It’s blindingly obvious that LED headlights are a menace

The ever brighter glare of today’s cars is becoming a hazard, says Ed Wiseman

We’ve all noticed it. The proliferation of excessively bright headlights is one of many slowly worsening situations on Britain’s roads, joining distracted and speeding drivers and soaring rates of drug driving. It’s not exactly scintillating dinner party conversation, but it has become a huge problem – nine out of 10 respondents to a recent RAC survey said that headlights are too bright, and about three quarters said they were regularly dazzled.

“Between 2013 and 2022, there was an average of six fatal collisions per year where bright or dazzling headlights were a contributory factor,” says Rod Dennis, public affairs officer at the RAC. “On average, there are around 280 collisions of different severity each year attributed, at least partially, to dazzling headlights.

“The Government is relying on these relatively low numbers, claiming that they don’t need to do any more work on it, but the data is two years out of date and the strength of feeling among road users proves that this is a problem.”

There are several factors fuelling this dangerous phenomenon. Firstly, headlights are indeed getting a lot brighter, thanks to several successive “improvements” to bulb technology. From the flickering acetylene lamps of the early automobile, to the once-futuristic xenons and HIDs of the not-sodistant past, to the high-intensity LEDs and high-power laser lights of today, car headlamps have increased in brightness consistently for decades.

Almost as important is the shape and stature of cars today. In the 1990s, even as advanced headlight technology was making headlights brighter and clearer, most cars were roughly the same height. You’d be in your estate car and a hatchback would come the other way, with lights approximately corresponding with each other. Nowadays, every other car is effectively a truck, with headlights at or above waist height.

Thirdly, British motorists may want the fastest, most imposing cars but may well not know how to adjust headlights to prevent them blinding oncoming traffic.

“Technology moves on,” says Dennis, “and regulation is supposed to move with it.

“As a driver, particularly in rural areas, you’re going to get a better view of the road and be safer if your headlights are bright and illuminate more of the road ahead.

“But people benefiting from this technology might be causing safety problems for others, which is why we need more research not just into brightness but also alignment and the other factors that cause people to be dazzled. Some people say we should ban LEDs, others say it’s about alignment. We need more data.”

There’s another issue which I’ve noted in my role as a road tester. Automatically dimming headlights, which first appeared on high-end models almost a decade ago but which are now relatively prevalent across all market sectors, simply do not work as they should.

In cars I’ve been testing, automatically dimming headlight systems have routinely ignored oncoming vehicles, and have no way to detect pedestrians or poorly lit cyclists.

“As cars do more for us, we become reliant on that technology, and when it doesn’t behave as we expect it to sometimes we think that doing these small tasks, like engaging and disengaging the main beam, maybe doesn’t feel like our job anymore,” says Dennis.

Car manufacturers are commercially compelled to keep up with the Joneses. Omitting new technology from their product puts them at a competitive disadvantage, even if that new technology is functionally useless to the majority of their customers. Most Land Rover owners will never need a 3.5-tonne towing capacity; few Bentley Continental owners will ever approach its 208mph top speed. Similarly, the ability of a new BMW to illuminate half a mile of Bavarian wilderness is largely irrelevant to owners who live within the M25, but that hasn’t stopped BMW from installing high-power laser lights which it claims will do precisely that.

“I work in Suffolk, where the roads are long and straight and where a lot of people drive 4x4s,” says Daniel Hardiman McCartney, a practising optometrist and clinical adviser to the Royal College of Optometrists. “I get people in-clinic who are increasingly worried about headlights and driving at night. It’s affecting people’s independence. We’re seeing people who aren’t particularly old – 60 or 70 – who just don’t drive after 6pm.”

Proposed changes to the way headlights are designed could filter through onto our roads by 2027, subject to deliberations by policy experts at the United Nations. Changing people’s inconsiderate or unsafe behaviour may not be as straightforward. It’s clear that this dangerous phenomenon will be a feature of our roads for a number of years to come; for now, car manufacturers are locked in a headlight brightness arms race, and regulators are turning a blind eye.

Ed Wiseman is a freelance writer who specialises in transport