. And as they've started to roll out, I mean, now most new cars have LEDs, like 80 percent or something like that. At first, there was sort of like a transitional phase.

And then the more of these have kind of rolled out in mass, now it's really starting to reach a fever pitch of people kind of feeling the effects of this transformation. At what point in time does the amount of light that they're producing, when put into a vehicle headlight, does it become actually a safety issue on the road? So you reached out to a couple of guys who run the bleep your headlights subreddit. Is that right?

Well, this is actually where my... whole journey with this started. I had posted something on X, Twitter, years ago, and I received a response from a moderator of this subreddit. And this is Paul Gatto. He's in his late 20s. He's an engineer in Newfoundland. And he was passionate about this. And as the subreddit shows, this is not about cars, really. This is about the way that regulations affect people or lack thereof. Exactly. Tell me a little bit more about Gatto and his co-conspirator, let me call that, in not the legal sense. They're very different from each other. His co-conspirator, if you will, is a man named Victor Morgan.

Victor lives in South Carolina, if I'm not mistaken. He's an engineer as well. And they kind of became, you know, a good cop, bad cop dynamic. Victor is more of the engineer type that would go and do the nitty-gritty and was doing measurements. And Paul was more the one that was refining messaging and making sure that the subreddit was focused and that they were trying to consolidate efforts, hence why he reached out to me. I don't think that they view this as the end-all be-all, but they view it as a good example of the type of things that are kind of falling apart as innovation outstrips regulation. And for Paul specifically, you know, he told me this story about his partner, his girlfriend, you know, having been hit by a cab when she was as a pedestrian.

And it motivated him, I guess, to sort of look into this car-centric world that we live in. I mean, he's in Canada, but it's very similar. And they're kind of subject to similar regulations. And, you know, he wanted to kind of understand how this is working and how it's not. Yeah. And that's where the subred it came from. So when we come back a little later in the show, we're going to come back to these two gentlemen and talk a little bit about the difference they're making, at least in raising this issue, if at all, and whether federal regulators are listening. So, ladies and gentlemen, as I said, we are talking about a major issue. And I'm not being tongue-in-cheek anymore.

It's real, as Nate said, about whether car headlights, vehicle headlights are just too bright in America now. So we'll have more in just a moment. This is on point. is Rebecca from Minneapolis. At the time I'm just driving blind, hoping something doesn't run in front of me. I just drive around with my bright lights on, otherwise I can't see. This is SCR in Denver. I'm a truck driver. Regulators have chastised American-made pickup truck companies several

times. In the 80s, 90s, early 2000s, auto manufacturers just, don't seem to care. It affects my profession. I'm hauling 80,000 pounds, you know, 40 tons. You don't want to blind me with your headlights. Let's move to Bozeman, Montana, and here's what Sarah told us. I get to commute to and from work in the winters, in the dark, and I drive my little Ford Focus to work, and I wear my company issued yellow tinted safety glasses because it really helps cut down on the glare on the flip side. I just received a brand new Ford F-150 to drive during work with super bright LED headlights. And there have been occasions where I'm in a rural area where there's no lights.

And these LED headlights are awesome. I hear you, Sarah. From the driver's point of view, it's great. But from other drivers who may be looking straight on, into the bright headlights of your Ford F-150, not so great. Okay, Nate, so now in the context of vehicle headlights, what does glare actually mean? Glare is a little different than just straight brightness. Glare is sort of more of a understanding of how much the light is in your eyes and causing

discomfort. Like there's like a scale almost, right? And at a certain point, there's like discomfort glare and then there's like glare that actually like causes, you know, safety issues. You can have a high glare incident, let's say, just from having high beams on you. And that's sort of, you know, high beams are obviously, they're illegal to drive, you know, when you're tailing or, you know, when you're near any sort of car, basically, you're not supposed to be using high beams. And the reason is because they're prone to glare people, because they're pointed up much higher. And that is sort of a good idea of what glare is. It's not

necessarily just the brightness, but it's also the direction of the light and how it's reaching you. But isn't glare an issue now even when people don't have their high beams on? One way that, you know, I look at it is that headlights have become so bright and so intense in the LED era that high beams almost seem like the same level of brightness. When you're behind the wheel of a car and you're almost trying to match the brightness of other cars, like I got to get on their level. And there's some logic to that, honestly, even though you know, you shouldn't be using

