Bright Lights, Big Problem

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Marie Gluesenkamp Perez likes her car. For a congresswoman, it’s not exactly flashy — a 2013 Volkswagen Jetta — but it has an upgraded engine, which is a boon when she’s driving the winding roads near her home in rural Skamania County, Washington. “A Dieselgate Jetta,” she told me on a video call, referring to one of the biggest scandals in automotive history, when VW was found to be rigging emissions tests. “It’s pretty sweet.”

At 37, Gluesenkamp Perez may not be seasoned as a Democrat in Congress, but she’s a veteran when it comes to driving. Prior to flipping the Republican seat for Washington’s Third District in 2022, she helped run Dean’s Car Care, an auto-repair and machine shop in Portland, Oregon, that she owns with her husband, Dean Gluesenkamp. The trivial matters of the auto industry — the thrills and punishments of a driving life — are closer to her than to your average politician, especially ones who spend most of their careers being chauffeured around in Town Cars. So it wasn’t surprising when she recently brought a sliver of that industry to Capitol Hill.

“I don’t know how many of you drive and how often,” she said in the House Appropriations Committee last July, “but I will tell you there is a plague in this country of headlight brightness.”

Gluesenkamp Perez had noticed the legions of scorned redditors and heard the nationwide watercooler talk bubbling up, but mostly she had just seen it for herself: The new class of LED headlights, which has largely replaced halogen headlights over the past decade, is prone to scorching eyeballs. For many, that has made driving at night deeply unpleasant or, worse, dangerous. “It is shockingly bright,” she told the committee members, presenting a headlight amendment for them to vote on. “If you look back to halogen lightbulbs, you’re reaching somewhere around 700 to 1,200 lumens. New LED technology — these sons of bitches get to, like, 12,000 lumens.”

The amendment, which urges the Department of Transportation to investigate the headlight issue, passed through committee unanimously across party lines. And in September, Republican assemblyman Brian Miller introduced the Brightness Emission Analysis for Motorist Safety Act (a.k.a. BEAMS) in the New York State Assembly, calling for its own headlight investigation.

“It’s talked about at the gas station,” Miller told me over the phone. “It’s talked about the kitchen table; it’s talked about in our offices. People call all the time.” Miller, a former engineer who puts 40,000 miles a year on his car in the upstate region he represents, said the new headlights just “bother” him.

How it got to the point where Democrats and Republicans are joining arms about anything at all is hard to fathom. And to someone like Gluesenkamp Perez, that makes headlights an opportunity to appeal to both sides of her purple congressional district. She presents it as an opportunity to demonstrate to restive constituents that government can still accomplish something.

“Some people are annoyed with me for talking about this when things feel so broken in a big-picture sense to so many people,” Gluesenkamp Perez said. “But if you can’t be faithful in the small things, how are you gonna be faithful in the big things? I would say it’s important to keep the muscle memory of an effective government alive.”

Glaring headlights should rank among the most straightforward issues a sitting congresswoman will ever consider — and Congress does have the power to mandate federal regulations affecting realms like car safety. But even recent high-priority congressional mandates, like drunk-driving prevention technology, are piling up in an automotive regulatory gridlock that has been building since the dawn of auto regulation. So what chance does a relatively minor nuisance have to be fixed, even if it’s one that many can quite literally see for themselves?

“What you’re seeing in headlights is a symptom of a much bigger problem,” David Friedman, acting administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in 2014, told me. The muscle memory Gluesenkamp Perez wants to keep alive may already be dead.

It has been 40 years since the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration updated the requirements in Safety Standard No. 108, its set of rules for vehicle lighting.

For many years, those rules seemed to work just fine. They were in tune with the nature of halogen bulbs, which adhere to a basic tenet of luminescence that traces back to the flame: The light is emitted equally in all directions. Really, the challenge with halogens was finding ways to make that single point of light stronger without creating glare for other drivers. “When I was administrator,” said Joan Claybrook, who ran NHTSA from 1977 to 1981, “there was a lot of concern that headlights weren’t bright enough.”

LEDs changed all that. Rather than the 360-degree glow of halogens, light-emitting diodes can be pointed in specific directions. What you see in an LED headlight is many little light sources, like computer pixels, which can be programmed to complex, powerful outputs the same as a television. But the outdated NHTSA regulations cover only specific parts of headlights, so by using LED technology, car companies can simply turn down the brightness on those parts while jacking it up beyond previous comprehension in the unregulated sections. The benefit is that LEDs are stronger and illuminate farther than ever before, creating something like permanent daylight in front of cars. The cost is that they bring a culture of aggrieved drivers surrounding those cars, who frequently feel bullied off the road.

If you ask NHTSA officials, they’ll say they’re quite happy with the current state of headlights, thanks. “The data we’ve assessed indicates that legally compliant LED headlamps improve visibility and have contributed positively to road safety,” the agency said in a statement. As for the pitchfork-wielding mob outside its office, NHTSA noted that it is “aware that some motorists have expressed concerns about LED-headlamp glare” but deferred responsibility to other contributing factors largely outside its control: “inappropriate use of high beams, illegal aftermarket lamps, improperly maintained lamps, misaligned lamps.”

