Today, Explained - Blinded by the headlights

Episode Date: March 30, 2025

Drivers and passengers are right: Car headlights are brighter now. And the solutions aren't simple. If you have a question for us, please give a call at 1-800-618-8545 or send a note at vox.com/askvox. This episode was produced and sound designed by Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Miranda Kennedy, fact checked by Melissa Hirsch, engineered by Patrick Boyd and hosted by Jonquilyn Hill. Photo by zhen li for Getty Images.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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and a 15-speaker bang and all-of-some premium sound system. The all-new ADX is crafted to be as alive to the world's possibilities as you are. The all-new ADX, crafted to match your energy. Acura, precision crafted performance. Learn more at Acura.com. Craft is where function meets style. It's where precision meets performance. It's where doing it yourself meets showing the world what you're capable of. The all-new Acura ADX is a compact SUV crafted to take you where you need to go without any compromises. With available Google built-in, all-wheel drive,

and a 15-speaker bang and all-of-some premium sound system, the all-new ADX is crafted to be as alive to the world's possibilities as you are. The all-new ADX, crafted to match your energy. Acura, precision crafted performance. Learn more at Acura.com. Nobody likes LED headlights. crafted performance. Learn more at Acura.com. easy to attain with a super bright light. Hey there, I'm JonGlenn Hill and this is Explain It To Me, where we answer the questions that matter to you most. What the heck is going on?

I wish I understood. Somebody please just explain it to me. And these days I only really get behind the wheel when I'm out of town. So when I noticed a change in cars on the road, I thought it was just me. But then we got a call from Reed and he also worried it was just him. Am I going crazy or does every new car on the road have the world's brightest headlights? I feel like whenever I'm driving at night now, I'm constantly having to shield or avert my eyes from people with giant flashlights

strapped to the front of their car. So I guess I'm wondering, why is this suddenly happening? And are there any limits? Can people just put whatever they want on the front of their car and blind everyone else? There's literally a subreddit dedicated to this, and there are even scientists who dedicate their time to setting it. Like John Bullo, a research scientist at the Light and Health Research Center at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. I'm not sure anybody has a dream of becoming a lighting scientist when they're a kid.

It actually started out as a summer job at the university where I went to school, and I actually thought it was the Lightning Research Center, which seemed a lot more exciting. I was a little disappointed when I learned it was lighting. But as I learned more about it, it really became something that was interesting to me about light that's all around us, and it affects not only the way we see but the way we sleep and a lot about our health and well-being and it hasn't gotten boring after 30 years. I'd love to get your thoughts on the question we got from our listener. Are headlights brighter than they used to be? Well there's two ways to answer that question but fortunately for your listener's sanity,

the answer is yes to both of those. The first way has to do with the color of LED headlights. You've probably noticed that a lot of them look a lot more of a bluish white compared to the yellowish white of halogen headlights. Can we please go back to the soft white headlights that they used to put in cars? Because I feel like now all these new LED headlights are like these bright blue blaring cold colored headlights. If you look at them too long you're gonna melt. And the way that we define light, the definition of light when we measure it, is actually over a hundred years old.

And it actually discounts a lot of the blue wavelengths, the blue part of the color spectrum. So in that sense, even though the light meter may say two headlights are equal, our eyes will see the LED bluish one as brighter. The second way to answer that question is to actually use the light meter and intensity of headlights have actually increased over the last 10 or 20 years. A halogen ball puts out around a thousand lumens. LEDs put out about four thousand lumens, so four times more. But there are some aftermarket lights that advertise an extreme 12,000 lumens. And does that include LED lights and non-LED lights that have gotten brighter or is it just these LED lights that are brighter?

