Decoder Ring | The Glaring Problem with Headlights

Summary

Decoder Ring | Blinded by the Headlights: A Comprehensive Summary

Release Date: May 21, 2025

In this engaging episode of Decoder Ring, host Willa Paskin delves into the pervasive issue of headlight glare in modern vehicles. Through a blend of personal anecdotes, expert interviews, and community insights, the episode unpacks the technological advancements in automotive lighting and their unintended consequences on road safety and driver well-being.

---

1. Nate Rogers' Personal Struggle with Headlight Glare

The episode opens with journalist Nate Rogers sharing his growing frustration with overly bright headlights on the road. Initially dismissing incidents as isolated cases, Nate's concern intensifies as encounters with glaring lights become frequent and emotionally taxing.

[02:00] Daniel Stern: "...the lights will be so bright that they will kind of stagger you and knock you out of your senses."

Nate's persistent irritation leads him to document and photograph excessively bright headlights, seeking validation and solutions from his social circle.

---

2. The Evolution of Headlights: From Oil Wicks to LEDs

To understand the root of the problem, Nate consults Daniel Stern, the editor of the trade journal Driving Vision News, who has been passionate about headlights since childhood. Together, they trace the history of automotive lighting:

• Early Beginnings: The first headlights were rudimentary oil wick lanterns, primarily serving to alert others of a car's presence at night.

• Electric Headlights: Introduced in the early 20th century, these offered significant improvements but introduced glare issues reminiscent of modern problems.

• Sealed Beam Standards: In 1939, standardized sealed beam headlights were mandated, ensuring consistent beam patterns and reducing glare by controlling light dispersion.

• The LED Revolution: Starting in the late 2000s, LED (Light Emitting Diode) technology transformed headlights with higher efficiency, durability, and customizable lighting options.

[13:15] Paul Gatto: "The leading light of the 21st century."

However, this technological leap brought unforeseen challenges, particularly concerning the intensity and color of LED headlights.

---

3. The LED Headlight Dilemma

LEDs offer numerous advantages over traditional bulbs, including energy efficiency and versatility in design. Yet, their introduction into automotive lighting has exacerbated glare issues:

• Increased Brightness: LEDs can emit significantly more light, sometimes doubling the brightness compared to halogen counterparts.

  [16:37] Daniel Stern: "LEDs have the ability to be much more powerful than your standard light bulbs used to be."

• Color Temperature: Manufacturers often opt for a bluish-white hue for aesthetic appeal, but this increases perceived glare.

  [19:55] Willa Paskin: "Light with a greater content of blue wavelengths feels more glaring to us than light with less blue in it."

• Vehicle Size and Headlight Placement: Larger vehicles like SUVs and trucks position headlights at eye level for smaller cars, intensifying glare for other drivers.

• Headlight Alignment: Misaligned LED arrays can project excessive light into the eyes of oncoming drivers, compounding glare problems.

Despite these issues, regulatory bodies like the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) have been slow to enact measures addressing LED-related glare, often attributing problems to aftermarket modifications rather than systemic design flaws.

---

4. Grassroots Activism: The Rise of "Fuck Your Headlights"

Frustrated by the lack of regulatory action, software developer Paul Gatto initiates a subreddit titled "Fuck Your Headlights", aiming to rally drivers against excessive glare.

[24:07] Leon Naifak: "I would like to not be blinded at night and I would like to be not in danger of hitting someone because I'm blinded. I would really like that."

The subreddit quickly gains traction, amassing over 45,000 members who share personal stories, measure headlight outputs, and campaign for regulatory changes. Key figures like Leon Naifak, motivated by personal tragedy, emphasize the real-world dangers posed by intense headlights.

[27:46] Leon Naifak: "There's no way everybody is like all these soccer moms are going out and putting custom LEDs in their SUVs."

---

5. Safety Implications and Regulatory Challenges

The debate over LED headlights hinges on conflicting viewpoints:

• Pro-Brightness Arguments: Advocates argue that brighter headlights enhance night-time visibility, potentially reducing accidents by 19%, as cited by insurance non-profit studies.

  [30:44] Daniel Stern: "Brighter light could be saving lives."

• Anti-Brightness Concerns: Opponents contend that excessive brightness causes glare, leading to driver discomfort, distraction, and increased accident risks, especially for pedestrians.

  [34:11] Willa Paskin: "There are all kinds of plausible links between discomfort glare and traffic safety."

However, the lack of empirical data linking glare directly to accidents hampers regulatory efforts. The NHTSA remains hesitant to impose stricter brightness standards, often deferring blame to individual drivers modifying their vehicles.

---

6. Industry and Regulatory Inaction

Despite rising complaints and grassroots movements, both car manufacturers and regulatory bodies exhibit resistance to change:

• Car Manufacturers: Push for adaptive driving beam technologies that automatically adjust brightness but resist implementing measures to reduce overall headlight intensity or alter color temperatures.

• NHTSA: Continues to uphold existing regulations, attributing glare issues to aftermarket modifications rather than acknowledging a broader systemic problem.

[36:58] Leon Naifak: "They're not examining if it's too bright. They're not even examining if it's affecting you negatively on the road."

---

7. The Road Ahead: Collective Efforts and Future Prospects

The episode concludes on a note of cautious optimism, highlighting the growing awareness and collective action among drivers advocating for safer headlight standards. However, challenges remain due to regulatory inertia and the automotive industry's prioritization of aesthetics over safety.