your high beams and they're even worse than most, you know, bright headlights in terms of glaring people. But I can see, you know, sometimes it's a little hard even to tell the difference on the road. Like, I've had arguments of people, is that high beams or is that just regular headlights? Yeah. And I think that's a good way to illustrate the whole issue. If you can't tell the difference between high beams and regular headlights, then, you know,

something's out of whack because they're supposed to be very defined difference. Very big difference. And I would say, I know right now a lot of people are probably saying, well, you know, there are a lot of pickup trucks and SUVs. There's like the number one selling vehicle in America. They're higher off the ground. So for folks in sedans, the lights from an oncoming SUV are more likely to be sort of directly in their line of sight, even without the high beams on.

But I even, I don't think I'm imagining this. Even when I'm behind the wheel and there's an oncoming sedan. Right. The lights seem way too bright. And I've like confirmed this a few times because I've seen people turn off their high beams, right? Like when they're coming over the crest of a hill, which is what they're supposed to do. But the lights are still really, really bright, Nate. I mean, have you observed that? Absolutely. Just to back up a little bit, LEDs are just a completely different type of technology than what, you know, headlights had been for, you know, since the dawn of cars. I don't know what they were using when there was like, you know, Model T's. But think about like an incandescent light bulb is not all that different from a halogen bulb in terms of halogen being what was the most common type of headlight before LEDs. And it's like a light bulb.

It goes out in all different directions, right? And that's really important in terms of trying to, you know, create regulations. The difference with LEDs, in addition to them being more. powerful and more actually energy efficient, which is great, is that they are more customizable. It's almost like LEDs are more like computer screens. They're pixelated. And so you can adjust it in a much more specific way, and that allows for much more compact points of light that can actually, you know, that are more likely to be problematic, let's say,

even in your sedan that's behind you. Okay. So here is John Lobesiger. He is manager for advanced safety technology and automated driving at Volkswagen Group of America. And he says that the amount of legally allowed brightness in vehicles sold in the United States is still the same, but of course it's this specific LED technology

and certain aspects of it that have changed. Many manufacturers have shifted to what we call a projector versus a reflector type system. And now we have smaller projectors that, depending on what type of system you're using, may exhibit more light, but with LED technology, we're able to put more light concentration into a smaller area. So this to me explains a lot, Nate. But it also makes me wonder, do they test for the impact on oncoming vehicles with these smaller, more precise, more powerful projectors? It depends on what you mean by they.

Oh, that's true. The manufacturers, let's start with them. The manufacturers. Well, the manufacturers actually don't really need to send their vehicles to be tested, so to speak. they have to self-attest to meeting NHTSA standards. And so when it comes to headlights, as a big rule, it's called 108. It's one of the larger entries in the giant NHTSA phone book that's out there.

They have to follow. And they, you know, their job is just to say, okay, this is what NHTSA says a headlight needs to do. It needs to be this bright and this point. and, you know, it needs to go be pointed in this way. And they say, yep, we did it. Sign off on it. And they send it out.

When's the last time that rule was updated? I believe it was 1986. Not necessarily updated in terms of, like, actual requirements as opposed to, like, suggestions. So, like, the last time it was like, you have to do this was 1986, which obviously is well, well before LEDs. So, 1986, this is really, really important because this gets to the heart of what your story talks about. this major gap, right, between regulation and where automobile technology is. So we also reached out to NHTSA. Of course, it's the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration

and asked them multiple times specifically if they were going to update this Rule 108, as you're saying, to include regulations around LEDs in headlights. They have not yet provided us with an answer. Did they provide you with any more detail when you did your reporting, Nate? Very little. I tried very hard to get them to talk to me. Obviously, they're the most important party in this. And, you know, they considered answering questions, and then they asked me to email questions,

and then I sent, you know, a pretty good list of questions via email, gave them a lot of time. You know, I was working on this for a long time. It wasn't a timing issue, let's say. And I got a statement back that didn't really answer anything specifically, but kind of provided a boilerplate answer of saying, you know, we believe that our regulations still work. And they also pointed to aftermarket LED conversion kits as being a problem, which I think is interesting because it's, you know, in such a broad conversation when there's so many things to talk about, that's what they they honed in on. But that absolutely is a factor. I mean, you've probably seen those on the road, especially like the light bars on top of trucks and stuff like that.