It's actually both kinds of headlights. Both the halogen headlights and the LED headlights have increased in their luminous intensity. Headlights are getting brighter, they're getting smaller, and they're getting bluer. And all three of those things increase discomfort glare. We think about the reason we have headlights. They're not to create glare to other drivers. They're to help us see things along the road

so that we can avoid colliding with those. As we've paid more attention to headlights and their ability to provide visibility, it's become clear that they don't always do the best job. And so headlight intensities have actually been increasing in intensity in part because of things like the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety's safety ratings that when they first started coming out about 10 years ago,

were giving headlights pretty poor grades in terms of their ability to help us see things at night. When the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety first started evaluating headlights in 2016, We're giving headlights pretty poor grades in terms of their ability to help us see things at night. When the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety first started evaluating headlights in 2016, only two out of the 95 vehicles tested got the highest rating of good. About half of the models we tested don't have adequate headlights that provide enough visibility for the driver. Okay, so LED and non-LED lights are brighter, both low beam

and high beam. But for the purpose of this conversation, let's focus on LED lights. That's the industry standard, right? That's right. More than 90% of all new cars have LED headlights only. So halogen headlights are going to be going away pretty quickly. And LEDs are much more efficient than halogen headlights, so

they use less energy and that corresponds to fewer vehicle emissions and things like that. That's a good thing. But because they're more efficient, LED headlights can actually end up having more light and some of that light actually ends up in other drivers' eyes or in their rear view mirrors. Do you see these headlights? Ten times brighter than the sun. Are there other factors coming into play when we talk about the brightness of headlights and drivers? We're driving more pickup trucks and SUVs than we were in earlier years and so headlights have

gotten higher off the ground than they used to be. If you are a victim of these bright headlights, I apologize. I don't mean it. I can't do nothing if I buy the truck like that. And all the requirements for headlights are relative to the headlight itself. So that means headlights are pushing more light into the eyes of drivers, especially drivers who are driving passenger cars and sedans. Their eyes are lower to the ground and now they're looking at headlights that are higher mounted off the ground.

What's happening because it feels like everyone has their brights all up in my car. It looks like y'all got ring lights for your headlights. Another factor is the fact that low beam headlights are very sensitive to the way that they're aimed. And when you shine your lights on a garage door, for example, you see a broad horizontal band of light with a pretty dark area above and a bright area below. That bright area is supposed to be aimed slightly downward so that you're lighting up the road, which is what we want to see. If those headlights are even mis-aimed just a little bit upward, that bright band of light is now going to be shining into other drivers' eyes. And we've found that headlight aim, especially when they're pointed slightly upward, can really increase the amount of glare by a lot.

John, thank you so much for confirming that our listener, Reid, is not losing it. Yes, lights are indeed brighter than ever, but they're also appearing brighter than ever. We're going to say goodbye to John for now, but when we're back, we'll find out who's responsible for these bright lights. This is Advertiser Content from Mercury. Hey, I'm Josh Muccio, host of The Pitch, a Vox Media podcast where startup founders pitch real ideas to real investors.

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["Blinded by a Light"] We're back. It's Explain It To Me. Looking at why headlights are so bright these days. It's a question that's literally tormented our next guest, Mark Baker. He says that his intense experience with headlights led him to a diagnosis of mild autism and changed his life. He now runs an organization to protect people from the impacts of LEDs, the Soft Lights Foundation.

How did you get involved in this? Like what inspired you to, you know, take this up? It's not really like an inspiration. It was more like a disaster. So I used to be a middle school math teacher. And when these LED headlights started coming out, I remember vividly this new thing appeared, the Cadillac. And they had daytime running lights.

I was assaulted by this LED light that I'd never seen anything like it before. And it was a white light, but some kind of a weird intensity that felt like it's indescribable, really, it sort of looks like a hot oven, but with a blue color to me. And it was really emotionally disturbing. So those headlights and other LED lights knocked me out of being a teacher, I just I couldn't get to work anymore without suffering these impacts, these neurological, psychological impacts. So many people don't see it,

but other people can actually consciously see it. So they're driving around seeing flicker, flicker, flicker, flicker. And that's of course really disturbing. I understand you've had quite a few people sign a petition about this. Could you talk about that a little bit? I would love to. We've notified the government. They have copies of this petition. But just

recently we exceeded 70,000 signatures. Wow. So we have thousands of comments and they talk about their astigmatism and how the light impacts their astigmatism. They talk about how they can't see. They talk about how they stopped driving at night. They're begging us to do something about the problem, begging anybody to do something. Yeah. Does it seem the government is paying attention?

The government is not paying attention. So we're getting more and more aggressive. We are pushing. We've been doing this for a long time already. So we've developed expertise on how this all worked. The Soft Lights Foundation has submitted multiple regulatory petitions, formal petitions to the government. Some have been just flat out denied.