[38:41] Daniel Stern: "Headlights have gotten so bright that they have made people feel like, well, screw this, I'm going to get mine too."

As the movement gains momentum, the hope is that increased visibility and persistent advocacy will prompt meaningful changes in headlight regulations, ultimately enhancing road safety for all.

---

Notable Quotes:

• Daniel Stern: "Brightness is not the same as intensity. Intensity is the amount of light. Brightness is a subjective impression." — [09:29]

• Willa Paskin: "Headlight glare has become the number one complaint of Americans on the road." — [07:57]

• Leon Naifak: "If it hadn't been a sedan that hit her, she would be dead." — [24:12]

• Paul Gatto: "The problem is that today's headlights are simply too bright." — [29:12]

---

Conclusion

Decoder Ring expertly navigates the complex interplay between technological innovation, regulatory frameworks, and consumer behavior in the context of automotive headlights. By shedding light on the often-overlooked issue of headlight glare, the episode underscores the need for informed advocacy and proactive policy-making to ensure that advancements serve the broader goal of road safety.

For those interested in exploring this topic further, Nate Rogers' in-depth article "Asleep at the Wheel in the Headlight Brightness Wars" is available on The Ringer, providing additional insights and comprehensive analysis.

Transcript

[Nordstrom Advertiser]

Summer's here and Nordstrom has everything you need for your best dress season ever. From beach days and weddings to weekend getaways and your everyday wardrobe. Discover stylish options under $100 from tons of your favorite brands like Mango Skims, Princess Polly and madewell. It's easy too, with free shipping and free returns in store. Order, pickup and more. Shop today in stores [e-mail] or download the Nordstrom app.

[Nate Rogers]

Today's episode is sponsored by NerdWallet's Smart Money podcast. Making financial decisions shouldn't feel like picking a new streaming show. There are too many options, it's too easy to fall for the hype, and you may end up wishing you'd done more research before committing. That's where NerdWallet Smart Money podcast comes in. Their finance journalists break down real world money decisions from from investing to home buying to credit cards with clear research backed insights. Make your next financial move with confidence. Follow NerdWallet's Smart Money podcast on your favorite podcast app and stay tuned later in the show to hear more about topics you can learn on Smart Money. Before we begin, this episode contains adult language Nate Rogers grew up in Los Angeles and over the years, like a proper Angeleno, he spent a lot of time in cars. But in the late 2010s he started to notice something on the road that felt new and unpleasant.

[Daniel Stern]

It happens in different degrees, but the experience is having somebody's lights of their car in an emotional sense, kind of running you off the road.

[Nate Rogers]

Nate would be driving and it would feel like the headlights of the car behind him or the one coming towards him or the one perpendicular to him at an intersection were blasting into his eyes.

[Daniel Stern]

And the lights will be so bright that they will kind of stagger you and knock you out of your senses.

[Nate Rogers]

The first dozen, two dozen times it happened, they shook it off. Maybe someone had forgotten their high beams.

[Daniel Stern]

Were on, but it happens so much that you start to notice it and then you start to fixate on it.

[Nate Rogers]

He started to take note of the headlights he encountered, trying to clock what exactly was going on with them as they sped by in the night. Everywhere he went, he could feel these lights in interfering with his ability to see and with his emotions.

[Daniel Stern]

I was feeling this uncomfortable, like road rage almost, you know, like, why am I getting blinded by all these headlights?

[Nate Rogers]

Nate started talking about it with friends and acquaintances every chance he got.

[Daniel Stern]

If I was in a car with somebody, whether I was driving or a passenger, I would just start complaining. And it felt a little bit like I had to explain to people or they would be like, shut up. Like, what are you? Like, it's not that big a deal.

[Nate Rogers]

Nate was not deterred. He kept obsessing over it, even taking photographs of particularly bright headlights and showing them to people.

[Daniel Stern]

I would get out my phone and be like, will you look at this? Like, pleading with people to witness my pain. And then for a long time, people would send me stuff whenever they saw anything about, like a meme about headlights or something. Like, two things I always get sent are like Nick Cage stuff and headlight stuff. You know, my friends just associate me with those things.

[Nate Rogers]

You just were in their mind. Like the headlight complaining guy.

[Daniel Stern]

Exactly. Yeah.

[Nate Rogers]

Now 2024, and increasingly, there was a lot of headlight stuff to send around me. Please ban those bright as headlights that like the new trucks and cars have. Because anytime I'm driving and I see.

[Daniel Stern]

Those, I can't fucking see everyone's lights are too bright.

[Nate Rogers]

Do you see these headlights 10 times brighter than the sun. People were no longer rolling their eyes about how bright headlights were and saying it was no big deal. They had started to complain too. It's literally causing more accidents. I mean, am I in the interrogation room right now? Are you sure those aren't.

[Willa Paskin]

You're bright? I don't think I can reach my destination. I think I've gone blind.

[Daniel Stern]

It seemed like there was kind of a critical mass happening where suddenly it was becoming something that other people were kind of joining in on. And it made me feel a little less crazy.

[Nate Rogers]

Nate happens to be a journalist. Up to this point, he largely wrote about arts and culture. But now, after years of aggravation and fixation, he realized he wasn't alone, and he needed some answers.

[Daniel Stern]

What is going on here? There has to be some sort of explanation.

