Auto safety ratings get tougher on headlights

Fancy technology sometimes inferior

Light it up. Even as high- tech systems such as collision warning and lane- departure detection have led to huge safety advancements in vehicles, a decidedly low- tech device — headlights — is a clear laggard.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety said Thursday it has stiffened the criteria for its highest safety honors, the Top Safety Pick+ label, using tighter standards for headlight performance.

The consequence is that only 38 models from the 2017 model year have achieved the group’s top score, down from 79 of 2016 models. The group tracks about 200 models.

“We’ve raised the bar,” IIHS President Adrian Lund said in an interview. “Automakers have not focused enough attention on whether or not headlamps are aimed such that they light up the road for the driver ahead of them.”

Some luxury vehicles come with fancy headlights that shift with the curvature of the road in an effort to provide better illumination, but they don’t always work better than the old- fashioned kind, Lund said. Many

headlights are failing to provide adequate nighttime visibility or causing too much glare, for example.

“Some lights with the newer technology are not doing as good of a job as older headlights,” Lund said.

For 2017, Toyota and its luxury brand Lexus led all manufacturers with nine models earning the Top Safety Pick+ designation. That included the Corolla, Prius and Camry cars, the RAV4 crossover and the Lexus NX and RX sportutility vehicles.

Honda and its luxury brand Acura were second among manufacturers with five vehicles on the list, including the Pilot and Santa Fe SUVs.

Of the six largest manufacturers, only Ford was shut out from the highest designation.

One surprise was that the only pickup to earn the highest honor was the Honda Ridgeline. Pickups from General Motors, Ford, Fiat Chrysler, Toyota and Nissan all failed to make the list.