It’s not my imagination... car headlights really ARE brighter

I had yet another bloody birthday this week, and am reaching that stage in life where totting up my minor ailments can leave me running out of mildly arthritic fingers to count them on.

Dodgy left kneecap, check. A tooth filling (oh, the shame), check. Waking up at 4am for no apparent reason, check. Being irritated by distracting noises like kids arguing and wives asking how my day has been, check.

So, I naturally figured that another sad sign of middle age had descended when I started noticing in these dark winter months that car headlights were getting brighter.

Like, ridiculously brighter - a headache-inducing, eye-averting dazzle - and these are not the cars’ main beams, but just their normal, everyday headlights.

“Bloody headlights weren’t like this in my day,” I would whinge to my kids, before bemoaning yet another faculty that was clearly in decline. Perhaps I was displaying the early symptoms of cataracts.

However, my eyesight wasn’t an issue. In fact, I discovered this week that the brightness of car headlights has become a universal problem.

I was relieved, then actually shocked to read that car headlights really have gone a hell of a lot brighter in the past decade - and it’s all down to the fashion for LED lights.

LED stands for Light Emitting Diode, a phrase which is almost as headache-inducing as the night-time glares, but these lights are actually good for the environment, as they have a longer life-span and are more energy-efficient.

You may have noticed this in your homes in recent years, as LED bulbs last for ages compared to the old halogen ones, and the days when you would change a bulb every week in the winter are gone.

That’s the good news.

The bad news - and I can’t understand why the authorities didn’t see this coming - is that when LED lights began to be introduced as standard on new cars, as has been the case for the past few years, they can cause a glare in the eyes of other traffic users, in other vehicles, on bicycles, and for pedestrians too.

Yes, they may allow the driver to see better in the dark, but they dazzle and even temporarily blind motorists, whether coming at you full-on, or behind you and dazzling your mirror.

To give the scientific reasoning behind this, the human eye reacts to the so-called ‘blue light’ from LEDs differently to the ‘yellow light’ of conventional halogen headlights, and these can be a source of glare.

There is another aggravating issue: The increasing popularity of SUVs and cars that sit higher off the ground means that their headlights are located higher up, so the level and angle of the light is more likely to be an issue for other drivers. They aren’t lighting up the low road ahead, but lighting up your cornea, in other words.

And, of course, if you already have deteriorating eyesight, especially if you have a cataract, a dazzling light will only exacerbate that.

This is clearly a bigger issue in darker rural areas of the country, which might explain why we don’t hear our mainly metropolitan politicians raising it.

One unfortunate consequence, as revealed in a survey in the UK this week, is that a quarter of motorists avoid driving at night now because of the intensity of these new-fangled headlights, and a further 22% say they would prefer not to drive at night, but have no choice.

The study was carried out by the RAC, and comes after Cork senior citizens advocate Paddy O’Brien said loneliness was the single biggest problem for elderly people.

If dazzling lights are keeping them from the roads, then their loneliness will only intensify.

The RAC study said almost all drivers agree that vehicle headlights can be too bright, and 61% said the problem has got worse in the last year - this is down to the fact that more and more new cars are hitting the roads with LED lights, and older ones are being phased out.

Some 16% of motorists complain of suffering headaches, migraines and eye pain because of the LED issue, and 59% say it makes driving more difficult and uncomfortable - a figure that rises to 65% for those aged 65-74.

Drilling down into the safety aspect, the RAC study revealed 79% of drivers find it hard to distinguish when some vehicles with LED lights are indicating, 77% say it is difficult to judge the position of incoming vehicles, 74% struggle to judge the speed of such vehicles, and 67% find it hard to tell how far away they are.

This adds up to a huge source of added danger on our roads.

So, aside from phasing out LED lights on cars, which wouldn’t go down well with the green lobby, how can we lessen the impact of these dazzling beams?

One piece of advice if a car with LED lights is dazzling you from behind, is to move your mirror to its ‘night-time setting’ to darken the effect.

However, when a dazzler is heading for you, there is little you can do other than shield your eyes and avoid staring at them straight on. Hardly a safe option.

In this instance, you might be advised to invest in special night-driving glasses which can be obtained from an optician.

I wonder if LED lights are partly responsible for the recent increase in road deaths and accidents in Ireland, along with other obvious causes such as speeding and drivers being distracted by their phones.

I would suggest so, since between 2013 and 2022, bright or dazzling headlights were a contributory factor to around six fatal collisions and 280 collisions a year in the UK, according to research by the RAC.

The motoring organisation says more and more European countries are recognising that LED lights are an issue in road safety.

It hopes its study will put pressure on the UK government to take action and look into the colour, intensity and angle of lights.

Here’s hoping that somebody in Ireland sees the light too.