I have two petitions in there right now. One to set the limit on maximum intensity, which right now there's no overall limit on maximum intensity. It can be as intense as they want. In fact, I do have a lawsuit. I filed it by myself. It's against the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Food and Drug Administration together, because there is a statute that requires the FDA and the NHTSA to establish a liaison and test and evaluate products that emit electromagnetic radiation. That includes LED headlights.

They don't want to. They are fighting my lawsuit, and so I'm trying to compel them to do their job. Marks also lobbied Congress to get a hearing on the impact of LED headlights, and he's tried working with state legislatures to pass light intensity laws. But he has as of yet to score a W for all his efforts. So how did we get here? We reached out to Nate Rogers, who explored all this in his extensive article for The Ringer, called, A Sleep at the Wheel in the Headlight Brightness Wars. So LEDs are new technology that took over pretty much everything in the lighting world in the last 15 years. It's just sort of arguably the biggest change in lighting technology since like, you know, they first fired up an incandescent light bulb. It's taking the

traditional form of a light bulb, which is sort of like one source of light that emits in every direction and replacing it with something that's more akin to like a computer chip. So you can really like program the different chips, which almost function like pixels or something. And it's more energy efficient, it lasts longer. It was a total sea change in the lighting world when LEDs came out and over time, they've started to replace pretty much everything

and that includes car headlights. Why did car manufacturers make that switch in the first place? There's a lot of answers for that and the shortest one is just that LEDs are kind of the future. But one really concrete reason that car companies like LEDs is that they are very much in search of getting a good safety rating from this nonprofit called the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety, the IIHS. They're a nonprofit that is funded by the insurance companies.

They all kind of pool in together. That's sort of like when you hear about crash test dummies. Even with airbags, Vince, you still got to remember to buckle your safety belt. Now you tell me a lot of that is like the IHS and they the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety have deemed brighter headlights to be advantageous to getting a good safety rating. So if you're to getting a good safety rating. So if you're trying to get that safety rating, you want to pump more light down the road, and the way to pump more light down the road is through more powerful LEDs.

So that's an important reason why car companies favor them. But who ensures that LED lights are actually safe? NHTSA. That's the National Highway Traffic Safety Association. They are the federal highway safety czars. They are the ultimate authority. Any car that is driving on the road has to meet NHTSA standards. It's hard to say exactly what they're doing on a day-to-day basis. They're kind of mysterious.

They did not wanna talk to me for the story that I did. They actually told me at one point to stop emailing their employees. But I think that it's a government agency. It's not some vast conspiracy. They probably are just busy doing other stuff. And clearly in the last 15 years since LED headlights have started to roll out, they have not been a priority for NHTSA. They haven't changed the rulebook to accommodate

LED headlights, which people are seeming to agree now was an oversight because of how different the technology is. It seems like, you know, they're paying attention to the regulations, they're doing something, but they're not doing any more than they really have to or, you know, as of now need to do. Does this mean that bright headlights aren't a safety issue, the fact that they're not being regulated more? This is the million dollar question because, you know, common sense will tell you that headlights that are really bright, like let's imagine that you're driving down the road and the car's coming the other way and the headlights get in your eyes and they're really

bright and you're struggling to see, that's an obvious safety issue. I mean, it doesn't, it's not disputed that headlight glare is a safety issue that is important. The question is how much of a danger is it and how can you measure that? Because with a government agency like NHTSA, you need hard data, you need proof. And when you're trying to measure, so like one study that gets pointed out is that the IIHS, they said that there was a like 20% reduction in car accidents with cars that have good safety ratings for their headlights, right? Basically, the short version is, it's really hard to measure something that's tied in as intrinsically with everything else in the way that the highway

operates. And without that strict measurement of how dangerous car headlight brightness is, you know, it seems that NHTSA is a little stuck and a little unsure about how to approach it, how to gauge it and how to fix it. Yeah. And you know, NHTSA is not the only player here. There's also car manufacturers. How are they responding? Because it sounds like their customers are not happy. Yeah, it's really interesting.

