Why are headlights brighter than they used to be?

This rebroadcast originally aired February 7, 2025.

Editor's Note: On Point reached out to 11 car companies for this show. Ford, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Nissan, Stellantis, Toyota, and Volvo all either declined our interview request or didn’t respond.

On Point also asked the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for an interview. They declined and asked us to submit questions via email. As of 10 a.m. ET on February 7, 2025, NHTSA had not yet responded to our emailed questions.

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.

How did this happen? And can we fix it?

Nate Rogers, writer. Author of The Ringer piece “Asleep at the Wheel in the Headlight Brightness Wars."

Jerry Wright, vehicle technology manager at Subaru.

John Lobsiger, manager for advanced safety technology and automated driving at Volkswagen Group of America's vehicle safety office.

Matthew Brumbelow, senior research engineer at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

Mark Dahnke, communications director at Audi of America.

Mark Baker, founder and president of the Soft Lights Foundation.

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Ladies and gentlemen. We found it. Even in these divided times, we have found the one thing most Americans can agree on. Those vehicle headlights are too damn bright!

(LISTENER MONTAGE)

CHRIS: Oh my gosh.

BO: Finally, someone's bringing this up.

BETSY: I thought I was the only one.

RAE: I thought something was wrong with my eyes.

PATRICIA: I did not know there's a place I can go to complain about this.

GABRIEL: My wife says I talk about so much that it's kind of like Grandpa Simpson like shaking his fist at the cloud.

VICTOR: Why do they need to have six headlights on a pickup truck? It's just nuts!

DEJA: Obnoxiously bright.

AARON: Geez!

VICTORIA: It's like alien abduction levels of brightness.

LINDA: The streets are like traveling Christmas trees.

BO: The same effect as you would if you looked into the sun briefly.

SHARON: They absolutely blind me.

LYNN: Totally blinding.

REBECCA: Blind.

TESSA: Blinded.

ROBERT: Blinded.

MATTHEW: Not to see the lines, the lanes, even for a split second.

PAM: I've had to slow down to 30 or 40 miles an hour.

RICARDO: Drive with my head tilted to the side.

KRISTIN: Eat carrots and other orange fruits and vegetables before I drive at night to make my vision better.

KATHLEEN: I've considered wearing sunglasses, although I'm not sure that's legal.

CHELSEE: It drives me insane, gives me road rage.

NANCY: The yellow-colored car headlights worked fine back in the day.

JUAN: The Highway Transportation Safety Institute, or whatever the hell it is, have done a (BLEEP) poor job of controlling this.

CHAKRABARTI: This is On Point. I’m Meghna Chakrabarti. And that was you, headlight blinded listeners from across the United States — Alabama, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, 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.

Is that even possible, Nate?

NATE ROGERS: 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.

CHAKRABARTI: And a very excellent article, I should say. And that article is “Asleep at the Wheel in the Headlight Brightness Wars." It appeared a little while ago in The Ringer and I ran into it, and I was like immediately 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 vehicles in the United States than they were I don't know, 10, 15 years ago.

ROGERS: It sounds like a simple question and 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. Every headlight is a little different. They're all designed differently. Your angle is really important. There's all these different factors that make it hard to exactly pinpoint brightness. But at the same time, think about it. We wouldn't be having this conversation if it wasn't true. 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.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Okay. So I'm looking at the article that you wrote in The Ringer. And by the way, we're going to dig into all those other factors that you talked about, angle, glare, et cetera.

But you do have this chart from data that's from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. It's publicly available data. And it, on the Y axis, it says brightness in cd. What's the cd unit?

ROGERS: It's Candela. So there's various ways to measure brightness and that's part of the trickiness of this conversation.

There's another chart in the story that might be a little bit easier to process in comparison. Or working with the Candela brightness levels, 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 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 brightness.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, sticking with the actual brightness chart, just so that people know, in 2015, IIHS reported that the bright, average headlight brightness was 9,000 candela. By 2025, it rises to above 19,000. So that's a lot. We're going to talk about relatively what that means. But 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 car makers, both domestic and foreign, 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.

JERRY WRIGHT: LED headlights are roughly 300% brighter than the old halogen bulbs we've used. They're 2,000 to 4,000 lumens. The average halogen bulb is only about 1,000 lumens. Much brighter.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so there's confirmation at least from Subaru, Nate. So take us back to before 2015. Is it simply the mass adoption of LEDs? That has driven this. How did we get here?