You know, that's definitely a factor. Yeah, but it can't explain. It can't explain all the cars that are just rolling off the dealership lots. It just doesn't. And hang on here for a second, Nate. Here's Victor in Highland, Wisconsin. He's also behind the wheel a lot. He says he regularly drives from one side of Wisconsin to another.

and his car is a 25-year-old Honda hybrid, low to the ground. I still travel at the Carter-era speed limit of 55. Unfortunately, for me, this seems to require many drivers to tailgate me, which puts their bright headlights directly in my mirrors. It forced me to permanently reset my mirrors to a much lower angle. And these pickups will have six headlights blasting at you. Why do they need to have six headlights on a pickup truck? It's just nuts.

Victor, I'm going to presume you're still going 55 for the peak fuel efficiency found at that MPH. Okay, here's Felicia in Dothan, Alabama. I had two Kia Souls in 2008 and 2013, and the light seemed normal, but it was my 2017 Kia Sportage that this trend was most noticeable. Sometimes oncoming cars would flash their high beams to let me know my brights are on, to which I'd flash my brights, letting them know they'd. were not. Thank you for that, Felicia. And here's Bo in Asheville, North Carolina. I believe part of the problem is also the angle of the headlights. It used to be when your car was

inspected annually, the angle of the headlight beams was measured for both the low and high beams. That doesn't seem to be happening anymore. I noticed the inspectors only check that your headlights are functioning properly, but they no longer check the angle of the low and high beams. And here's one more. Here's Pam. And she listens in Jacksonville, Florida. I spoke to my local car dealer about this the other day. And they said they had been required by, you know, the federal government to increase the brightness of their lights. And that all the new cars are that way.

Is Pam's dealer misleading her? Yeah, definitely. There's nothing, it hasn't gone up. the requirements have not changed, as it were. What the dealer could have been referring to is this incentive that car companies have, which is to make their lights have farther downroad punch, which is kind of a similar way of saying brighter, in order to get a safety rating, a good safety rating from the IHS,

the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety. They're a nonprofit, but they're a nonprofit, it, but they have a lot of say and they have a lot of influence, you know, like crash test dummy type tests. And the car makers really want to get a good safety rating. And so, you know, when I talk to someone from the IHS, you know, he said, yes, you know, more light seems to be better for us, so we give it a better rating. And so car companies are fighting to increase their brightness in some sense in order to get

that rating. So there is some motivation for them. Okay. But to be clear, it's not coming from the federal government, Pam, no matter what your dealer, your car dealer says, we're going to talk a lot more about some of the other aspects that are going into this increasing scourge of bright headlights on American streets and then also what to do about it. So so much more in just a moment. This is on point. Here's some more on point listeners who are sharing their on-road experiences and things that they're using to cope with dealing with those extremely bright lights, including glasses. I will wear sunglasses on top of my glasses.

I'm wearing sunglasses at night just to drive safely. I purchased night vision glasses for my entire family for Christmas. I drive with driving glasses on. I got us both a pair of those nighttime driving glasses that have the yellow tint. It's somewhat held. That's Israel in Los Angeles. Allison in Raleigh, North Carolina, Roy in Deer Harbor, Washington, and Ray in Charlottesville, Virginia. Nate, is it a good idea to even, I mean, wearing sunglasses on top of your glasses at night behind the way?

I'm no expert, but I think that's not a good idea. Yeah, but I will say this. it is there's sort of a pole that a bright light has, you know, when it's on you. It's like you're like a moth to a flame. It's hard to look away. And so I'm sympathetic because like sometimes you just feel like I need something to, I can't ignore it, you know. Now, you had mentioned something a little earlier, Nate, that's really important that in the United States, the safety testing is basically done in accordance with the standards set by the federal government. but it's done by the manufacturers.

And that's a long-standing system here. And most of the time it works. We've had some pretty bad exceptions to that, thinking of, well, actually this was an international scandal of the Volkswagen emissions scandal, for example. But it seems like there might be similar scandal in the world of headlights, because on an April 24 episode of the Carmodgin Show podcast, auto journalist Jason Camisa showed his co-host Derek Tamscott a picture. And the photo was of two car headlights shining on a wall. And you could see two dark spots in those beams of light. And according to Camisa, automakers put those dark spots into pass headlight brightness tests.