Car manufacturers at any time could make headlights that were, you know, a little bit less bright, but still fit the rule book of what NHTSA requires for a safe level of brightness. They could dial it back at any time, any of these car companies could. And they could market that, and maybe that would work. But for whatever reason, they don't do it. And the car companies, their number one goal is to sell cars. And whatever makes sense for that is why, you know, they make the decisions that they do, generally speaking. Like NHTSA was created because car companies

were not prioritizing safety in cars. So, you know, it's a shame that car companies can't be relied upon to fix this issue on their own. And, you know, when you try to speak to them, they don't even really acknowledge it. Like I reached out to like probably about a dozen car companies. Only got an interview with one. I think maybe two or three also responded and said, no, you know, and they're and

they're just never heard from. That's writer Nate Rogers. If regulators and car companies aren't taking action, is there anything we can do to avoid getting blinded on the roads? One more break and we'll find out. McDonald's new cheesy jalapeno and bacon quarter pounder with 100% Canadian beef is here. So if you crave beefy burgers with a pretty peppery punch and pickled jalapeno peppers

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told me the worst offenders actually aren't new cars. Well, you know, there are certainly really bright lights in a lot of new cars, but if you look at the Reddit forums and other places where people are complaining, a lot of these complaints are actually coming from aftermarket headlights. So we're seeing a lot of aftermarket retrofit kits

for older cars, particularly on larger trucks, many of which are not legal. And the result of that is incredibly blinding incredibly bright headlights, which can be pretty annoying and frankly damaging at some point to other people's eyes. OK, I want to get some clarity because you're blowing my mind a little bit here.

So if I get a car with these headlights, it's not an accident. Like I have to actively choose to get these bright ass headlights. It definitely depends on the model, certainly higher end newer models, that kind of thing do come with super bright headlights. We see a lot of bright LED technology, that kind of thing,

but most modern cars do include brighter headlights, LEDs built in. But when you're talking about older cars, cars that maybe came out 10 or 15 years ago, at that point, that's kind of an active thing where a lot of owners are replacing maybe broken headlights or they want something brighter that's maybe comparable to a more modern car. And they're going out to Amazon or eBay or somewhere else and buying aftermarket retrofit kits, which may or may not be legal. And they do result in brighter lights for you, the driver, but they can be pretty painful for everybody else. Yeah.

Speaking of everyone else, is there anything we can do to get these modified lights dimmed? It's really a question of enforcement. A lot of states like Michigan, for example, they don't have any kind of annual inspection at all. So at that point, it just becomes an issue for the police to basically pull someone over if they think that someone's headlights are too bright. And that's asking a lot of our law enforcement officers out there. So, you know, there are a lot of very strict defining rules when it comes to

new vehicles coming on the road, that kind of thing. But for older vehicles, you know, people who are either maintaining or modifying them, it's really hard to actually enforce that people are doing these things and doing them in a legal, safe way. A constant refrain we've heard working on this episode is that there's difficulty regulating and car manufacturers aren't exactly, you know, springing into action. Is there an effort to develop technology that could successfully dim these LED headlights? So we've seen technologies to address that auto dimming headlights is one of the kind of most common things that we see these

days where a car will basically detect if there's an oncoming car, and automatically go from high beam to low beam. The problem is a lot of the early implementations of this technology were pretty bad, particularly on Tesla cars, for example. I used to have a Tesla Model S, and it was so bad at identifying other cars.

It would just leave the headlights on full blast for way too long, and I would have other people flashing me all the time, and I felt awful because the car was just really bad at identifying other people and dropping those headlights down. So that technology is getting better, but really I think the better solution is kind of coming down the road. We're just sort of starting to see that now, which is what's called an adaptive beam headlights or an active matrix headlight, which is kind of a much more advanced technology.

It really gets rid of the old high beam, low beam paradigm. But that really could change things quite a bit. Can you tell us more about that adaptive beam technology? Is it successful? How does that work? Yeah, it's pretty exciting stuff. So basically, since the dawn of cars, pretty much, we've had a high beam and a low beam.