[Nate Rogers]

Nate knew there was only one thing to do. He was going to have to figure out what the hell was happening with headlights for himself. This is decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. In a perfect world, the average person would think about car headlights almost never. It would just be a reliable tool, making us all a little safer while working well in the background. But this is not a perfect world. And whether you personally have noticed them or not, headlights have become the number one complaint of Americans on the road. The story of how and why that's happened is confounding and illuminating. In turn, it's about the interplay of an incredible technological breakthrough with market forces, regulatory failure, and human foibles, all of which have made headlights relevant to far more than just our roads. So today on Decoder Ring why are we in the dark about headlights? Foreign the temperatures are rising and summer's almost here. Tired of looking at the same tank, the same shorts, the same everything? Give your daily uniform an upgrade with quints. I have a great sleeveless dress from them that's nice and slinky and cool. You can dress it up, you can dress it down. It feels elevated, but without trying too hard. By working directly with top artisans and cutting out the middlemen, Quint gives you luxury without the markup. Like 100% European linen shorts and dresses from $30 Luxe Swimwear, Italian leather platform sandals and so much more. Treat your closet to a little summer glow up with quince. Go to quince.comdecoder for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. You can that's Q U I N C E dot com decoder to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com decoder Today's episode is sponsored by NerdWallet Smart Money podcast NerdWallet's finance journalists do the research so you don't have to. They break down the fine print, cut through misinformation, and give you real fact based insights so you can make smart financial moves. Smart Money covers a lot of financial questions and decisions. Recently they've aired some episodes about topics I'm curious about, like how to prepare for a potential financial crisis. Who's not worried about that? And they even have an episode about how to choose a savings account, which honestly, I think my savings account currently gives me 0.01 a year, so I could stand to learn about that to and that's just a small taste of the financial issues they explore on Smart Money. Make your next financial move with confidence. Follow Nerd Wallet Smart Money podcast on your favorite podcast app. So Nate Rogers decided to embrace his identity as the headlight complaining guy and take on the mystery of the glaring headlight.

[Daniel Stern]

I was like, well I'm already like attached to this so I might as well just like plant my flag.

[Nate Rogers]

It seems self evident to him that headlights had changed for the worse. But when he just like googled why very few articles turned up and the ones that did had no satisfying explanation. He wanted to talk to someone who was steeped in the entire history of headlights and he found him.

[Daniel Stern]

Daniel Stern. He's like the preeminent authority.

[Willa Paskin]

Here I am, I have this weird fixation with car lights and I've managed to turn it into my specialty.

[Nate Rogers]

Daniel Stern is the Editor of the trade journal Driving vision news. He has a great big bushy beard, and he's been captivated by headlights since he was seven years old. And he discovered that his camp counselor's vw beetle had two settings in a single headlamp.

[Willa Paskin]

And the idea of two filaments in one light bulb had not occurred to me at age 7. So I followed the poor guy around, asking pesky questions, and it's just like, yes, yes, Daniel, I have low and high beam. Can you go ride horses or something?

[Nate Rogers]

Daniel never got into horses, and he never got bored with headlights either. Daniel's the kind of person who always uses the correct automotive term like headlamp, which is the entire lighting unit at the front of the car, instead of headlight, which is just a part of the headlamp. He also gets a little exasperated when he hears a word that regular people use all, all the time when talking about headlights. Brightness. Daniel avoids it because brightness isn't something you can measure.

[Willa Paskin]

Brightness is not the same as intensity. Intensity is the amount of light. Brightness is a subjective impression. Something can look brighter than something else, irrespective of how much light is being put out.

[Nate Rogers]

For Daniel, the more precise way to think about the issue is in terms of glare. His reservations about terminology aside, he confirmed to Nate that there absolutely is a problem with headlights.

[Willa Paskin]

Glare complaints have been increasing all over.

[Nate Rogers]

The world, and actually, headlight glare is an issue we've been contending with for a long time.

[Willa Paskin]

Some drivers and their lights can be a hazard at night. As drivers like this approach, don't blind yourself by staring into their lights. You don't want to be in the dangerous plight of driving blindly, even for a moment. It's interesting, this problem, what we're discussing right now, Headlight glare and seeing this problem is almost as old as headlamps.

[Nate Rogers]

The first car was invented in 1885, and the first headlight introduced soon after. They were, by today's standards, laughably bad at helping drivers see they were literally oil wick lanterns.

[Willa Paskin]

Those were pretty much only to advise others at night that there's a motorcar coming down the road.

[Nate Rogers]

The first electric headlight wasn't much better.

[Willa Paskin]

By today's standards, these things were like a flashlight with an almost dead battery. But compared to oil wicks and lanterns, they were amazing.

[Nate Rogers]

By 1915, headlights were becoming a requirement in cars and starting to be more useful to drivers. And it was at this point that they stumbled into the problem that has dogged headlights ever since.

[Willa Paskin]

Even then, they were saying, you have to be really careful. If you encounter another car, you need to throw the towel over the headlamp so that they're not glared, because, boy, the glare potential of these new electric headlights is just astounding.

[Nate Rogers]

The problem, then, as now, is a goldilocks problem. Too little light and drivers can't see. But too much light and other drivers can't see. And while sheer power is important, as anyone who's ever had a flashlight pointed in their face knows, the issue is not just about the amount of light there is. It also matters where that light is.