ROGERS: First of all, I want to congratulate you on getting three car companies to talk. That's a real accomplishment.

I, yeah, 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 once, as they've started to roll out, now most new cars have LEDs, like 80% or something like that.

And at first, there was like a transitional phase and then the more of these have rolled out in mass, now it's really starting to reach a fever pitch of people feeling the effects of this transformation.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, and overall, LEDs are great, actually, right?

Because their strength is that they produce so much light for a fraction of the energy consumed. So that's not the issue here. But I guess the issue is, 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?

To that point Nate, can you just explain to us, you reached out to a couple of guys who run a subreddit ... if this was just a podcast and not a broadcast, I would actually be able to say the full name of this subreddit, but I'm going to just call it the Bleep Your Headlights subreddit.

Is that right?

ROGERS: Yeah, we got to be careful with that one. Bleep Your Headlights. Let's do that. Sure.

CHAKRABARTI: Tell us about this subreddit and who these guys are.

ROGERS: This is actually where my whole journey with this started. Because, like I said, I was one of these people who was just going around complaining about this.

I think a lot of my friends think it's funny that I've turned into a headlight journalist because I was talking their ear off about this at night, driving in cars for a long time. I had posted something on X, Twitter, years ago, I think, at this point. And I received a response from a moderator of this subreddit.

And which shall not be named. And this is Paul Gatto. He founded it and he's a young, he's in his late 20s. He's an engineer in Newfoundland and he was passionate about this and wanted to talk to me. Because he's trying to get more media attention on this issue of headlights that he feels really passionate about.

And as the subreddit shows, there's a lot of people that feel the same way. And he was right. There was a story there and I started talking to him just casually, we got on Zoom and got to know each other a little bit and I was like, there's a story here because, this is not about cars, really.

This is about the way that regulations affect people or lack thereof.

CHAKRABARTI: Exactly. Tell me a little bit more about Gatto and his co-conspirator, let me call that, in not the legal sense. They also sound just like really interesting individuals.

ROGERS: They are. They are very interesting individuals.

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 met each other online, as it were, putting together this subreddit. And they became a good cop, bad cop dynamic.

And Victor's 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.

And they, I don't think that either of them are super, 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 falling apart as innovation outstrips regulation. And for Paul specifically, he told me this story about his partner, his girlfriend, having been hit by a cab when she was, as a pedestrian and it being a very difficult process for her, obviously and it motivated him to look into this kind of car centric world that we live in.

He's in Canada, but it's very similar and they're subject to similar regulations as we are. And he wanted to understand how this is working and how it's not. And that's where the subreddit came from.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Nate, I've got to give voice to more of our listeners because as I said, this was just like by far the number one show that we've got responses for. So let's listen to a bunch of them. This is Rebecca from Minneapolis.

REBECCA: I am a courier. Most of the time, I'm just driving blind, hoping something doesn't run in front of me because it's impossible.

I just drive around with my bright lights on, otherwise I can't see.

CHAKRABARTI: So Rebecca's one of the people who called us, who actually, her job keeps her on the road a lot. Here's a couple more. This is SCR in Denver.

SCR: 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. 40 tons. You don't want to blind me with your headlights.

CHAKRABARTI: That's SCR in Denver, Colorado, and here's Aaron in Redmond, Washington. He's a truck driver, and he says the bright lights are worse when he's driving in his car than when he's high up in the cab of his truck.

AARON: A few years back when this started happening, I was flashing people. Of course, it's illegal to flash people in Washington state, but I did it a couple times. And until I realized it was against the law, these people, they get away with driving with their lights so bright. And I heard that the reason being was that it's not the amount of looms, it's the color of the light that's doing it.

That's how they get away with it. Shouldn't be rights. Somebody's slacking on the job, allowing that to happen.

CHAKRABARTI: Let's move to Bozeman, Montana, and here's what Sarah told us.

SARAH: 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!

CHAKRABARTI: 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 into that, the bright headlights of your Ford F-150, not so great.

Okay, Nate, so I would like to spend a few minutes with you really digging in layer by layer of all the things that go into our perception of headlight brightness. Let's start with the one that Sarah talked about, glare, now in the context of vehicle headlights, what does glare actually mean?

