The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has been throwing a lot of shade lately at new cars’ headlight performance, and with good reason. Not only is the group incorporating headlight ratings into its 2017 overall crash ratings, it also won’t give a car the outfit’s coveted Top Safety Pick + rating unless it scores at least a mid-level Acceptable grade in the headlight category. IIHS has already tested mid-size sedans and small crossover/SUVs, and now it has turned its attention to pickup trucks. The results, as in the other tests, weren’t good.
Seven large pickup trucks and four “small” pickups were tested, meaning that while not every truck on the market fell under IIHS’s watchful eye, most did. Three of the seven large trucks (2016 and 2017 Chevrolet Silverado, Ford F-150, and Toyota Tundra) and all four small pickups (2016 Chevrolet Colorado, GMC Canyon, Nissan Frontier, and 2016 and 2017 Toyota Tacoma) are available only with headlights that scored the worst rating, Poor. The other four large pickups tested offer lights graded from Marginal (2016 Ram 1500, 2017 Nissan Titan) to Acceptable (2016 and 2017 GMC Sierra). The lone Good headlight rating on a pickup went to the 2017 Honda Ridgeline.
When testing headlights—a process you can read about in full we explained in detail earlier this year—IIHS measures not only how well the units illuminate a real road at night but also how much glare they throw at oncoming traffic. Although the results of the truck tests speak for themselves, IIHS did go out of its way to point out that the Ford F-series pickup is “among the poorest performers,” saying, “Both the base halogen and the optional LED low-beams provide inadequate visibility in all test scenarios.” To illuminate the differences between Poor- and Good-rated headlights, the Chevrolet Colorado’s halogen low-beams illuminated only 123 feet on IIHS’s straightaway, while the Ridgeline’s LED low-beams threw light 358 feet down the road.
As we pointed out when IIHS tested the headlights on mid-size sedans and small crossovers, the new headlight ratings should spur automakers to start addressing real-world headlight performance and not just federal headlight standards (which don’t incorporate real-world evaluation). After all, carmakers just love to advertise those Top Safety Pick + ratings. IIHS isn’t alone in pressuring automakers for better lights, though; the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) plans to adopt similar headlight ratings when it redoes its crash tests for the 2019 model year.
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