By Marc J. Elzenbeck
Once upon a time, cars all had identical headlights. From 1940 to 1984, there was a United States sealed beam standard. While the adage, “You can’t stop within the reach of your low beams, young fella,” was mostly still true, safety had improved.
By 1978, lights could come in both rectangular or round cases; you could add a few extra and mount them higher or lower, but they were all yellow incandescents set in the same parabolic aluminized reflectors. When one burned out, you couldn’t replace the bulb or filament – you tossed the whole thing and plugged a new glass insert into the car’s empty socket, from Ford to Ferrari, Buick to Volkswagen Bug.
In 1979, 17 years after Europeans got them, halogen bulbs were approved in the US. Produced by passing electricity through quartz-encased tungsten, the extremely hot chemical reaction can be excited even further, by 25% or so, by adding exotic accelerants like bromine, iodine, or (maybe) sea slug venom, but these all shorten bulb life.
Drivers were satisfied with brighter halogen lights going further down the road, and in most conditions, you could finally stop within the distance of your low beams. Which was more than nice: in the 5 years following 1979, US motor vehicle fatalities dropped by one-third.
Then, in 1984, deregulation hit. The Lincoln Continental Mark VII would become the first new car with custom body-integrated cases and replaceable bulbs. This kicked off freedom of styling, innovation, and a lumenology arms race we’re still experiencing. We have the full spectrum of colors, xenon, light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and, at long last, lasers. Using the old panel of metrics to measure the new brightness and frequency – lumens, lux, kelvins, candles, melvins – is a lot like using TNT to measure nuclear bombs.
No, it is not our imagination. Headlights are blinding.
They come in several levels of pain and disorientation, each of which is added to the previous indignity. First, there’s Level One: Ouch. The white of an LED is usually set at a death-like 6,000 kelvins, utterly devoid of red or green tones. Even if the lumens are only slightly higher than the strongest 1,400 or so possible from a 2,500+ degree halogen bulb, no evolution prepared human retinas for this new trauma, so it feels like they’re being scoured with Liquid Plumber.
Level Two: Stun. In which we must quickly either shield or avert our retinas or have holes burned into them. This means steering by using spatial waypoints such as the line by the side of the road, or ditches and mailboxes, with the occasional reflexive glance risked back at the 3,000 oncoming lumens to make sure we’re not going to do a head-on. Vision loss is transient, crash risk moderate.
Level Three: Free cataract surgery. This occurs when you are suddenly confronted with 4,000 or so lumens and can’t look away soon enough, such as when tricked by headlights coming around a corner, over a rise, or up out of a dip. A partial second’s stare into the lights will result in 15 or 20 minutes before vision returns (or not) to the cauterized areas.
“Thank God,” you’ll usually say a half-hour after hitting the brakes and veering somewhere off to your right. “The lime-purple floaties are still pulsing on and off, but I can make out the road again.”
Level Four: UFO abduction. It isn’t a function of lumens alone, but also of color, angles of focus, and numbers of lights. If a driver has an SUV with 5,000-lumen headlights, chances are good they’ll also have a couple of 3,000-lumen foglights deployed, plus maybe an after-market roof-mounted rack seven or eight feet higher than the road. These lights can be green, purple, yellow, or ice blue, and can easily add up to over 20,000 total lumens. Even from a considerable distance, the array combines to make a sort of beautiful, disorienting kill box, not unlike having a fabled close encounter.
With LEDs now available on Amazon claiming 36,000 lumen output, where the headlight Wild West goes next is a good question, but there are signs of push-back. Porsche was just forced to recall 2,941 of its 2023-2024 model year Macans for having headlights too bright for the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. Dialing back their headlight control unit software commenced on January 24th.
One might expect other vehicle manufacturers to follow suit in response to complaints. An Oregon-based non-profit called the Soft Lights Foundation was founded in 2021, with a Facebook group, “Ban Blinding LEDs.” And the Department of Transportation is mulling certification of aftermarket LEDs, which implies regulation.
Finally, European manufacturers are once again in the lead, and already have adaptive LED arrays, described as “2 million intelligent mirrors,” which sense oncoming lights and create a polite shadow for drivers. In the meantime, for US driving incidents at night, we can always claim to have been bedazzled by LEDs, saying, “There were lights in my eyes, they were horrible, and suddenly I noticed the deer on my hood.”
Who wouldn’t believe it?