And he calls it light lighting gate or headlight gate. With complex arrays of LEDs and of optics, car companies. car companies realize they can now engineer in a dark spot where it's being measured, but the rest of the field is vastly over-illuminated. And I've had now two different car companies engineers when I played stupid and say, what's the dark spot? And their lighting engineers are all proud of themselves. That's where they measure the thing. And I'm like, you, you're the reason that every new car is blinding the out of everyone. Nate, have you heard about this?

Yeah, definitely. This was really important for me, I think, in terms of understanding some of the broad implications of what's going on. If there is a test that's measuring brightness and you are engineering the lights, you know, the LEDs to have these dark spots and where it's being measured and then blasting light, you know, every other direction, you know, you're dismissing the spirit of the law in order to follow the letter of the law. Yeah. And that's not altogether different from, you know, rigging a test. You know, you're basically saying, like, they're just going to test it right here, so we're going to, you know, knock it down right there, and then we get away with it. I mean, that's not the way the test is meant to be looked at. Make a better test, I'd say.

Making a better test, yeah, it's certainly, it's a little different than Dieselgate in that regard, but yeah, I think that's the point of kind of when Jason was saying, like, you know, what are we going to call his headlight gate? It's a little craven to do it that way. And that's not to say every light is like that. Right. But, you know, that image that he shows kind of speaks for itself. And I think it's in a broad sense, it does indicate kind of how LEDs are avoiding some of the regulations I used to restrict, you know, halogen headlights for being too bright.

Yeah. So, by the way, I should say once again that we did reach out to 11 car manufacturers, domestic and foreign. only three agreed to talk to us, Audi, Subaru, and Volkswagen, and they all denied that they do any kind of tampering with their headlight testing. And here specifically is John Loebseger, manager for advanced safety technology, and automated driving at Volkswagen Group of America. No, that is not something that we do. That becomes sort of a dangerous game because you have to account for,

well, what if you have lights spilling over into the test point? Or what if NHTSA test in the area that you have higher intensity? So we take compliance very seriously. We do not look for areas like that to, you know, stretch the intent of the regulation. NHTSA has a pretty antiquated, I would say, set of regulations that Rule 108. More stringent testing may come from the I-IH-S.

Did I get that right? IHS, yes. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. So here's Matthew Brumbolo. He is a principal research engineer at IIHS. And they are funded, by the way, by the auto insurance companies. And their stated goal is to reduce death and injury on the road. And in fact, in American driving history, if memory serves, we do have the IHS to thank for things like making car seatbelts the norm in the United States.

So they also happen to rate vehicle headlight safety and how they do is they drive cars on a test track using sensors to detect things like visibility and glare. Now that we've been doing the rating for nine years, we have real world data, and we do see that those with good visibility are in 19% fewer single vehicle nighttime crashes per mile than those with poor visibility.

What we don't have are, real world data showing how does glare change the number of crashes, risk of crashing. Here's Jerry Wright. He is a cross-carline function manager at Subaru. And he says it's actually tough for the manufacturers to balance limiting glare and meeting those safety rating standards. Unfortunately, sometimes to get these stars in these reports from Consumer Reports and IHS, we need brighter headlights. I don't know what the correct answer is to your question of what do we do? How do we do it? It's just like every other technology out there. We need to continue to work at it until we get it right. Okay, Nate. So a lot of people are saying that the way to solve

this isn't to make headlights less bright. It's to improve technology and perhaps make it, I don't know, mandatory across all cars sold in the United States, like automatic dimming systems. What do you think? I don't want to dismiss technology as being a potential great help. You know, car companies in particular are very keen on what's called like adaptive driving beam, which is when it has your high beams on is the way the system works. And then it senses when there's a car or a person and it automatically dims the high beams to not glare the people. And that's interesting as a concept, but I guess the critique of this that comes up, you're talking about the high beam, you know, it's not really adjusting the low beams that are already really bright that we're

spending most of this time talking about. So I guess what I would say is that some technology like that could be really helpful, you know, like if that was the way that it worked on the low beams, perhaps, that might be really great. And technology has saved a ton of lives, you know, in the history of auto safety, and the IHS has been behind a lot of that. But at the same time, you know, this number that is going around, this 19% reduction in single car nighttime crashes, it seems a little flawed in terms of looking at the bigger picture, which is that that number, you know, that only constitutes single car accidents that cars that are coming from the cars that have brighter headlights, have good safety ratings, which, as we know,