The public thinking regarding headlights, however, is much easier to parse. Drivers’ frustration has clearly been increasing for years — you can partially track this via the frequency and popularity of certain memes — and began to boil over around the time I first covered the increasing brightness in a piece for The Ringer at the end of 2024. My initial story was an attempt to assess whether there was a problem; by the time I found myself responding to a litany of incensed listener comments and complaints on NPR as the country’s presumptive senior headlight reporter, it seemed self-evident that there was. (“Most of the time,” one caller, a courier in Minneapolis, said, “I’m just driving blind, hoping something doesn’t run in front of me, because it’s impossible.”) Still, the question I couldn’t quite answer was what would be done about it.

Car companies can dial back the brightness of their product at any time, of course. But with NHTSA mostly absent from the conversation, manufacturers are more influenced by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a nonprofit funded by insurance companies with the goal of decreasing the overall number of crashes. (Fewer crashes = fewer payouts.) The IIHS has made driving much safer over the decades — those images in your head of cars thrown against walls with dummies flailing inside are likely from an IIHS operation — and attaining a high-grade safety rating is a vital marketing goal for car companies. On this matter, the IIHS believes brighter lights actually prevent collisions, based on its 2021 study suggesting that cars with “good”-rated headlights saw a 19 percent reduction in nighttime single-vehicle crashes.

It stands to reason that brighter headlights would benefit drivers in certain conditions, especially on the dark, isolated roads where single-car crashes often happen. (Imagine if James Bond had just slightly more time to react to Vesper in the road in Casino Royale.) But relying on single-car accidents doesn’t tell the whole story. For one thing, the IIHS hasn’t incorporated multicar pileups into its decision-making. The current approach also doesn’t grapple with the possibility that encouraging maximum brightness on all cars may help fuel an increasingly antagonistic dynamic between trigger-happy drivers. (Shooting-involved road-rage incidents increased more than 400 percent from 2014 to 2023.) If brighter headlights are such a good thing, why do they generate such hostile feelings?

“You read these defensive statements from NHTSA and [the IIHS],” Gluesenkamp Perez said, “and it’s like, how many jackasses with this spreadsheet do you need to tell you that you’re the crazy one and that everything’s fine?” In Congress, she noted, there has been a “resounding agreement” that something has gotten out of hand here. “If the science says there’s no problem,” she said, “and clearly there is a problem, then maybe it’s the science that’s the problem — the way that you’re defining the problem so narrowly so that it’s not your problem.”

Prior to 1966, there was no focused effort to control automobile safety, and that was the way the carmakers liked it. After Ralph Nader started nipping at the heels of the auto industry with Unsafe at Any Speed, his 1965 book that functioned as an exposé of the avoidable dangers on American roads, General Motors responded by tailing him with private eyes and tapping his phone. When that didn’t dig up any useful dirt, it hired a prostitute to attempt picking him up in order to catch him in a compromising situation.

“He’s very shy, and he’s particularly shy of women who ask him to come up to their apartment and have some fun,” remembered Claybrook, who worked with Nader around this time. “He figured out what they were doing.”

When she was just 29, Claybrook was tasked with capitalizing on Nader’s momentum by helping draft the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966, which eventually begat NHTSA itself. A decade later, Jimmy Carter appointed Claybrook to run the young agency, then struggling to force automakers to incorporate basic safety features like seat belts and airbags. (For many years, there was a persistent myth that airbags were actually dangerous.)

Claybrook is 88 now and still settling into her retirement from the consumer-rights advocacy group Public Citizen, which she ran for 27 years. Talking over the phone, she swerves back and forth between the tone of a fierce bureaucrat ready for a fight and a weathered activist reminiscing about her past battles with car companies. As Claybrook explained it, a perpetual lack of resources meant NHTSA could never regulate automakers effectively. “The agency has always been overwhelmed,” she said, sighing. “Always had too much to do.” Even today, the budget of NHTSA ($1.6 billion) pales in comparison with that of the Federal Aviation Administration ($27 billion) despite the latter being responsible for the same type of consumer protection, just in the air.

“So many more people are exposed to risk on the road every day, and yet we’re spending less than one tenth of the money to protect us,” said Friedman, the former acting NHTSA head. Each year, 40,000 Americans die on the highways, and it’s a fact of life. “How many fatalities do we tolerate a year from airlines?” Friedman asked.

There has been progress over the years: Traffic fatality rates fell dramatically in the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st. But those gains have since flipped into reverse. Death rates reached a 16-year high in 2021 and remain about 20 percent higher than a decade ago despite a slight recent downtick. Pedestrian fatality rates, meanwhile, jumped 70 percent from 2010 to 2023, reaching a 40-year high in 2022 before leveling off and decreasing slightly in the past two years. And that’s just the most comprehensible end of the damage. “I always try to push on the fact that it’s not just deaths,” added Ann Carlson, acting administrator of NHTSA from 2022 to 2023. “It’s extraordinary the number of people injured in crashes whose lives are forever altered. It’s a huge social problem.”