[Daniel Stern]

Shining, because if it goes out too far in the left corner, that's going to be shining into an oncoming car or super high up in the headlight, and that's more likely to shine, you know, into the back of a car that's in front of you. We want as much light on the road as possible, because that is helpful, but we don't want the light in the wrong places.

[Nate Rogers]

In the first half of the 20th century, carmakers and regulators worked out a solution. They got very careful about where a headlight was permitted to show shine. In 1939, they mandated a standardized headlamp for all cars. The sealed beam headlight. It was a light bulb in a container that popped in and out of the front of your car. It wasn't perfect. It was a drag when the light bulb stopped working because you had to change the whole unit. But it kept glare and visibility in balance by putting light in the right places and keeping it out of the wrong ones.

[Willa Paskin]

They all put out the same beam pattern and same amount of glare, same amount of seeing. And occasionally there were articles saying, you know, we hate our headlights and we wish they were brighter or whatever, but everyone had pretty much the same headlamps.

[Nate Rogers]

This is how things were for generations, Even after the sealed beam was destandardized in the early 1980s to give consumers some more choices. Headlights basically just worked. And then, starting in the late 2000s, headlights, just like every other artificial light in our lives, were upended by a new technology.

[Paul Gatto]

The leading light of the 21st century.

[Nate Rogers]

The LED.

[Paul Gatto]

Short for light emitting diode.

[Nate Rogers]

LEDs are semiconductors, similar to the chips used in computers. They use far less energy than traditional lighting while providing flexibility and code color and intensity. The first commercial leds became available in the 1960s, but it was only in the 90s that a Japanese American electrical engineer figured out how to get them to make white light, an innovation for which he was awarded the Nobel prize in physics. It could well signal the biggest advance since well, since Thomas Edison invented the electric light bulb in 1879, LEDs, when.

[Daniel Stern]

They were introduced, were a completely different technology that experts in lighting basically consider the most dramatic change in lighting as long as we've been alive.

[Nate Rogers]

LEDs are radically different from traditional incandescent light bulbs.

[Daniel Stern]

You know, the type of thing that screws in above your head when you have an idea. That's like a.

[Nate Rogers]

That's, that's what I use my light bulbs for. Just screwing them in overhead when I have an idea.

[Daniel Stern]

Exactly.

[Nate Rogers]

Traditional bulbs emit light and insight by heating up a metal filament, the wire that you can see glowing in the center. Because they waste so much energy making heat, they're not that efficient at making light. LEDs, in comparison, are very efficient. They emit light not by turning it into heat, but by running electricity through a wafer like semiconductor that illuminates a whole lot of tiny controllable diodes.

[Daniel Stern]

It's like a little computer screen. If you zoomed in really close, you would see a bunch of little pixels. And basically they're programmed. If you go to Times Square or something, all these flashing lights, these are all LED screens, right?

[Nate Rogers]

In addition to being highly customizable and far more energy efficient, LEDs are also more durable, cost effective, and powerful than incandescent light bulbs. So starting in the late 2000s, their use was essentially mandated by the government. Well, the new year will mark the beginning of the end for the incandescent light bulb. The idea is to phase out regular bulbs and replace them with high tech LEDs by 2014.

[Willa Paskin]

I know light bulbs may not seem.

[Josh Levine]

Sexy, but this simple action holds enormous promise.

[Nate Rogers]

Over the course of the 2000 and tens, LEDs have replaced incandescent bulbs almost everywhere. Homes, public spaces, on Christmas trees, and in car headlights, where they specifically replaced incandescent halogen bulbs.

[Daniel Stern]

They put this on the front of cars and it just completely changed the way things work.

[Nate Rogers]

So it's fair to say that, like, the transition to LEDs is the biggest change in headlight history.

[Daniel Stern]

It is definitely fair to say that. I mean, maybe outside of the first time that anyone put a headlight on.

[Nate Rogers]

A car, LEDs have a lot to recommend them. But it is exactly when they started showing up in car headlights, that glare became a problem like never before.

[Willa Paskin]

Headlight glare is definitely and indisputably worse than it used to be.

[Nate Rogers]

So how exactly could LED headlights be causing glare? There's actually quite a heated debate about the answer to this question, because simply put, there are a lot of potential ways, but over the course of his reporting, Nate Rogers became focused on the most blindingly obvious power.

[Daniel Stern]

LEDs have the ability to be much more powerful than your standard light bulbs used to be.

[Nate Rogers]

And this has led to unprecedentedly powerful headlights. Headlights that most of us would describe as way too bright.

[Daniel Stern]

There are various ways to measure it, but the average brightness of a headlight at least doubled in the last 10 years.

[Nate Rogers]

LEDs now throw much more light down the road than halogen headlights ever could.

[Daniel Stern]

It's not like your imagination. You know, the reason that we're having this conversation right now is because brightness has gotten much higher and people noticed.

[Nate Rogers]

The sheer power and intensity. The brightness of current LED headlights is a problem in and of itself. It also exacerbates other problems with headlights. And there are other problems, like take the matter of car size. In America, cars have gotten much bigger in recent years. So much so that the headlights of an SUV or a truck are basically at the height of the eyes and mirrors of a driver of a smaller car. When headlights were weaker, it might not have mattered so much. But now the drivers of smaller cars are being blasted in the eyes by lights two times as powerful as they used to be. Of course, they're experiencing more glare. And then there's headlight aim, which Daniel Stern believes is the most important, important factor of all.

