DOT in the Dark: American headlight regs are dimwitted
While the agency delays life-saving technology, it allows automakers to sell cars that drive around in the dark. And that doesn't seem bright at all.


Have you noticed the startling number of cars driving without their lights on recently? I have, and it's pretty scary. About half of all road fatalities occur in the dark, even though we log only a quarter of our miles after sunset. Imagine how much worse those numbers would be if more cars drove without their lights on.

It's easy to blame the drivers, as I did. But, while behind the wheel of a 2014 Lexus ES350 one night, I became someone to blame. I commented that the headlights were weak, with a harsh white color temperature and a beam pattern that more closely resembled a fog light. My passengers agreed. It wasn't until we saw our refection in a store window that we realized the headlights were off. The harsh light was coming from the LED daytime running lights. The rest of the car was dark—no taillights, no license-plate lights, no side markers. Yet the gauge cluster and center stack were illuminated, so we know the car was smart enough to recognize it was dark out, yet not bright enough to turn its headlights on. The only indication the ES350 was a Lexus Invisibilius was a missing green indicator light on the cluster.

In the past, dash lights didn't come on until you turned on the headlights. Those days, even drunk people remembered to turn on their headlights—so they could find the cigarette lighter. Now, even sober drivers routinely forget. Since my Lexus incident, I've been paying attention to lightless cars on the road, and almost every time, the driver is drenched in the glow of an instrument cluster.

Cars with backlit or LCD-screen gauges that are always illuminated should be required to have automatic headlights. As we meander toward the autonomous car, we're sometimes in control of our cars and sometimes not—which is why now, more than ever, we need idiotproof solutions. This is where the government should step in: To prevent drivers from inadvertently risking injury or death in near-lightless Lexuses, and everything else. Yet there is no law on this matter. The last time something big happened in automotive lighting, it took our government decades to react.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA, is the part of the Department of Transportation that writes and enforces rules on vehicle safety, including lighting. When the U.S. government mandated the sealed-beam headlamp in 1940, it seemingly decreed the headlight done, perfect, and never to be improved upon. The rest of the world, meanwhile, was soon using vastly superior lighting technology. (Remember when you swapped out your pathetic sealed-beams for bright "Euro" H4s?) The U.S. government essentially ignored new lighting technology until 1983, when Ford submitted an ingenious petition for a lighting upgrade on the basis of fuel economy. The argument was that free-form "aero" headights would help achieve better fuel mileage than fat, sealed-beam units. NHTSA listened, but probably only because it's responsible for fuel-economy standards, too. The 1984 Lincoln Mark VII was the first to receive aero lights. It managed a whopping 20 mpg on the highway, but at least its drivers could see at night.

That was 32 years ago, and the government is again hindering progress on lighting. The rest of the world is being offered adaptive driving beams, or ADBs. These are headlights constructed from a matrix of individually dimmable LEDs, each aimed in a different direction. Using a forward-facing camera, the system can recognize oncoming cars or reflective signs and selectively dim or turn off the LEDs to limit glare. Driving with ADBs is like having your high beams on at all times, except without blinding other drivers. Audi is one of the leaders in ADBs. Its most advanced matrix uses 25 LEDs per headlight and can track up to eight objects simultaneously. It'll only get better as the number of LED segments increases; the next-generation system will use more than 150 of them. Next up? Laser headlights that use digital light processing micromirrors to create 400,000 independently controllable dots of light.

Too bad ADBs are illegal here: DOT rules permit a low beam, a high beam, and nothing in between. Two years ago, Toyota petitioned to allow ADBs. Audi joined in, along with archrivals BMW and Mercedes. "This isn't about competition," says Wolfgang Huhn, Audi's director of lighting development. "It benefits everyone."

THE LAST TIME SOMETHING BIG HAPPENED IN LIGHTING, IT TOOK OUR GOVERNMENT DECADES TO REACT.

NHTSA agrees, calling the ability to see properly at night "a key element of highway safety for all drivers." The agency is currently researching how glare affects motorists who encounter ADB-equipped vehicles. Couldn't it just look to European standards—as it should have back in the sealed-beam days? Apparently not. "The European standard utilizes a series of subjective tests that rely on the opinion of a test driver," NHTSA said in a statement. "This approach does not meet the requirements for NHTSA to adopt practicable performance requirements in an objective way that manufacturers can utilize in self-certifcation of their vehicles."

In other words, NHTSA wants to boil down this technology to easily reproducible, standardized tests that carmakers can conduct in a laboratory. What the agency should do instead is perform exhaustive, detailed, real-world tests of individual ADB systems.

Either way, NHTSA should get moving. Not only is the agency delaying potentially life-saving safety technology, it's also allowing automakers to sell cars that drive around in the dark. And that doesn't seem bright at all.