In response to this stagnation, Congress has started growing restless. Democratic senators like Elizabeth Warren, Ben Ray Luján, and Edward Markey have recently tangled with NHTSA in an attempt to get it to enact new regulation mandates such as crash-avoidance technology. But the mandates keep ending up in purgatory — development hell via federal dysfunction.

And almost all of this was happening before the latest Trump administration: before DOGE hypercharged the broader ongoing Republican effort to strip regulatory agencies down to the studs, and before Elon Musk, owner of one of the largest auto manufacturers, Tesla, began work that included a 10 percent reduction of staff at NHTSA, an already beleaguered agency that is supposed to be a watchdog over matters that affect Tesla’s business, like self-driving cars. (The recent on-road deployment of “Mad Max” autopilot mode indicates how concerned Tesla is with regulation.)

“I did say during the first Trump administration that there would be a definite pushback and ultimately the pendulum would swing,” said Thomas O. McGarity, author of the 2022 book Demolition Agenda: The Dismantling of American Government … and How We Can Stop It. “But at some point you destroy the institutions. That’s what they’re really doing now. You destroy the institutions, and they’re going to be very hard to put back together again. It’s like breaking eggs.”

When Claybrook took over NHTSA in the ’70s, she wanted to solve the problem of dim headlights but instantly realized it was a lost cause. “Carmakers don’t want any agency telling them how to design their lights,” she said. “So I poured most of our energy and engineering talent into crash protection and saving lives.”

The modern-day NHTSA claims it is open to finding a solution. “We are in the process of assessing a broader array of studies on LED headlamps,” the agency said in a statement, “and will consider taking additional steps depending on those findings.” Beyond that, it’s difficult to glean much more about its thinking; a spokesperson declined to provide anyone at the agency for an interview and did not respond to specific questions. The car companies don’t want to talk about this either. I attempted to reach more than a dozen, and none provided an interview. Only one, Audi, offered anything resembling a comment but solely to emphasize a previously shared stance: that the solution is adaptive driving beam, a technology not yet cleared in the U.S., which uses sensors to determine when and where to push additional light on the road.

But in Europe, where ADB has been in use for over a decade, driver aggravation from overly bright headlights is also reaching a breaking point. A 2025 study from the U.K.’s Department for Transport found that 97 percent of drivers were “regularly or sometimes distracted” by oncoming vehicles and that 96 percent thought “most or some headlights were too bright.” The department is now planning a “new assessment of the causes and remedies.” ADB, which functions by turning the high beams on and off, clearly hasn’t solved the problem. If anything, it’s making things worse.

“The advent of the adaptive beam technology — that shit is expensive and pretty fragile in a lot of ways,” Gluesenkamp Perez said, getting riled up. “And then people will say, ‘We don’t need to have reasonable lumen standards. We just need this new technology.’ And it’s this new thing and this new thing and this new thing.”

Gluesenkamp Perez related the problem to a different bipartisan issue she’s concerned with: diminished specialized trades and critical thinking in the face of an increasing reliance on computers to do all the thinking for us. “We’ve replaced skill with some kind of technological promise,” she said, “and without a consideration of what’s useful in the first place or what we should be pursuing as a society. Like, if you need to see that far ahead, maybe you should slow down.”

And even if blazing headlights are technically safer than the alternative, that doesn’t mean LEDs can’t be regulated in ways that make them less liable to visually assault the public. “I would bet that we can figure out a way to have added brightness which protects other drivers and pedestrians,” said Friedman, “without causing a massive glare problem.” But that would require the attention of NHTSA long enough to figure out a reliably effective balance across hundreds of millions of vehicles in various shapes, sizes, and conditions.

In the meantime, those who see blinding headlights as a societal scourge watch and wait for something to change. Frustrated lawmakers are mostly in the same boat. Whether Gluesenkamp Perez’s congressional amendment can help accomplish anything remains to be seen. It passed into law in February as part of a larger government-funding package, but the provision is just a mandate to research — the same as Assemblyman Miller’s in New York — so it could be years before anything is determined, let alone interpreted into a piece of NHTSA regulation.

Mark Rosekind, NHTSA administrator from 2014 to 2017, told me “anything that moves it on the list of visibility” within the agency is a positive. And all the former NHTSA administrators I spoke to emphasized their belief that the people in the agency care about what they do and want to help. They just have to work with the hand they’re dealt.

One saga that stuck with Rosekind was his effort to get seat belts mandated in school buses. “There were so ‘few’ students dying every year,” he said, throwing up exasperated air quotes, “that it did not justify the cost benefit of how you would ever get a regulation through.” Instead, he explained, the agency put out a policy statement declaring its stance that there should be seat belts on school buses. “And you know what?” he asked. “Some people started making changes just because the agency took a stand.”

Not an ideal solution, Rosekind seemed to emphasize, but it’s much better than nothing. The agency was trying to find a way. As a driver on the road, sometimes you just have to avert your gaze and hope it knows what it’s doing.