Saskatoon optometrist Rachael Berger has seen an increase in the number of patients concerned about their vision when driving at night.
“I’m seeing an alarming number of perfectly young, healthy individuals coming in and saying, ‘I’m having a hard time seeing at night, what’s going on,’” she told The Current guest host Peter Armstrong.
She tells patients it’s not them — it’s the LED headlights increasingly used on vehicles.
When it’s dark, Berger explains, the rods in our eyes turn on to help us see better.
“When you’re driving at night and your rods are activated, and all of a sudden this blast of light comes, it can be very jarring, because our night system isn’t prepared or necessarily expecting that,” she said.
Advocates are calling on the federal government and car manufacturers to adjust their regulations and industry standards around bright headlights because there needs to be a better balance between solutions to help drivers see while not compromising other’s safety.
Headlights are regulated and tested by brightness, not power consumption, so it’s already what you suggest. The problem is brightness is tested using a few very standardized tests.
LED arrays make it easier to engineer uneven brightness throughout the area of the light beam, e.g., dimmer in the middle than the outside, dimmer on the left sides, etc. This means manufacturers can make headlights that are overall brighter than allowed but can still pass tests as the region tested by regulators is designed to be dimmer, so the test results are acceptable.