Vehicle lights are still in dark ages
Lack of advances in illumination heightens road risks
As the era of self- driving vehicles dawns, the auto industry is stuck with a 20th- century technology: headlights.
Despite rapid advancements in engines, autonomous driving and dashboard technology, road illumination has stalled, putting at risk the lives of thousands of motorists and pedestrians every year.
Blocked by federal rules that are out of date, automakers aren’t able to introduce advanced headlamps that automatically adjust to oncoming traffic to reduce glare and help drivers see better.
Manufacturing slip- ups on available systems lead to inadequate performance on the road, including excessive glare and insufficient light on the pavement.
University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute ( UMTRI) headlights expert Michael Flanagan estimated that 2,500 pedestrians are killed on the road at night every year — in many cases because drivers can’t see them in poor illumination.
New technologies, including headlights that swivel with the curve in the road on luxury vehicles, have helped in some cases but vary widely in quality.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety ( IIHS) concluded last year that two- thirds of lighting packages available on the industry’s 21 small SUV models deliver “poor” performance.
Low- beam headlights on 80% of vehicles on the road may not provide adequate stopping distance at speeds above 40 mph on unlit roadways, according to a study by AAA and the Automobile Club of Southern California’s Automotive Research Center.
Although headlights don’t fetch the same headlines as self- driving vehicles, improvements could help reverse the increasing tide of roadway deaths in the USA, experts said.
“Nobody who hits the deer thinks, ‘ My headlights are bad,’ ” said Matt Brumbelow, senior research engineer and headlights expert at IIHS.
Complicating the pursuit of change is the exceedingly complex section of federal code governing vehicles’ exterior lighting, which runs more than 26,000 words.
“Regulators have not done a lot to help this through inaction,” said Greg Brannon, director of automotive engineering at AAA. “There’s technology available today that could potentially reduce some fatalities, and it would be simply a matter of regulation change to allow that in the U. S.”
Japanese automaker Toyota asked the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in 2013 for permission to introduce adaptive beam technology, which is widely used in Europe and Japan. Four years later, the NHTSA hasn’t responded.
The adaptive beam technology is “very promising for making a truly major improvement in safety,” said Flanagan of the UMTRI. He said he expects the NHTSA to propose new rules “sometime soon” but it will take one to two additional years after a comment period to implement such rules.
The NHTSA championed a goal in 2016 of eliminating roadway deaths within three decades.
“DOT and NHTSA welcome data and research, including that by IIHS, that can serve to encourage manufacturers to improve headlight performance beyond minimum federal safety standards,” the NHTSA said in a statement.
The agency has been strapped for resources in enforcing safety rules and collaborating with automakers on self- driving vehicles.
“They’re really sincere people — I also think they’re incredibly overworked,” said Jack Nerad, executive market analyst at Kelley Blue Book.
Among the issues with headlights is that automakers turn to highly stylized headlights to illuminate the road. Flanagan said the automakers meet standards.
Brumbelow said that after the IIHS published data exposing the poor performance of certain headlights, industry insiders contacted the group expressing concerns about the trend toward “whatever looks the coolest.”
Significant changes for headlights are many years off, Flanagan said, even as several automakers are set to introduce cars that could drive themselves by 2021.