ROGERS: Glare is a little different than just straight brightness, glare is more of a understanding of how much the light is in your eyes and causing discomfort, like there's a scale almost, right? And at a certain point there's discomfort glare, and then there's like glare that actually like causes safety issues.

And you can get a high glare you can have a high glare incident, let's say, just from having high beams on you. And high beams are obviously, they're illegal to drive ...  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 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.

CHAKRABARTI: So I have to say, Nate gosh, I think it was about eight years ago. On Point, we actually did this exact show, okay.

Headlines are too bright, but it was eight years ago, so we didn't actually have at that time all the more recent data that is in your piece from IIHS, for example. And at that time, the experts that we had on just said, it's all a glare issue. And he was like, it's because so many people are just reinstalling, or they're installing new headlights into their cars.

They're putting them in at the wrong angle. That's the problem. And I walked away from that hour being like, I feel stupid. Like how, I can't be imagining like millions of Americans are actually the cause of their own headlights being brighter. This is why when I saw your story, I was like, we have to do this again, because now we have data.

My next question about the glare, though, is that, yeah, when you have your high beams on, obviously you are changing the angle of the light, which is why it's shining more directly into oncoming driver's eyes. But isn't glare an issue now, even when people don't have their high beams on?

ROGERS: Definitely, and that's, I think, why you're seeing more high beam usage. This is this is something that I hadn't really seen people figure out, and that I wanted to understand, which is why people were using their high beams more often, I think it's most people understand that you're not supposed to do it, but people are doing it a lot anyway, and there are a couple of different potential explanations for that, but one way that 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.

And so both, 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 shouldn't be using your high beams, and they're even worse than most bright headlights, in terms of glaring people, but I can see, sometimes it's a little hard even to tell the difference on the road.

Like I've had arguments with people, is that high beams or is that just regular headlights? 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 something's out of whack, because there's supposed to be very defined difference.

CHAKRABARTI: Very big difference. And I would say, I know right now a lot of people are probably saying there are a lot of pickup trucks and SUVs are 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 directly in their line of sight, even without the high beams on, point taken on all of that, but I even, again, 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, even when their high beams aren't on. And I've 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 bright, Nate. Have you observed that?

ROGERS: Absolutely. I think, this goes back to what we're talking about with LEDs, which, basically, they have a smaller margin for error, let's say. You can have really bright lights that are pointed down, and they're unlikely to cause problems, but as these headlights have gotten more powerful, let's just to back up a little bit, LEDs are just a completely different type of technology than what headlights had been for, since the dawn of cars. I don't know what they were using when there was like, Model T's.

But it's been a relatively tame technology until LEDs came out. Think about incandescent light bulb is not all that different from a halogen bulb in terms of Halogen being what was most common type of headlight before LEDs. And it's like a light bulb.

It goes out in all different directions. And that's really important in terms of trying to 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, that are more likely to be problematic, let's say, even in your sedan that's behind you.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay to that point, again, we reached out to 11 car manufacturers, foreign and domestic, and only three of them got back to us. Audi, Subaru, and Volkswagen. And here is John Lobsiger. 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.

JOHN LOBSIGER: 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.

CHAKRABARTI: 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?

ROGERS: It depends on what you mean by they.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, that's true. The manufacturers, let's start with them.

ROGERS: The manufacturers. The manufacturers, they 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, there's a rule, there's a big rule. It's called 108. That is, a very, it's one of the larger entries in the giant NHTSA phone book that's out there they have to follow.

And their job is just to say, okay, this is what NHTSA says headlight needs to do. It needs to be this bright and this point, and 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.

CHAKRABARTI: When's the last time that rule was updated?

ROGERS: I believe it was 1986 and 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, before I was born.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. It was only a little bit after I was born. But we actually, so 1986, this is 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.

Specifically, regarding the headlights and the potential dangers there. 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.

And they, as of this broadcast today, they have not yet provided us with an answer. Did they provide you with any more detail when you did your reporting, Nate?

ROGERS: Very little. I tried very hard to get them to talk to me. Obviously, they're the most important party in this. And they considered answering questions, and then they asked me to email questions, and then I sent a pretty good list of questions via email.

