Driving after dark was once a refuge. Late at night, there is no traffic, just the meditative sound of the miles passing by. But these days, my eyes can’t take it anymore. Even on a lonely road in the middle of the night, I can’t escape the obnoxious glare of the lights. A tailgating truck blinds my rearview mirror with flashing lights. Even in the distance—and even without light—the beams of cars in the oncoming lane make me squint instinctively. America’s roads are now full of smart-level lights, and no one is happy. Just check for any virus screeds on the Reddit forum “r/manyour headlights.”
Other people’s headlights are a pet peeve almost as old as cars: everyone else’s headlights are too bright, too messy, and deliberately directed into your eyes. But the problem is worse than ever, and that’s because of LED lights that have taken over automotive design over the past decade or so. Not only can they remove more lumens than old halogen lamps; Their light is also bright and blue, which makes it feel like an attack on the eyeballs. Car companies have an incentive to install bright lights that make drivers think Oh man, you can see everythingJonathan Elfalan, director of vehicle testing at Edmunds, told me. The driver who wins in the opposite lane is not their problem.
Around the world, high-powered headlights are less threatening. That’s partly due to America’s preoccupation with crossovers, SUVs and pickup trucks. The new cars are longer and bigger than before, which means they light up everywhere but down on the road ahead. “There’s a good chance the car behind you is shining its lights on your windshield,” Sean Tucker, managing editor of Kelley Blue Book, told me. Still, some countries have had something we haven’t had in a long time: advanced headlights that can illuminate the road ahead without burning another driver’s retina. Although American cars are loaded with technology—many new models now come with self-driving features and AI aids—we’ve been missing a simple feature that could alleviate the problem of blinding headlights.
This technology is called “adaptive beam driving,” or ADB. Adaptive headlights analyze the road ahead and adjust accordingly: In a bend, the lights will follow the road instead of shining straight ahead. They can also detect oncoming vehicles and only dim the lights directed at fellow drivers. This is possible because an LED light bulb is not a single bulb that turns on or off but is made up of a multitude of specific sizes. Self-aligning beams have been popular in Europe for over a decade and are used in Asia and Canada. In the US, only a few cars have them.
Blame the often strict and mysterious world of American car regulations. Decades ago, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration mandated that cars need to have separate low and high beams. Variable axes—which are inherently different—do not fit into that binary. Congress finally amended the law in 2021, a move intended to legalize the best way. That didn’t happen. NHTSA got to write new regulations, and instead of adopting international standards, it drafted a different set of stricter rules. (An NHTSA spokesperson referred me to position (which the agency explained a few years ago, which says that the European test of the flexible bulbs does not have the “objective performance criteria” needed to approve the technology for vehicles in the United States)
The result of this confusion is that even though new cars in the U.S. have the technology in place to flash blinding lights—possibly activated via a simple over-the-air update, Tucker said—that’s illegal. This gets even more ridiculous when you consider how a simple fix solved the previous lighting problems. Even new entry-level cars come with an automatic dimming feature to turn off the headlights when another vehicle approaches, reducing traffic violations.
Instead of turning on technology that already exists, the way for car companies to fix America’s headlights involves reinventing their smart headlights. In 2024, Rivian put the technology on its pickups and SUVs and became the first automaker to enable acceptable lighting in the United States. That happened just after Rivian. recreated the entire electronic and computer setup in its cars, a move that gave the company enough control over the sizes of LED lights to satisfy American regulators. “The standard is really demanding,” Carlos Montes Relanzon, Rivian’s general manager of lighting systems, told me.
The solution is powerful, if terrifying. When I test drove Rivian’s R1S SUV on a California beach last summer, I couldn’t stop staring at the occasional hole in my headlight—a dark spot that would look like the headlight had burned out, then disappeared. At first not knowing that Rivian had launched the feature, I wondered if the car might be defective. When I finally realized what the SUV was up to and began to monitor the performance of the technology, I was reassured by the fact that the Rivian could recognize other vehicles and turn off the lights while there were still a few seconds, instead of waiting until the oncoming driver was close to me.
The rest of America’s auto industry is coming along slowly. Last year, Tesla introduced dynamic beams in its update Model Y cross. And last month, Audi he announced that it would put dynamic beams in the 2027 Q9 SUV, which will debut in the US later this year. An Audi spokesperson told me that the company is holding out hope that the NHTSA will come around and agree to adopt international standards. For now, other car companies will also have to absorb it and sink money into rebuilding the adaptive headlights of their American cars. (I asked Ford, Chevrolet, Toyota, and Mercedes about when automakers might introduce adaptive bulbs, but received no further details.)
Unless the U.S. suddenly allows automakers to flash technology that’s already well-established in many cars, the lights that flash today will remain. Cars now remain on the road longer than before—for an average of 13 years—so even if every new car today started offering convertible headlights, the journey to replace old cars with new ones that have better lights would be a long one. Fancy feature or not, variable axles don’t tend to convince many drivers to trade in an old car for a new one. After all, they improve the life of another drivers more than helping the car owners themselves.
This is evident when you are on the highway Good Samaritan. As I drove through the blackness of Route 101 in Rivian, passing outposts like King City and Soledad, my car automatically dimmed its headlights for one oncoming driver after another. Mile after mile, their lights still gave me goosebumps.
