Imagine it’s the future. You’re driving at night, high-beams blazing. You didn’t have to remember to turn them on—they brightened automatically. As you approach an oncoming vehicle, your high-tech lights—which make thousands of individual points of light and use data from the car’s onboard camera and sensors to focus the beam—make a dark hole in the brightness to protect the other motorist’s night vision. Further down the road, a deer emerges from the woods, and the lights mark it with a thin ray of brightness. Potential catastrophe has been averted, thanks to adaptive-beam lighting.
In Europe, where such systems are available amid a different regulatory system, that future is now.
If you’re like most people, you probably don’t think much about your car’s headlights, other than to switch them on and off and occasionally to flash the brights. At least, that’s what Michael Flannagan, a headlamp expert at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI), has found in his extensive study of automotive lighting.
“Even expert drivers don’t seem to understand the risks associated with darkness,” he said. “Our estimate is that there are slightly over 2000 people killed each year because of darkness—mostly pedestrians. They loom up out of the darkness far too quickly for drivers to react to.”
According to Flannagan, part of the problem is that drivers—even skilled ones—tend to underutilize their high-beams. There’s data going back to the 1960s to confirm this.
“Low-beams are designed to work at 35 to 40 mph, so if you come upon a pedestrian who is drunk, texting, or whatever, and you’re driving 55 mph, you have no warning because there’s not enough lighting,” he said.
In the grand scheme of things, with more than 3 trillion vehicle miles traveled in the United States every year, low-light crashes may be more deadly to pedestrians than other types of crashes, but their numbers don’t amount to much.
Nevertheless, headlight-related accidents have become enough of an issue that the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) introduced a rating system for headlights last year. Last month, the organization released a report that rated the headlights on more than half the U.S.-market mid-size SUVs as Marginal or Poor. Only two received the IIHS’s top Good rating.
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“People generally aren’t willing to pay more for better headlights, and there hasn’t been much interest in the tech.”
– Michael Flannagan, UMTRI
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Even in an era when cameras and sensors work in concert with semi-automated features to apply automated braking, keep the car in its lane, and alert the driver when there’s another vehicle in his blind spot, the headlamp technology available in the United States is less advanced than it could be. Automakers such as Audi and Mercedes-Benz have already developed headlamps that increase the driver’s nighttime visibility and decrease glare aimed at other motorists.
But current federal regulations—specifically, Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 108 — make adoption of the new technology challenging. Lamps such as Audi’s Matrix Beam, which uses LEDs to break apart light from a single laser into a field of countless smaller beams that can reduce glare in some spots and intensify brightness in others.
“There’s a philosophical difference between regulations in the U.S. and in Europe, which covers most of the rest of the world,” Flannagan said. “U.S. regulations are based upon self-certification by the manufacturers rather than type approval, as they are in Europe.”
What that means is that in the United States, companies certify that their products meet federal standards. The standard itself contains pages of esoteric information—what colors can be emitted from which lights, how lighting should be tested, light source, and on and on.
“The company is responsible for meeting the standard,” Flannagan said. “If anyone ever points out that the vehicle is not compliant, the company is responsible for proving that it is.”
Contrast that approach with Europe’s. There, the government certifies an independent entity to evaluate manufacturers’ technologies. Conformity to an American-style empirical testing standard isn’t required, and engineers subjectively evaluate a lighting system’s efficacy. In Europe, the manufacturer brings its vehicle to the testing house, which sends engineers—one in the vehicle to observe brightness and another in an oncoming car to look for “undue glare”—to evaluate the lighting under real-world road conditions. The type of road and other specifics are up to the test house.
U.S. regulations are much more specific.
“The federal government isn’t dragging its feet,” Flannagan said. “Everyone’s doing the best they can with the resources given to headlamp tech. Part of it is the buying public. People generally aren’t willing to pay more for better headlights, and there hasn’t been much interest in the tech.”
Regardless of the regulatory hurdles, automakers and federal policymakers are working together to introduce new lighting technology in the United States. For example, a few years ago, Toyota submitted a request to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for rulemaking on its adaptive beam technology. Last summer, after two years of deliberation, the engineering group SAE International recommended a change from reliance on testing adaptive-beam headlamps in the lab toward field testing. Other manufacturers have also been active in pushing for regulatory change.
“It’s strange—it’s industry asking to be regulated, but they just want the rules to be clear,” Flannagan said, pointing out that under a self-certification system, clear rules mean less likelihood that a system could be challenged as noncompliant later on. “It’s pretty easy to implement this stuff on any car with a front-end camera. All you need is some software.”
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