Nate Rogers

They haven't changed the rulebook to accommodate LED headlights, which people are seeming to agree now was an oversight because of how different the technology is.

This is the million dollar question because... You know, common sense will tell you that headlights that are really bright, like let's imagine that you're driving down the road and a car's coming the other way and the headlights get in your eyes and they're really bright and you're struggling to see. That's an obvious safety issue.

I mean, it's not disputed that headlight glare is a safety issue that is important. The question is how much of a danger is it and how can you measure that? Because with a government agency like NHTSA, You need hard data. You need proof.

And when you're trying to measure... So one study that gets pointed out is that the IIHS, they said that there was a 20% reduction in car accidents with cars that have good safety ratings for their headlights, right? Basically, the short version is... it's really hard to measure something that's tied in as intrinsically with everything else in the way that the highway operates.

And without that strict measurement of how dangerous car headlight brightness is, it seems that NHTSA is a little stuck and a little unsure about how to approach it, how to gauge it, and how to fix it.

Yeah, it's really interesting. Car manufacturers at any time could make headlights that were, you know, a little bit less bright, but still fit the rulebook of what NHTSA requires for a safe level of brightness. They could dial it back at any time. Any of these car companies could. And they could market that and maybe that would work. But for whatever reason, they don't do it.

And the car companies, their number one goal is to sell cars. And whatever makes sense for that is why, you know, they make the decisions that they do, generally speaking. Like NHTSA was created because car companies were not prioritizing safety in cars. So, you know, it's a shame that car companies can't be relied upon to fix this issue on their own.

Um, and you know, when you try to speak to them, they don't even really acknowledge it. Like I had reached out to like probably about a dozen car companies, only got an interview with one, I think maybe two or three also responded and said, no, you know, and their, and their, uh, I just never heard from them.

I wish I understood.

So LEDs are new technology that took over pretty much everything in the lighting world in the last 15 years. It's just sort of arguably the biggest change in lighting technology since like, you know, they first fired up a incandescent light bulb.

It's taking the traditional form of a light bulb, which is sort of like one source of light that emits in every direction and replacing it with something that's more akin to like a computer chip. So you can really like... program the different chips, which almost function like pixels or something. And it's more energy efficient. They last longer.

It was a total sea change in the lighting world when LEDs came out. And over time, they've started to replace pretty much everything. And that includes car headlights.

There's a lot of answers for that. And the shortest one is just that LEDs are kind of the future. But one really concrete reason that car companies like LEDs is that they are very much in search of getting a good safety rating from this nonprofit called the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety, the IIHS. They're a nonprofit that is funded by the insurance companies.

You know, they all kind of pool in together. That's sort of like when you hear about like crash test dummies.

A lot of that is like the IIHS. And they, the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety, have deemed brighter headlights to be advantageous to getting a good safety rating. So if you're trying to get that safety rating, you want to pump more light down the road. And the way to pump more light down the road is through more powerful LEDs. So that's an important reason why car companies favor them.

NHTSA, that's the National Highway Traffic Safety Association. They are the federal highway safety czars. They are the ultimate authority. Any car that is driving on the road has to meet NHTSA standards. It's hard to say exactly what they're doing on a day-to-day basis. They're kind of mysterious. They did not want to talk to me for the story that I did.

They actually told me at one point to stop emailing their employees. But, you know, I think that it's a government agency. It's not some vast conspiracy. They probably are just busy doing other stuff. And clearly in the last 15 years since LED headlights have started to roll out, they have not been a priority for NHTSA.