Vehicle headlights are stuck in tech’s dark ages
Lack of advances in illumination heightens road risks
Cars carry cameras, computers and warning signals to make travel safer, but one piece of outdated 20th-century technology poses a safety risk for drivers and pedestrians: headlights.
About 2,500 pedestrians are killed at night every year crossing the road, in many cases because drivers can’t see them because their headlights don’t shine brightly enough, according to headlights expert Michael Flanagan at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI).
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) concluded last year that two-thirds of lighting packages available on 21 small SUV models, including the Jeep Wrangler, the Mitsubishi Outlander Sport and the Nissan Rogue, deliver “poor” performance. Ten midsize cars’ headlight systems were deemed poor, including the Buick Verano, Hyundai Sonata and the Mercedes-Benz C-Class. The headlights of seven pickups were rated poor, including the Ford F-150, the GMC Canyon and the Toyota Tundra.
“Nobody who hits the deer thinks, ‘My headlights are bad,’ ” said Matt Brumbelow, senior research engineer and headlights expert at the IIHS. “They don’t realize actually if you had better headlights, you might have seen it in time and avoided the crash.”
Outdated federal rules have blocked automakers from introducing headlamps that automatically adjust to oncoming traffic to reduce glare and help drivers see better, even though the technology is legal and available in Europe and Japan.
“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 to allow adaptive beam
technology. The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, 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 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.”
Headlight 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 change for headlights are many years off, Flanagan said, even as several automakers are set to introduce cars that can literally drive themselves by 2021.