Gave them a lot of time. 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 provided a boilerplate answer of saying, 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 in such a broad conversation when there's so many things to talk about, that's what they honed in on.

But that absolutely is a factor. You've probably seen those on the road, like especially the light bars on top of trucks and stuff like that. That's definitely a factor.

CHAKRABARTI: 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. I'm Meghna Chakrabarti. This is On Point. Because I'm so grateful for our listeners in affirming my not hallucinations here. I want to give them more of a say. So 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's a 25-year-old Honda Hybrid, low to the ground.

VICTOR: 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.

CHAKRABARTI: 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.

FELICIA: I had two Kia Souls in 2008 and 2013, and the lights 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 were not.

CHAKRABARTI: Thank you for that, Felicia. And here's Bo in Asheville, North Carolina.

BO: 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.

CHAKRABARTI: And here's one more. Here's Pam. And she listens in Jacksonville, Florida.

PAM: I spoke to my local car dealer about this the other day, and they said they had been required by the federal government to increase the brightness of their lights, and that all the new cars are that way.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, Nate, we've only got about a minute till our next break, but is Pam's dealer misleading her?

ROGERS: Yeah, definitely. There's nothing, it hasn't gone up, the requirements have not changed as it were. But there has been what the dealer could have been referring to, is this incentive that car companies have, which is to make their lights have farther down road punch, which is a similar way of saying brighter.

In order to get a safety rating, a good safety rating from the IIHS, the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety. They're a non-profit, but they have a lot of say and they have a lot of influence, like crash test dummy type tests and the car makers really want to get a good safety rating.

And as I, when I talked to someone from the IIHS, he said yes, 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.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: 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.

(MONTAGE)

ISRA: I will wear sunglasses on top of my glasses. I'm wearing sunglasses at night just to drive safely.

ALISON: I purchased night vision glasses for my entire family for Christmas.

ROY: I drive with driving glasses on.

RAE: I got us both a pair of those nighttime driving glasses that have the yellow tint. It somewhat helps.

CHAKRABARTI: That's Isra in Los Angeles, Alison in Raleigh, North Carolina, Roy in Deer Harbor, Washington, and Rae in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Nate, there's a lot more I want to get through, but I'm just going to give you a quick second.

Is it a good idea to even, wearing sunglasses on top of your glasses at night behind the wheel?

ROGERS: I'm no expert, but I think that's not a good idea. Yeah, but I will say this. It is, there's a pull that a bright light has, when it's on you, it's like you're like a moth to a flame, and 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.

CHAKRABARTI: And one thing that I do is, sometimes it's not so much, the oncoming traffic, that's the problem, because there might be a barrier in between the lanes. It's the folks behind me, right? And so my side view mirror is reflecting, by design, the light directly into my eye. That's what the mirror's supposed to do.

And so I just have to put my hand up and literally block the reflection of the lights from behind me. 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 actually this was an international scandal, of the Volkswagen emissions scandal, for example, but seems like there might be similar scandal in the world of headlights because on an April 2024 episode of the Carmudgeon Show podcast, auto journalist Jason Cammisa showed his co-host Derek Tam-Scott 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 Cammisa, automakers put those dark spots in to pass headlight brightness tests. And he calls it lighting-gate or headlight-gate.

CAMMISA: With complex arrays of LEDs and of optics, 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 [expletive] proud of themselves. Ha! That's where they measure the [expletive]. And I'm like, you're the reason that every new car is blinding out of everyone.

CHAKRABARTI: Nate, have you heard about this?

ROGERS: Yeah, definitely. This was really important for me, I think, in terms of understanding some of the broad implications of what's going on. Like I said, I may not be an auto journalist by trade, but Jason certainly is. He's serious and he knows what he's talking about, and he has connections.

And I think the point of, comparing it to Dieselgate. It's not to say it's necessarily on the same level. Obviously, emissions are, that was a huge global implication of what was going on with rigging emissions tests. But the point is that if there is a test that's measuring brightness and you are engineering the lights, the LEDs, to have these dark spots and where it's being measured and then blasting light, every other direction, you're dismissing the spirit of the law in order to follow the letter of the law.

And that's not altogether different from rigging a test. You're basically saying 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. That's not the way the test is meant to be looked at.

CHAKRABARTI: Make a better test, I'd say.