[Willa Paskin]

Headlight aim has been shown in a mountain of excellent quality research all over the world over many decades as the primary number one determinant not only of how well the equipped driver can see, but also of how much glare those lights are throwing around.

[Nate Rogers]

Remember, an old halogen headlight had one bulb that kind of like a flashlight was most powerful right in the center. So as long as that bright side center wasn't pointing right at your eye, you were pretty okay. But LED headlights are composed of all those very intense pixel like diodes that can be extremely powerful across the whole headlight, like a screen. When their aim is off even a little, you're not getting the relatively dim edge of the flashlight in your eyes anymore. You're getting the full intensity of a wall of light. And there are other, even less obvious explanations for why LED headlights are affecting us so much. One incredible one has to do with color. Since LEDs are basically little programmable computer screens, there is a vast range of colors you can dial up for each pixel.

[Willa Paskin]

This is a new freedom. We've never had this before. You can have a white LED which has a great deal of blue light in it. You can have a white LED that has almost no blue light in it.

[Nate Rogers]

And with this freedom, car manufacturers have mostly settled on making white headlights with a lot of blue in them. And they seem to have done this purely for design and marketing reasons. The bluish white looks cool, futuristic, tactical, expensive.

[Willa Paskin]

When you drive off at night, your next door neighbors are going to be envious because they see this cool blue light coming from the front of your new car.

[Nate Rogers]

And we can assume the motivation is aesthetic because it can't possibly be about safety.

[Willa Paskin]

The sort of the nub of it is that for any given intensity, light with a greater content of blue wavelengths feels more glaring to us than light with less blue in it. We could snap our fingers and have very effective led headlamps that were 60% less glaring without changing how well we can see by them simply by selecting a less blue light color. That's the other thing.

[Nate Rogers]

60%, 60%. Like if we were just like. They have to be yellowish.

[Willa Paskin]

They don't even have to be yellowish, they just have to be blue.

[Nate Rogers]

So bluish, the overall brightness, the size of cars, aim the blue tinge. These are just a few of the tricky aspects of LED headlights. There are others, including what regulatory agencies insist is the real problem. Not the headlights themselves, but individuals tricking out their cars with DIY aftermarket LED kits. LEDs you put on your car yourself. Today, we're taking the ultimate headlight upgrade task.

[Daniel Stern]

We're swapping out those dim, outdated stock.

[Nate Rogers]

Halogen bulbs with insane LED lights that are brighter, cooler, and just better. All of this might make it sound like we should just get rid of LEDs and the problem would be solved. But LEDs really are a more advanced technology. They are more efficient, longer lasting and versatile. And you can make LED headlights that are less powerful, less bright, less blue, harder to knock out of place. You can make ones that are better. So when we come back, we're going to get to the truly tricky part of this case, which is, if we can do all of that, why haven't we? It's smart to always have a few financial goals. What's a really smart one? You can set earning cash back on what you buy every day. With Discover, you can get this. Discover automatically matches all the cash back you've earned at the end of your first year. Seriously, all of it. Discover trusts you make smart decisions. After all, you listen to this show, see [e-mail] credit card. It's smart to always have a few financial goals. What's a really smart one? You can set earning cash back on what you buy every day. With Discover, you can get this Discover automatically matches all the cash back you've earned at the end of your first year. Seriously, all of it. Discover trusts you make smart decisions. After all, you listen to this show see [e-mail] credit card this episode is brought to you by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Choiceology is a show all about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. Each episode shares the latest research in behavioral science and dives into themes like can we learn to make smarter decisions? And the power of do overs. The show is hosted by Katie Milkman. She's an award winning behavioral scientist, professor at the Wharton School, and author of the best selling book how to Change. In each episode, Katie talks to authors, historians, athletes, Nobel laureates, and everyday people about why we make irrational choices and how we can make better ones to avoid costly mistakes. Listen and [e-mail] podcast or find it wherever you listen so Car headlights are glaring like never before. If you've noticed, it's not your imagination, but relatively few people are trying to do anything about it, and almost no one is trying to do as much about it as Paul Gatto.

[Leon Naifak]

I would like to not be blinded at night and I would like to be not in danger of hitting someone because I'm blinded. I would really like that.

[Nate Rogers]

Paul is a software developer from Newfoundland and he did not grow up with any particular interest in headlights or really even cars. But that all changed dramatically in the late 2010s.

[Leon Naifak]

The real way that I kind of got into this whole sphere was dating someone who was a pedestrian who was hit by a car.

[Nate Rogers]

Paul's girlfriend Liz was crossing the street at a crosswalk when a taxicab struck her, flinging her several feet in the air.

[Leon Naifak]

If it hadn't been a sedan that hit her, she would be dead.

[Nate Rogers]

She sustained serious injuries to her hip and shoulder, which required the insertion of a metal plate.

[Leon Naifak]

She was able to make a very, very good recovery, especially how bad the accident was. But that being said, she's a violinist. She was a violinist and she made a lot of money teaching and doing concerts and the metal plate in her arm prevents her from actually holding the violin up in that position comfortably for any length of time.

[Nate Rogers]

Paul and Liz only got together after the accident, but watching what she went through in its aftermath completely changed his perspective on cars.

[Leon Naifak]

Seeing her go through the court proceedings and the recovery and everything, and almost being blamed the entire time despite being a victim, that really radicalized me against the car centrism of our world.

