Who decides how much glare from headlights is too much?
TIP OF THE WEEK
Headlight glare is now in the spotlight. The group who decides how much is too much picked an interesting way to decide where that line is.
Headlights are starting to be phased into the safety scores consumers and automakers rely upon to gauge how safe a vehicle is compared with its peers in a segment.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety is now testing and ranking all the headlight systems available on the most popular-selling models.
In a recent round of IIHS testing, 17 of 42 headlight systems on small crossovers had excessive glare. Three models were rated poor based on headlight glare alone. The interesting thing about the glare ratings the institute is compiling is that it isn’t an expert at the laboratory that decided how much glare is too much. It was you, the average driver.
Of course, there are ways that scientist and engineers can measure glare.
However, IIHS knew that there was a need for real people to be involved in its testing and to set the point at which glare is considered too much. What IIHS came up with was a group of 20 individuals, 10 men and 10 women, who would be the glare jury. The qualifications for the participants are real-world sensible.
Everyone considered had driven at least 10 years, was between 30 and 50 years of age and had a relatively clean driving record. Of course, none had night-time restrictions on their license.
Also, so that the institute could be certain it didn’t pick any “ringers” from its own scientific community, it used a third party, the Chesapeake Institutional Review Board, to review its protocols for selection. Once the type of participant was profiled, the actual 20 were found through print and radio.
The apparatus measures glare using a metric called the DeBoer scale. This complex scientific method to determine glare levels was initially developed for streetlights and is now used widely as the measurement metric for glare in general. Using a 9-point scale, the DeBoer scale rating counts down from 9, rated “Just Noticeable” and ends with a score of 1, considered “Unbearable Glare.”
In its first test group of tested vehicles, IIHS found that the best headlights were not on expensive models, but affordable ones. This will now drive automakers to develop headlight systems that work better in the real world. Even better, the new systems won’t be blinding us as we see them approach. — John Goreham/
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