When there's nobody else around, you flip on the high beams. It lights everything up. Everything's great. And when you are maybe in town or there's a car ahead of you or oncoming, you flip down to the low beam, which lowers your headlights down. Typically that's from two sets of bulbs, two sets of reflectors, completely separate headlight system. And you're flipping from one to the other. When you switch to a more modern advanced or active matrix headlight system with an adaptive beam system, something like that, you're kind of getting rid of that differentiation. And now basically everything is on all the time. You're shooting out a lot of light in a lot of different directions,

but now the car is advanced enough to be able to identify oncoming traffic, pedestrian, cyclists, and it can basically individually dim individual portions of the headlights to block out those things that would be blind to other people. So think of it like an advanced monitor on HDTV, that kind of thing. We have portions of the display that are bright white and portions that are black. It's the same basic idea. You've got a bunch of small LEDs and mirrors in your headlights now, which can block out individual portions of light.

So you can have basically the high beams on all the time. But if there's someone standing in front of you, that portion of the light will be turned off so they won't see anything. It's really remarkable technology. And as is the case with many cool things in cars, it's been available in Europe and in the rest of the world for quite a few years. It's only been made legal in the US since 2022.

But because it takes a long time for auto manufacturers to bring new technology to market, it's takes a long time for auto manufacturers to bring new technology to market, it's still taking some time for them to be able to bring these new headlights to the American market. So that technology is really promising. That'll mean we can have really bright, really amazingly high tech headlights, but theoretically without the glare. But again, it's only going to be on the newest and highest end car.

So it's going to be a long time before we see those really on the majority of cars on the road. Okay. In the meantime, while we're waiting for that to happen, are there things we can do when we're driving at night, if we're struggling to see with those bright lights? From a car that's coming directly at you, the advice that I've got is to look at the, the white line on the side of the road off to the right of your fender. As you're driving ahead, basically that allows you to keep an eye of where your

car is going, going, but without looking directly at the headlights. I think that's the safest place that you can look at. But there is some technology that is much more available on modern cars now, which will help for really bright lights coming up from behind you. There are camera-based rear view mirrors that are getting to be more common, particularly in larger SUVs and trucks. Where basically instead of having a traditional mirror to look backwards, you now have a camera pointing backwards.

And when you flip the little switch on the bottom of the rear view mirror, it actually pops over to basically integrated LCD that's built into the mirror. So instead of having the reflection of the lights coming at you, you're looking at a camera feed and that camera feed can block out those really bright headlights. Well, Tim, thank you so much for that. Yeah, you're welcome. I'm happy to help. Remember John Below, who ended up having and loving a job no kid dreams of, being a lighting scientist? I asked him what solutions he'd suggest for the bright lights problem too.

There are LED lights that are a warm white color that would look very similar to halogen lights, and they would be much more comfortable to look at at night. So that's one possibility. Another possibility, and something we probably should pay more attention to, is the aim of our headlights. Headlight aim is something that some states, but not most, actually require as part of their

safety inspections. So, you know, drivers could ask their mechanic once a year to have their headlight aim checked and to adjust it if needed. Is there any chance that we could get something from federal regulators that all automakers would be required to do across the country? Yes, the Federal Department of Transportation is very interested in the glare question. They've been getting a lot of complaints from the public in the last 20 to 30 years about glare specifically. And so they have been looking into what might be done. Certainly, what could be done is some upper limits on the overall intensity

from low beam headlights. That's one possibility. Maybe some restrictions on the height of headlights, heights on vehicles is another possibility. So there are some things that could be integrated into regulations to help reduce the glare issue. Before we go, we wanted to go back to Mark Baker, the guy who says he was so incapacitated by headlights that he had to quit his job. He's obviously thought a lot about helping people avoid being triggered by overly bright headlights. So, there are basically techniques for survival. You can get blue blocker type glasses with a yellow tint or an orange tint.

It does help the glare, so they can try that. But it's really sort of not safe because the way LED light is, it's a directional light, it's very intense. And I've tried them myself. I basically can't see, so I don't use them. And so the empowerment comes from our listeners contacting the government, joining up with the Soft Lights Foundation, contacting me, getting involved, and let's fix this systemic problem. and let's fix this systemic problem. Thanks so much to Mark Baker and all our car and lighting experts who helped us answer Reid's question today. We're making a show soon about post high school graduation blues.

If you have a question about those next steps, give us a call at 1-800-618-8545. This episode was produced and sound designed by Hadi Mawagdi. It was edited by Miranda Kennedy, it was fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, and Patrick Boyd was our engineer this week. I'm your host, John Glen Hill. Talk to you soon. Bye!