One night in early November, Aaron Madrid was driving home from his job at a haunted house outside Chicago when he faced an unexpected horror. The lights from an oncoming pickup truck hit him dead in the eyes, blinding him.
“The United States is decades behind the rest of the developed world with respect to updating standards to keep up with technologies, particularly in the headlight area,” said Greg Brannon, AAA’s director of automotive engineering and industry relations. “The standards have not been substantively updated since the ‘70s. Meanwhile, technology has marched on.”
But the agency could not just adopt the European rule because the U.S. and Europe approve vehicle technology in different ways — automakers test their own vehicles to meet U.S. safety standards, while vehicles in Europe are tested by regulators. The U.S. and Europe also have different legal processes for approving new technology.
Adding the systems wasn’t difficult, as almost every Audi model has them as an optional feature and, in Europe, roughly half of Audi vehicles are sold with the technology, said Filip Brabec, the company’s senior vice president of product management. “For the U.S. specifically, we have well over 150,000 cars on the road today that could have it if we just turn it on. … The capability is already there.
A number of industry groups and companies, including Ford, Honda and Volkswagen, asked the NHTSA to reconsider its requirements, and the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a trade group representing automakers, petitioned the agency to do so. NHTSA is “not aware of any studies or data that demonstrate that increasing upper beam intensities would improve safety and doing so would likely increase glare levels on roadways in the United States,” an agency spokesperson said.
For Bullough, misalignment is the biggest issue. His research has found the majority of vehicles on the road have at least one mis-aimed headlight.