[Nate Rogers]

And it was as he was being radicalized that he started to notice he was constantly getting glared by other cars.

[Leon Naifak]

Headlights almost brought in a new side of my personality that I'd never seen before, which is just unspeakable rage. And I never considered myself to be one of those guys who had full testosterone, just road raging all the time, just flipping off every little thing. But when these lights are in my face, suddenly the only thing I can think about is that I'm going to put someone in the same position Liz was in.

[Nate Rogers]

He's enraged because he's afraid, afraid of what a pair of headlights might cause him to do. And he's also infuriated because the person with the headlights will have no idea about the harm they've done.

[Leon Naifak]

I think you know what, they're going to drive off perfectly fine from this interaction. I might hit somebody and they will never know.

[Nate Rogers]

Paul soon found himself thinking and talking about headlights all the time.

[Leon Naifak]

I absolutely pissed off a couple friends because every time I'd have a couple beers I start complaining about it. Just like looking at the windows, like, God, can you believe those? Just becoming an old man about it.

[Nate Rogers]

Paul wanted to do more though, and to find people to do it with.

[Leon Naifak]

I think the only way that you're ever going to solve this problem is if you were to somehow create a mass movement about it.

[Nate Rogers]

And then in 2022, he came across a subreddit about headlights with only a single member. Paul took one look at its name and thought it could be the platform he was looking for. He asked to become a moderator.

[Leon Naifak]

I messaged him saying, I'm serious about it, let's do it. And he said, okay, I actually would.

[Nate Rogers]

Love you to just tell me the name of your subreddit.

[Leon Naifak]

It's fuck your headlights.

[Nate Rogers]

Paul started posting on Fuck youk Headlights immediately. Within a year it had 10,000 members.

[Leon Naifak]

When we first created that subreddit, it really was more just about complaining and letting people know that they weren't alone in this. There wasn't a coherent theory, like, why is this the way it is?

[Nate Rogers]

As Paul and the other members of the forum tried to figure out what was really going on, they ran into the same problem that Nate Rogers had. There was just very little reliable seeming information available about headlights.

[Leon Naifak]

Originally, when I started Googling this, all the articles that were present on the Internet blamed things, which can all be really be summed up as this problem is caused by individual choices and is not systemic.

[Nate Rogers]

According to car manufacturers, the problem was people driving around with misaligned headlights. They should get fixed or adding Those aforementioned illegal LEDs to the front of their cars. But Paul was skeptical.

[Leon Naifak]

There's no way everybody is like all these soccer moms are going out and putting custom LEDs in their SUVs. I just don't see it. The people who won't touch their own vehicle are suddenly putting in their own headlights.

[Nate Rogers]

I couldn't buy it, but the regulating body that could theoretically restrain the manufacturers. They also said there was nothing wrong with LED headlights. There just was no problem here.

[Leon Naifak]

I just felt so gaslit. This is dangerous. This is affecting everybody and the regulations do not protect you.

[Nate Rogers]

Paul and the other Redditors started measuring a headlight output, researching, debating. The forum became a bustling proving ground, its members sharing information, articles, evidence, ideas as well as videos, memes and calls to action. I am begging automobile manufacturers, you have got to do something about these LED headlights lights cuz it's out of control.

[Nordstrom Advertiser]

There is no reason for you to be lighting up my car like this.

[Nate Rogers]

What do you need permanent high beams for? Are you driving through the fog of war? Are you all on your way to light up a a high school football game? Back up or turn them down. Soon enough, Paul and the other members of the group began to come to a consensus about the overarching cause of glare on the road. One that seemed self evident and yet had been barely mentioned in the existence existing literature. Their consensus was that today's headlights are simply too bright.

[Leon Naifak]

The word brightness was almost, it almost seemed like a faux pas. Like the people in the regulatory positions were almost avoiding any mention of the word brightness.

[Nate Rogers]

But the more Paul learned, the more convinced he became that this was the problem. The LEDs being installed just had way too much power.

[Leon Naifak]

These lights are blinding everybody.

[Nate Rogers]

The fuck your headlights Subreddit now has a membership of 45,000 and counting, and it has become the hub of grassroots headlight activism, reaching out to politicians and journalists like Nate Rogers, all to get the word out that headlights are dangerously bright and something needs to be done about it.

[Leon Naifak]

We have both pro car people who want the roads to be fixed and anti car people who want a massive overhaul of our transit systems working together on the same thing. People want this.

[Nate Rogers]

For Paul and much of the Fuck youk Headlights community, the issue is straightforward. All you have to do is believe your eyes. It is plain to see that headlights are emitting way too much light. Reduce that light and the problem is largely solved. But remember how I described headlights as having a Goldilocks problem where you don't want too much light or too Little. You just want it in the right amount, in the right, right places. Well, the players who have made headlights so powerful have a defense against the charge. They have put too much light on the road. They say that what you should really be worried about, what's really dangerous, is too little light.

[Daniel Stern]

The most compelling argument that I heard against the citizen activist approach of it's too bright is that, yeah, it might be annoying to you, but brighter light could be saving lives. If there's a super bright headlight and it flashes a tree that's fallen in front of you and you see that just early enough to hit the brakes and not hit it, that is a brighter headlight doing something incredible. And if the offset of that is a headlight that is kind of annoying when you're in traffic, then maybe the balance is not being read correctly by people because they're only really focusing on the thing that annoys them.

