Despite US dominance in so many different areas of technology, we’re sadly somewhat of a backwater when it comes to car headlamps. It’s been this way for many decades, a result of restrictive federal vehicle regulations that get updated rarely. The latest lights to try to work their way through red tape and onto the road are active-matrix LED lamps, which can shape their beams to avoid blinding oncoming drivers.
From the 1960s, Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards allowed for only sealed high- and low-beam headlamps, and as a result, automakers like Mercedes-Benz would sell cars with less capable lighting in North America than it offered to European customers.
A decade ago, this was still the case. In 2014, Audi tried unsuccessfully to bring its new laser high-beam technology to US roads. Developed in the racing crucible that is the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the laser lights illuminate much farther down the road than the high beams of the time, but in this case, the lighting tech had to satisfy both the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Food and Drug Administration, which has regulatory oversight for any laser products.
The good news is that by 2019, laser high beams were finally an available option on US roads, albeit once the power got turned down to reduce their range.
NHTSA’s opposition to advanced lighting tech is not entirely misplaced. Obviously, being able to see far down the road at night is a good thing for a driver. On the other hand, being dazzled or blinded by the bright headlights of an approaching driver is categorically not a good thing. Nor is losing your night vision to the glare of a car (it’s always a pickup) behind you with too-bright lights that fill your mirrors.
This is where active-matrix LED high beams come in, which use clusters of controllable LED pixels. Think of it like a more advanced version of the “auto high beam” function found on many newer cars, which uses a car’s forward-looking sensors to know when to dim the lights and when to leave the high beams on.
Here, sensor data is used much more granularly. Instead of turning off the entire high beam, the car only turns off individual pixels, so the roadway is still illuminated, but a car a few hundred feet up the road won’t be.
Rather than design entirely new headlight clusters for the US, most OEMs’ solution was to offer the hardware here but disable the beam-shaping function—easy to do when it’s just software. But in 2022, NHTSA relented—nine years after Toyota first asked the regulator to reconsider its stance.
I’m curious if the problem is how bright LED lights are or something else. I recently bought a car and it has an automatic brights option. Basically, it switched on the brights automatically for some situations. I turned it off because I felt it was turning them on when I didn’t need them.
My auto bright feature barely ever turns them on for more than a couple of seconds since it seems to be triggered off by reflective signs. So on empty roads with signage I have to turn them on manually if I don’t want them to flick to dim constantly.
Seems like tech that should be a lot more reliable by now, instead of the two of us having opposite experiences.
It depends entirely on how well the software handles the sensors and its basically completely different on every car afaik
Yeah, but every manufacturer should have decades of practice by now. Whatever approach they took should be reliable by now.
Any company whose primary focus is not software always has shit for software.
I don’t know if it’s because manufacturing companies don’t really care about it, or they feel they should cut corners everywhere they can, or what, but it seems to be a universal phenomenon.
I think it’s the cutoff. My Bronco LEDs don’t seem to bother people.
My stock Toyota 86 LEDs had an extreme cutoff between the area it lit up and where it didn’t. Even though it was lower to the ground and had a shorter throw, people would flash me all the time.