comes from having brighter lights. And what that means is that that car, you know, if you have really bright lights, you're less likely to be in an accident. It doesn't take into account how the bright lights are affecting other people. And that's the real tricky thing that no one has really been able to get really good data on is how does glare affect drivers. And it's not to say it. No one's saying it doesn't, but it's hard to, you know, like if you blind somebody in your

in your car and they go off the road. you keep driving and never know about it. So it's this hypothetical that no one hasn't been able to tackle. Okay. So this is what Mark Danky, he's with Audi of America, communications director there. Again, they're the last of the three car manufacturers who responded to our requests out of the 11. And, you know, he insists that making lights less bright is not the answer. And, you know, he likes the, or Audi prefers the,

the automatic dimming systems? The answer is not getting rid of bright light. It is to shade the light from oncoming traffic, but provide the maximum light for everyone. Because if everyone has maximum light, especially with an aging population and all these things, then it's helpful because you can just see better fundamentally. Yeah, there are moments when a car comes over a hill,

but frankly, you're not going to avoid that with any light. But Nate, to your point, we're talking about dimming, of high beams. So here's Linda Kimbrough in Portland, Oregon, and she's usually out walking her dog in the early morning when it's still dark out. So here's a pedestrian's point of view. I wear a build cap so that I can tip my head down and not be blinded by the lights. Some car manufacturers are also now putting in a new feature, I'll call it, they probably call it a feature. I'm not sure I do. Where the car identifies when they are approaching an oncoming car and the car automatically dims the lights.

That's fantastic. Except that doesn't help pedestrians at all. And here's Tessa in Newton, Massachusetts. Coming around a sharp corner and the oncoming car doesn't see me until it's already blinded me or coming over a rise where the same thing's happening, I get blinded and then they're dimmers. actually go down. I just don't understand how this got approved. Individual factors come back to what you started with in that LED technology came on the scene. It really was revolutionary. It transformed illumination of all kinds. Street illumination, car illumination, in-home illumination. But federal regulation regarding safety, I would say also, has not at all caught up with it.

And to that point, there's one more voice I want to play here, and you know him well. This is Mark Baker. He's the founder and president of the Soft Lights Foundation, which advocates for more regulation of LEDs, including in car headlights. He has an online petition called Ban Blinding Headlights. It's got some almost 69,000 signatures, and he wants automakers to take notice. When they went from circular headlights to rectangular headlights, there was a petition. It's approved it. So when they switched to this totally different technology, it's clear that they needed to

submit a petition, and they never did. NTSA just looked the other way and allowed it to occur. So now that we have tens of thousands of people have signed the petition, which puts the automakers on, notice that the headlight technology is defective and dangerous. They're going to get sued. Nate, what really needs to be done? If Nizza, for example, updated that Rule 108 to actually deal with what modern headlight technology is rather than relying on. on bulb emissions from 1986, would that, you know, be enough? Well, Magno, there's one thing to consider also, which is that, you know, you can't change anything overnight and you have like, you know, 15 years worth of LED cars already on the road

that are going to continue to exist and be blinding people when they don't work right or when they're just too bright in general. I think that, you know, it's very easy to kind of point to a variety of factors. LEDs, like alignment is really important. The color of the light, you know, our eyes are more sensitive to brighter, whiter and bluer lights, and that's what LEDs tend to come in. And, you know, there's all these little things, you know, after markets and, you know, just, if you want to approach it piecemeal, you can. But the way I view it is that this is a new

technology. And like any new technology, you know, there needs to be new regulations to accommodate it. And the most effective way to, you know, tackle this kind of thing would just be to say, you know, for NHTSA to be like, look, we need to update the brightness regulations in order to make sure that, you know, these headlights are just not, not so bright. that they can easily, you know, cause problems if they're at all wrong or even just if they're a little on off the lot, just too bright. And that's, you know, that may not be the way that they approach it, but it would certainly be the simplest and quickest way to look at it.

It's just like, all right, let's just tone it down, take a step back, and really think about what we want to do here going forward. Well. We've already made some mistakes clearly. I mean, I think catching up over a little bit at least over a 30 year gap in regulation and technology is a great place to start. So Nate Rogers, author of A Sleep at the Wheel in the Headlight Brightness Wars. It appeared in the ringer. Nate, thank you so much. And thank you to all our On Point listeners. I'm Megyn Chakrabardi. This is On Point. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes.

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