[Nate Rogers]

And so in order to avoid hitting not only trees, but also animals and people, we should be willing to tolerate aggravation and even discomfort. That's the argument for more powerful headlights. They save lives. Whatever agitation they cause, it's worth it. So here we have two diametrically opposed arguments. One is that too much light is causing accidents and hurting people, and the other is that too little light is causing acc accidents and hurting people. Which is it? Well, the side that says there is too little light, the pro bright headlight side, if you will, which includes car manufacturers, would point to a road safety test. A well respected insurance nonprofit studied accidents very similar to the one Nate described. Single car collisions of the kind a driver is likely to encounter on a dark, empty road at night. And they found that headlights reduced accidents like this by 19%. That's a lot. So what safety tests can the people who say there is way too much light, who say that brighter headlights cause accidents, what can they point to? Well, it's here that we have come to a major wrinkle. Because they can't point to any safety tests because nobody knows how to measure the consequences of glare.

[Daniel Stern]

It's just so hard for them to figure out a way to empirically prove that headlight brightness is a hazard in the way that people sense that it is.

[Nate Rogers]

It is apparently nearly impossible to recreate a real world scenario in which dozens of drivers with cars of various sizes and headlight intensity are driving past and around each other. And then to isolate from that swirl of interaction the impact of glare alone.

[Willa Paskin]

It's really easy to prove that I hit that pedestrian because I couldn't see them because I didn't have enough light. That's very easy.

[Nate Rogers]

Daniel Stern, the headlamp expert who has been fascinated by them since he was.

[Willa Paskin]

A kid, it's much harder to prove that anything bad happened because I was glared. Obviously, if you are glared and you can't see that pedestrian or that curve in the road and you hit the pedestrian or you go flying off the road, well, there's your link between glare and traffic safety. But if you think about what a dynamic traffic situation looks like, it's going to be really hard to draw that line, because by the time the crash happens, the glare source is somewhere off behind you down the road.

[Nate Rogers]

It's even harder to measure the consequences of what's called discomfort glare. This is not the kind of glare that disables your sight. It just really bothers you. But Daniel says even that could be dangerous.

[Willa Paskin]

Maybe I'm stuck in front of a vehicle with very high glare headlights in my mirrors. If I feel like I can't see while I'm driving two and a half tons of steel at 70 miles an hour, I'm probably going to be somewhat panicked. I am probably fatigued. I might be enraged. And even if none of those are the case, I might very well unconsciously adjust my driving behaviors in unsafe ways. So there are all kinds of plausible links between discomfort glare and traffic safety, but trying to measure and quantify them is hideously difficult.

[Nate Rogers]

One area where the link between glare and safety is difficult to measure, but seems really important is pedestrian deaths. As headlights have gotten more powerful, pedestrian deaths have not gone down as you might expect they would. They have, in fact, skyrocketed. And this has not been the case in other countries, which have far more regulations on glare. Daniel cautions that this whole issue is extremely complicated. Other countries have a different approach to just about everything about traffic safety, but.

[Willa Paskin]

Still, it does raise sort of an uncomfortable. If US Headlamps and regulations are so superior to what the rest of the world uses, as US Regulators claim, then why are so many more American pedestrians getting hit and killed?

[Nate Rogers]

Overall, it seems very plausible to those well versed in the issue that in some situations headlight glare is doing harm. But because of the underlying data asymmetry, the fact that when it comes to LED headlights, as they currently exist, we can measure how they help, but not how they hurt. Car manufacturers have continued to make stronger and stronger headlights. That leaves one player that could curtail the trend towards brighter headlights, the regulatory agency in charge of them. It's called the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Or nhtsa.

[Daniel Stern]

They are absolutely in charge of this and the only governing body with any authority over automotive safety.

[Nate Rogers]

NHTSA has heard the concerns. Multiple sources told Nate it now gets more complaints about headlights than anything else. Nevertheless, it has not updated its regulations about headlights to account for LEDs and at all. And in fact, there is currently no limit whatsoever on the amount of light a headlamp can emit in certain areas. Headlights can legally be as bright as is physically possible. But a representative told Nate they stand by their regulation and blame the bulk of the problem yet again on LED aftermarket headlights. Which seems absolutely outrageous to Paul Gatto of Fuck your headlights.

[Leon Naifak]

They're not examining if it's too bright. They're not even examining if it's affecting you negatively on the road. They are simply looking at how good it is for the driver.

[Nate Rogers]

And this brings us to the last player in this whole mess. Even though the lion's share of the blame for all this may belong to car companies and regulators, they do have a helpful partner in spreading these headlights, the drivers, us. Because it turns out we like bright headlights when they're on our own cars.

[Willa Paskin]

You light up the road surface right close to the car and wow, it feels like you've got great headlamps. It feels like you can see everything. But there's a canyon between the light that drivers feel like they like or feel like they want and the light that drivers actually need. The headlamp that makes us feel like we've got great lighting is not the headlamp that we need in order to see well.

[Nate Rogers]

But if you walk into a dealership and you sit behind the wheel and test out the lights, you're probably not thinking about how headlight brightness makes everything outside its cone of light harder to see, or whether your lights are going to blind some imaginary driver at some future date. You're about to spend a lot of money on a long lasting piece of heavy machinery. And the question you ask in that moment is simple. How well can I say, see? We're in a kind of headlight brightness arms race with ourselves.

