Bright headlights can be annoying, but they’re not as dangerous as you think – Jalopnik

Now that Apple CarPlay (and to a lesser extent, at least in the US, Android Auto) is pretty ubiquitous, if there’s one car thing normal people like to talk about, it’s headlight glare. And with good reason. Headlight glare is incredibly annoying, and if you have astigmatism like me, it’s often even worse. Updating your prescription and keeping your glasses clean can certainly help, but as I recently discovered, even new glasses can’t completely solve the problem of headlight glare. That’s a big deal, since not being able to see while driving clearly causes more accidents, right?

Not necessarily. In the video below, Joe Young, director of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety Media Relations, talks with IIHS principal research engineer Matt Brumbelow about headlight glare. And according to Brumbelow, when his team investigated the issue, they did just that actually couldn’t find any evidence that headlight glare contributes to more accidents. That doesn’t mean it’s still not a problem, just that the evidence currently available does not show an increase in glare-related crashes. Instead, insufficient visibility remains the biggest factor contributing to nighttime accidents.

That said, the available evidence is also somewhat limited, as only eleven states list glare as a contributing factor in their crash reports. Furthermore, even in the states that do track this, motorists must report that glare was a problem before an officer can include it in their report, meaning we don’t know exactly how many glare crashes go unreported. But while the data may be incomplete, IIHS researchers still looked at more than six million crashes from 2015 to 2023 and found that crashes in which headlight glare was cited as a factor remained fairly consistent, at a rate of about one or two per 1,000. In addition, the number of accidents caused by insufficient visibility decreased significantly.

Of course, that’s still not great news. If 51% of new vehicles have good headlights, that still leaves 49% of new vehicles that don’t. Furthermore, the vast majority of Americans don’t drive brand new cars, and all those cars with bad headlights will likely remain on the road for years to come. Still, it’s at least nice to see things moving in a positive direction, especially at a time when it feels like most of what you see in the news is negative.

And while the IIHS will clearly be biased in its own favor, it deserves credit for implementing a headlight test that appears to have directly contributed to automakers offering better headlights. As they mention in the video, federal standards are still stuck in the 1990s and don’t take into account how high the lights are mounted on different vehicles, but with IIHS not giving a vehicle with what it considers excessive headlight glare an “acceptable” safety rating, automakers are essentially being forced to offer better headlights. Especially since the coveted Top Safety Pick award requires standard headlights to be rated “Good” or “Acceptable.”

Does any of this information change how frustrating it can be to drive at night? Not really. The next time you’re blinded by an oncoming truck, “Just give it a few decades, and this will be much less of a problem,” probably won’t be very reassuring. Yet it is notable that the data does not show a clear increase in glare-related accidents, even though we all know that headlight glare is a major problem.