LED Headlights: Sure we complain but do they really cause accidents

Headlights may be brighter, but glare-related crashes flat: IIHS

On the whole, LED headlamps have hugely bettered nighttime safety for drivers--but there's still room for improvement

By David Booth -- Driving.ca

Headlight glare has become a constant complaint of late, the advent of LED lamps not only changing the intensity of our cars' illumination, but their colour as well. Behind only our constant bitch-and-moan about gas prices, glare from oncoming headlights while driving at night is top of mind for motorists who feel "blinded" by oncoming cars.

Well, maybe not that blind. The supposed dangers of too-bright bulbs haven't shown up in accident statistics. Indeed, according to the American Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) glare is implicated in just a tiny fraction of nighttime crashes, and that percentage has hardly changed over the past decade.

"Although it can certainly be uncomfortable, headlight glare contributes to far fewer crashes than insufficient visibility," IIHS President David Harkey said in an October report. "But that doesn't mean reducing glare isn't an important goal -- one that we've long focused on at IIHS, in addition to improving illumination."

Indeed, according to the institute's research, between 2015 to 2023, headlight glare was cited as a factor in only one or two out of every thousand nighttime crashes across 11 U.S. states. More importantly, there was essentially no change in how often glare was mentioned in crash reports, keeping at that "one or two out of a thousand" crashes per year level since 2011.

Combined with the fact the amount of light emitted by newer headlights has slashed crashes caused by poor visibility, the researchers found it "encouraging to confirm that these headlight improvements don't appear to be leading to more glare-related crashes." In fact, the "glare-rate" in crashes peaked in 2015, before the headlight revolution really got going, and was at its lowest in 2020, when it was in full swing.

Indeed, according to IIHS' study of police-reported crashes, vehicles with "good" ratings for visibility in the IIHS headlight test are involved in 19% fewer nighttime single-vehicle crashes, and 23% fewer nighttime pedestrian crashes, than vehicles whose headlights are rated "poor" by the agency.

Read more HERE!

Source: Headlights may be brighter, but glare-related crashes flat: IIHS | Driving

 

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