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.
Better road illumination and less glare from oncoming traffic are both key for safer night driving, automotive safety experts say. Technology that can do both at once — known as adaptive driving beams — has been in use in Europe since 2012, according to automakers, and today is available in cars sold in every major automotive market worldwide, except the U.S.A 2022 regulation allowed the technology in the U.S.
“NHTSA carefully considered the existing [European] regulation during the rule-making process,” the agency said. “In areas where that regulation lacked objective and measurable performance criteria required for the self-certification system in the United States, the agency adopted performance requirements to ensure safety for all road users.”Many newer U.S. headlights automatically switch between high and low beams, which improves nighttime visibility.
“It’s very frustrating,” he said. “We have technology that has been proven in many countries around the world, and we would just really like to bring it to the U.S.” “The final rule contains several requirements that are either not practicable or not reasonable,” the group wrote in its petition. “If not adjusted, parts of this rule stand as an obstacle to the deployment of this important safety technology in the US market.”
Despite that lack of change, longtime drivers likely feel that headlights have gotten brighter in the last few decades, as halogen headlights were replaced by more efficient LED lights. “Headlights aren’t like a flashlight, where they just throw out a beam of light, there’s a very sharp horizontal cutoff. So there’s a line below which headlights are very bright,” he explained. “When you’re 100 feet away, a little change in how that headlight is aimed can make a big difference in putting your eyes in that bright part of the headlight beam.”NBC News
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