Lights could avert crashes

which represents major automakers on Washington policy issues, backed the petition. Four years later, the NHTSA hasn’t made a decision.

The NHTSA championed a goal in 2016 of eliminating roadway deaths within three decades. The agency acknowledged that incremental technological improvements could be as important as revolutionary self-driving technology in reaching that objective.

The Department of Transportation and the “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. It did not address the status of Toyota’s petition.

Once the NHTSA proposes new regulations, it could take one to two additional years to implement standards. After that, it may take years for advanced lighting to become standard technology.

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. “They don’t have a lot of resources to put into headlights.”

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.

The number of pedestrians killed on U.S. roads in 2015 rose 9.5% to 5,376, although distracted driving is suspected as the key culprit for the uptick.

Still, 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.

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,” Brumbelow said.

“We had lighting engineers that told us they were glad we were doing this because internally in their companies, there’s a war between the styling department and the safety department sometimes,” Brumbelow said. “The packaging of headlights has been getting smaller and smaller and smaller and more distinctive. That doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t have good visibility at the same time, but it makes it much harder to accomplish and more expensive if you’re going to do both.”

Significant changes for headlights are still many years off, Flanagan said.