The Trump administration framed the effort as one of safety and deregulation at once, promising to bolster driver safety, cut red tape and embrace new technology. NHTSA Administrator Jonathan Morrison said today’s standards keep automakers from deploying the latest safety-improving lighting technologies, and he described the new approach as collaborative. What the agency did not say is whether the rules it eventually writes will make the roads feel any less blinding to the people who have been complaining about them for years.
What the Agency Says It Will Examine
The announcement lists five areas of work. Regulators will look at the role modern headlighting plays in glare for other road users, and revisit the rules for LEDs, dusk sensors, automatic high beams and replaceable light sources. They will study how headlamp height and aim affect what a driver can actually see, streamline test procedures for plastic optics and replaceable lenses, and work to harmonize American requirements with international standards.
Secretary of Transportation Sean P. Duffy will appoint up to 18 stakeholders to the committee, drawn from lighting manufacturers, equipment associations, safety organizations, research institutions and engineering groups. The public has until November 9, 2026 to comment on the scope of the effort and the balance of the committee, or to nominate members, through regulations.gov under Docket No. NHTSA-2026-1981.
The last time NHTSA convened a committee like this, in the mid-1990s, the subject was headlamp aiming, and the work produced a 1997 final rule. Federal brightness limits have changed little since, according to reporting on the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s research. In that quarter century, the American fleet has moved from halogen bulbs to LEDs, and from sedans to sport utility vehicles and pickups that carry their lights higher off the pavement.
The Complaint Desk Has Been Busy
Drivers did not wait for a press release. A survey conducted by AAA from February 5 to 8 of this year, covering 1,092 U.S. adults, found that six in ten drivers consider headlight glare a problem after dark, and that 73 percent of those drivers believe it has worsened over the past decade. Of those who notice glare, 92 percent point to oncoming headlights as the main offender, and roughly a third are also bothered by lights in their mirrors. AAA’s Greg Brannon called the issue “a major source of frustration” for millions of drivers and blamed a mix of new lighting technology and taller vehicles.
The numbers carry telling details. Drivers who wear prescription glasses reported glare at 70 percent, against 56 percent of those who do not. Women reported it more often than men, 70 percent to 57 percent. Pickup drivers, who sit highest, were least likely to complain, at 41 percent, compared with 66 percent of everyone else. Age and driver height were not statistically significant. The survey carries a margin of error of about four percentage points.
The frustration is not new to NHTSA. Reporting by NBC News found that the agency has been receiving consumer complaints about glare since 2001 and has been researching the subject since at least 2005. When it finally approved adaptive driving beam headlights in 2022, the agency acknowledged the “numerous complaints from the public” it had received. Overseas, the story is similar. A 2025 U.K. Department for Transport study found that 96 percent of respondents thought at least some headlights were too bright, and as recently as August, India’s road ministry was reported to be weighing a 6,500 Kelvin ceiling on headlamp color temperature.
What the Crash Data Says, and Doesn’t
Here the picture gets complicated, and any honest account has to say so. In October, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety published a study of police-reported crashes across 11 states and found that glare was cited in only 0.1 to 0.2 percent of nighttime crashes, a rate that barely moved even as headlights got brighter. Out of roughly 24 million crashes examined, fewer than 150,000 had glare coded as a contributing factor at all, and most glare-related crashes happened in daylight, with the sun low on the horizon. Nighttime glare crashes skewed toward older drivers, older vehicles and undivided, low-speed roads, and lane departures were the most common response.
IIHS President David Harkey put the finding in context: glare can be uncomfortable, he said, but it contributes to far fewer crashes than “insufficient visibility.” The institute points to its own research showing that vehicles with good-rated headlights are involved in 19 percent fewer nighttime single-vehicle crashes and 23 percent fewer nighttime pedestrian crashes than those with poor-rated lights. Good-rated systems have gone from rare in 2016, when one of more than 80 evaluated earned the top mark, to about half of the 2025 models tested. Excessive glare in IIHS testing fell from 21 percent of 2017 headlights to 3 percent of 2025 models.
The institute’s researchers offered a thought about why the complaints feel so large against so small a crash footprint: any one vehicle’s headlights help only one driver see, while adding to the perceived glare of everyone else. And NHTSA itself has said in prior rulemaking that it does not know of a quantified relationship between glare dosage and crash risk. Crash statistics measure what ends in a collision. They do not measure the drivers who, as many say, have quietly stopped driving at night.
What Drivers Are Saying Online
Few places collect the grievances as vividly as Reddit. The community r/fuckyourheadlights, devoted to photos and videos of offending vehicles, has been reported to have tens of thousands of members. But the complaint is just as visible in ordinary local forums. An April thread in r/maryland, preserved in a third-party archive, drew more than 500 upvotes and 150 comments after a driver wrote that oncoming lights were so intense his vision went splotchy, as if he had looked at the sun.
The replies read like a field guide to the problem. One commenter described being blinded in the rain by large trucks in the opposite lane, calling the setup superb visibility for the truck’s driver and glare blindness for everyone else. Others singled out the blue-white color of modern LEDs as piercing, with one naming a particular Japanese automaker as the worst offender. A commenter with a vision condition said glare had pushed them to give up most night driving; another said yellow-tinted glasses were the only way to manage it, and even then not always. Many described the daily routine of tilting rearview mirrors away, shading side mirrors with a hand, or hanging back to let a bright vehicle pass.
Diagnoses varied. Several blamed aim, arguing that a great many American vehicles have lamps that are set too high or are out of alignment. Others blamed cheap aftermarket bulbs swapped into housings never designed for them, and one commenter said a parts counter had asked how bright they wanted a replacement. A few argued, as a theory, that IIHS ratings pushed manufacturers to chase maximum distance visibility at others’ expense, a claim the institute’s own crash data complicates. And one commenter observed that federal rules had until recently kept adaptive headlights, common overseas, off American cars. Not everyone agreed there is a crisis; one owner of a new vehicle reported almost no glare and credited factory glass treatments and an auto-dimming mirror.
The Technology That Was Supposed to Help
That last complaint points to the heart of the matter. Adaptive driving beam headlights use sensors and arrays of individually controlled LEDs to carve shadows around other vehicles while keeping high-beam light on the road. Toyota petitioned NHTSA to permit them in 2013. They have been sold in Europe since 2012, and NBC News reported that they are available in every major automotive market except the United States. NHTSA finally approved them in 2022, after a decade of work.
But approval has not meant arrival. Industry voices argued at the time that the final rule held adaptive systems to higher glare standards than conventional lights, and that the test scenarios required new lamp designs rather than simply switching on hardware already installed on some imported luxury models. Automakers also asked the agency to reconsider parts of the rule. The new negotiated rulemaking, with its focus on automatic high beams and global harmonization, reads in part as an effort to clear that bottleneck.
Meanwhile, the existing rulebook has its own gaps. One analysis in The Regulatory Review notes that the standard defines no glare limits in lux for conventional headlights, as it now does for adaptive ones, and that only ten states require headlight alignment checks at inspection. IIHS’s David Aylor has acknowledged that the way glare limits are evaluated does not account for lamps mounted on an actual vehicle, even though height on trucks and SUVs has a “big influence” on what other drivers experience.
Enforcement tells its own story. In July, NHTSA denied a Tesla petition that sought to avoid a recall of nearly 20,000 Model 3 and Model Y vehicles whose headlights may exceed maximum lighting levels, rejecting the company’s contention that glare risk was inconsequential. In 2022, it turned down a similar request from General Motors involving some 820,000 vehicles.
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