ROGERS: 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, when Jason was saying what are we going to call this headlight-gate? It's a little craven to do it that way. And that's not to say that every light is like that, but that image that he shows speaks for itself.

And I think in a broad sense, it does indicate how LEDs are avoiding some of the regulations that used to restrict halogen headlights from being too bright.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. By the way, I should say, once again, that we did reach out to 11 car manufacturers, domestic and foreign.

Only 3 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 Lobsiger, Manager for Advanced Safety Technology and Automated Driving at Volkswagen Group of America.

LOBSIGER: No, that is not something that we do.

That becomes a dangerous game because you have to account for, well, what if you have light spilling over into the test point, or what if it's a test in the area that you have higher intensity. So we take compliance very seriously. We do not look for areas like that to stretch the intent of the regulation.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so that's at least what Volkswagen says. I also just want to talk, go back a little bit to the testing and who's requiring it. As you had said earlier, Nate, that NHTSA has a pretty antiquated, I would say, set of regulations that Rule 108, more stringent testing may come from the IIHS.

Did I get that right? IIHS.

ROGERS: You got that right. It's a mouthful.

CHAKRABARTI: The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. So here's Matthew Brumbelow. 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 IIHS 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 it is they drive cars on a test track using sensors to detect things like visibility and glare.

MATTHEW BRUMBELOW: 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.

HAKRABARTI: Okay, so Brumbelow there identifying something good, that greater visibility makes things ostensibly a little more safe, but they don't actually have real world data on glare. 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.

WRIGHT: Unfortunately, sometimes to get these stars in these reports from consumer reports and IIHS, 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 every other technology out there. We need to continue to work at it till we get it right.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, Nate. 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?

ROGERS: I would say that, it's, let me put it this way, if, I don't want to dismiss technology as being a potential great help, car companies in particular are very keen on what's called like adaptive driving beam, which is when, it already exists in Europe and it's trying to be rolled out in the U.S. but it's been slow and hasn't, they haven't been able to do it quite yet, on any kind of major level. And it basically would, 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 that has honestly been a little slow to make its way into stories about this, which is that you're talking about the high beam, 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, 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 in the history of auto safety and the IIHS has been behind a lot of that.

But at the same time, this number that is being, 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 number, that only constitutes single car accidents that are coming from the cars that have brighter headlights, that have good safety ratings, which as we know, comes from having brighter lights.

And what that means is that car, 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, no one's saying it doesn't, but it's hard to, like if you blind somebody 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.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so this is what Mark Dahnke, 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 eleven. And he insists that making lights less bright is not the answer. And he likes, or Audi prefers the automatic dimming systems.

MARK DAHNKE: 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.

CHAKRABARTI: But, Nate, to your point, we're talking about dimming of high beams. So here's Linda 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.

LINDA: 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.

CHAKRABARTI: Here's Tessa in Newton, Massachusetts.

TESSA: 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 their dimmers actually go down.

I just don't understand how this got approved.

CHAKRABARTI: Nate, we only have a couple of minutes left here in this conversation, and I think all of these 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.

MARK BAKER: When they went from circular headlights to rectangular headlights, there was a petition. NHTSA 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.

NHTSA 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.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, Nate, we've only got about a minute and a half left.

What really needs to be done?

If NHTSA, for example, updated that Rule 108 to actually deal with what modern headlight technology is, rather than relying on bulb emissions from 1986, would that be enough?

ROGERS: Well, Meghna, there's one thing to consider also, which is that you can't change anything overnight, and you have 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 it's very easy to point to a variety of factors. LEDs, like alignment is really important. The color of the light, our eyes are more sensitive to brighter, whiter, and bluer lights, and that's what LEDs tend to come in. And there's all these little things, aftermarkets, and 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, there needs to be new regulations to accommodate it.

And the most effective way to tackle this kind of thing would just be to say, for NHTSA to be like, look, we need to update the brightness regulations in order to make sure that these headlights are just not so bright that they can easily cause problems if they're at all wrong. or even just if they're a little off the lot, just too bright. And 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, alright, let's just tone it down, take a step back and really think about what we want to do here going forward. We've already made some mistakes clearly.

The first draft of this transcript was created by Descript, an AI transcription tool. An On Point producer then thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and reformatted the transcript before publication. The use of this AI tool creates the capacity to provide these transcripts.