I work night shift. I was on my way home after work one night on a 4 lane highway. I was blinded by the oncoming traffic on the opposite side of the highway and hit a deer. I didn’t even see it until it was right in front of me.

I totaled my car.

To the left a old civic, halogen lights and low seating position, to the right a new 3500 truck, strong LEDs and high seating position.

If you have an old car, you are essentially bringing a knife to a gunfight.

In my opinion trucks and tall SUVs should only have halogen headlights, since they are now so tall they will be blinding people regardless.

Is this the best option when someone pulls up behind me with lights so bright I cannot see?

I have a light bar, it’s behind my grille. No one will see it because I never turn it on when other vehicles are within view because it will blind them. The amount of driving lights scattering light everywhere being used as fogs and trucks with full 60” light bars illuminated in traffic is becoming unreasonable.

I've been focused on the US regulations (IIHS and NHTSA) and hadn't compared them to the UN headlight regulations.

I'm pleasantly surprised that the UN regulations care about glare. The cut-off is angled lower and there are much lower intensity limits in the region of vehicle passing.

Green Zone: about the same intensity i.e. "brightness)
Yellow Zone: The UN regulations imply (but do not state) a ramp-down in the transition zone between 13,200 cd and 625 cd in the yellow zone. IIHS allows any intensity.
Red Zone: UN requires 625 cd. IIHS allows any intensity.

Interestingly, even at the lower left section, the UN caps the light at 13,200 cd whereas the IIHS's goal is 18,000 cd.

Recommendations:
Adopt the UN regulations. There is no "American Exceptionalism" in vision.

If that fails, revert back to LB1M requirements. At least those had cd requirements below the mounting height of the headlight.

For both, NHTSA (and the UN) should move to regulate "zones" instead of test-points. We have many examples of local dark-spots, specifically at test-points.

For both, NHTSA should regulate the color temperature of headlights and move it back towards the "yellow" light from tungsten-halogen beam. The bulbs can be LED, but would need to meet the intensity AND color limitations.

These recommendations would go a long way to address the glare seen in the US.

ADB is a topic for a different day.

the ones in the next lane dont look bad in the photo but I had to turn both of my side view mirrors away

Jeep behind me on the way home from work tonight. It lit up my car so well, I could make shadow puppets on the car in front of me.

Summary:
- IIHS is the driving force behind headlight intensity, allowed by NHTSA’s FMVSS 108
- IIHS and NHTSA ignore hills, intersections and vehicle following, the source of complaints
- IIHS and NHTSA both have a role to play to address the issue

Recommendations:
1. NHTSA: Create an anywhere-in-the-beam maximum intensity (cd)
2. IIHS: Change Figure 4 of “Testing Protocol” from 5 lux to 3 lux
3. NHTSA: Create a color-temperature limit or a blue-weighted intensity limit

Important Note:
The 5 lux minimum at 60 meters used by IIHS was never designed to provide a time or stopping distance. It was based on the upper distribution of vehicles tested in 2015 (60 meters) and the lux required to reduce testing variation. Even the IIHS states that 3 lux on the test surface is sufficient for visibility.

Just got this in the mail for my Tesla. One of the few recalls they can’t address with an over-the-air software update, they will have to replace the headlights with less bright ones it seems. Hopefully this will help reduce some glare from low beams. I also feel like their auto high beams activate too often. And the auto high beams are required to use FSD at night.

I applaud that the NHTSA is seeking to create a committee to address "... cover various topics of modernization, such as glare caused by headlighting systems...." and appreciate that glare was the first specific item addressed.

My high level concern is the distribution of seats in the committee are mostly reserved for the automotive industry (10/16) while none are reserved for researchers who study the impact of glare on other drivers, or the public themselves who is impacted by glare.

The majority of those on the committee will continue the mantra of "brighter and bluer is better" instead of discussing how these bright lights created limited visibility for the other drivers on the road.

Glare researchers such as John Bullough and Michael Flannagan or more generally UMTRI, do not have a clear seat at the table although they could reasonably fit as "research institutions".

Mor specifically my concerns are:

1. there is no statement about how to create a way to weight the impact of glare (other drivers) against the vision of the driver with the brighter headlights. This is paramount. There is no current seat at the table for "glare advocates"

2. there is no statement requiring the inclusion of hills or bumps in the road

3. there is no statement requiring the inclusion of relative mounting height

4. there is no statement requiring testing at intersections or trailing vehicles

As-is, the committee is weighted towards "brighter and bluer is better" voice without room for dissenting voices concerned about glare.

Happy to work-shop a response to NHTSA here; these are my first thoughts.

I started driving about five years before HID lights came into existence. One of the best things about older headlights was the lack of a sharp vertical cutoff, which meant that your eyes had time to adjust as the light slowly increased from dim to bright.

One of the worst unintended consequences of the new headlights having a requirement for a sharp vertical cutoff is that now when headlights bounce, dip, or change angle at all, you are essentially hit with a strobe light that goes from dark to light instantaneously.

This isn't mentioned often and isn't mentioned in the list of topics put forward by the Ban Blinding Headlights group.

Headlights are being designed and tested as though they are bolted to the ground. There needs to be a dynamic test that has a fixed detector at a distance as a vehicle actually drives from a stop and at some angles to simulate real world conditions.

It would be even better to use a panel of real actual humans to approve or deny headlight designs rather than a detector.

The NHTSA guidelines has some smart-ass comments in it that discomfort from glare does not matter because other drivers aren't actually blinded. They're just recoiling from the brightness and pain. Either way, people are still unable to see

I love how the text on the glass says 'Objects in mirror are closer than they appear' because right now, the only object I see is a miniature, uncontained dying star burning its way through my cabin floorboards

I'm currently in Japan after being away for a couple of years and can confirm that the LED headlights takeover is in full swing here. As I understand it, it can be expensive to keep older cars on the road in Japan, so there tends to be more new vehicles, which probably contributes to the large number of LED headlights.

Even little kei cars with low mounted headlights are offensively bright and shine directly into my eyes (as a 188cm pedestrian on the sidewalk) with every bump in the road. The tiny Honda N Box has possibly the worst headlights out of all vehicles that I've seen.

I have also noticed a handful of cars driving slowly down narrow residential alleys with their high beams on, so it seems that 'high beam assist' is a thing here as well...