[Daniel Stern]

The regulatory bodies allowed this to happen, and car companies don't seem to be concerned with that. And this has created sort of a snowball effect that reaches down to the way that we interact with each other on the road.

[Nate Rogers]

Some of us are adding on those LED kits, but even more keep our high beams on all the time.

[Daniel Stern]

Headlights have gotten so bright that they have made people feel like, well, screw this, I'm going to get mine too. If I'm going To get blinded out there, then I might as well have as much light as possible on the road too.

[Nate Rogers]

In the winter of 2024, Nate Rogers published the result of his reporting research and thinking about headlights on the website the Ringer. In the article titled Asleep at the Wheel in the Headlight Brightness wars, he spoke with Daniel Stern, Paul Gatto and many others about the intricacies of the headlight problem. It was the most high profile piece of reporting on headlight glare yet, which is increasingly becoming a mainstream issue.

[Daniel Stern]

Recently it got to a point where I think just any average person totally understands and has sort of joined the movement, if you will.

[Nate Rogers]

The group of people actively dedicated to doing something about headlight glare can be a fractious one. They may all want the same thing, less glaring headlights, but they can't always agree on how to achieve it because they disagree about which is the most pressing problem. They do agree that regulation of some kind is in order. For Paul Gatto, the co founder of Fuck youk Headlights, that means curbing overall brightness.

[Leon Naifak]

I would hopefully like to see a regulation on the total brightness of a low beam headlight.

[Nate Rogers]

Daniel Stern has a different priority.

[Willa Paskin]

If you give me a magic wand and say you can use it once to improve things in car lighting, then I wave it and make it so that all vehicle headlights get aimed and stay aimed correctly, dynamically.

[Nate Rogers]

If he had two more wishes, he'd get rid of the blue tinge and stop headlights from getting so small, which actually also makes them appear brighter. The car companies, for their part, are promoting their own solution called adaptive Driving beam technology. High beams that will be able to dim automatically in the presence of another car. They're not currently available in the US but have been for years in Europe, where for what it's worth, glare complaints continue to rise. Everyone I spoke to agreed that the pressure to do something about headlights is clearly increasing. Though it might be a while yet until anything happens, glare is having a moment.

[Willa Paskin]

At the same time, the current US administration has a very anti regulatory bent. So if they're deleting whole agencies and saying regulations are bad, it's hard to imagine how we would get better regulations.

[Nate Rogers]

Headlights, in the scheme of the day's problems, seem relatively trivial. But that's exactly why the inability to do anything about them is so disheartening. The details may be complicated, but then what issue doesn't have complicated details? When you you really dig into it, they're still just headlights. With a new kind of light bulb, shouldn't we be able to get our hands around this one.

[Daniel Stern]

The worst version of super bright headlights is not going to be like a disaster. It's not going to be end of the world. The worst version of other tech not being regulated is a disaster and it is the end of the world. And if this is how they are handling headlights, it is not very common comforting in terms of all sorts of new technology.

[Nate Rogers]

When we drive, we are simultaneously more powerful and more at the mercy of others than at almost any other time in our lives. When you're flying down a two lane highway, any car could swerve into your lane just as you could theirs. When you're driving through an intersection, anyone could blow a stop sign just as you could. It's terrifying the amount of damage you can do and have done unto you in a car. Which makes it all the more incredible that most of the time we instead engage in a collective and collaborative effort to follow the rules of the road, to do our best to keep each other and ourselves safe. These efforts have in no way turned the roadway into some kind of paradise, but that doesn't mean it can't be degraded further that it can't be made worse if we can't even see this is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. You can read Nate Rogers in Depth piece on headlights at the Ringer and we'll link to it on our show page. If you're a fan of the show, I'd love for you to sign up for Slate Plus. Slate plus members get to listen to Decoder Ring and every other Slate podcast without any ads, and they also get unlimited access to our website. And this week we have a new bonus episode exclusively for Slate plus members. In it we talk to the Slate writer Dan Kois, all about his quest to rediscover a famous chocolate cake from the 1960s.

[Willa Paskin]

The first tunnel of fudge I made, which was from a recipe on the Pillsbury website. It was a total disaster. Like 10 minutes later the thing collapsed like there had been an earthquake in my house. It wasn't just that I'm a bad baker, Pillsbury had fudged the recipe.

[Nate Rogers]

If you want to hear more and aren't already a Slate plus member, you can subscribe now on Apple Podcasts by clicking Try Free at end the the top of the Decoder Ring show page or visit slate.comdecoder/ to get access wherever you listen. Member support is crucial to our work, so please sign up. This episode was written by me and Olivia Briley and we produced it with Max Friedman. Decoder Ring is also produced by Katie shepherd and Evan Chung. Our supervising producer, Merritt Jacob, is senior Technical director. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode code, please email [e-mail] or give us a shout on the decoder ring hotline. Our number is 347-460-7281. We love to hear any and all of your ideas for the show. We'll see you in two weeks.

[Josh Levine]

Leon I'm Leon Naifak and I'm the host of Slow Burn Watergate. Before I started working on this show, everything I knew about Watergate came from the movie all the President's Men. Do you remember how it ends? Woodward and Bernstein are sitting at their typewriters, clacking away and then there's this rapid montage of newspaper stories about campaign AIDS and White House officials getting convicted of crimes. About audio tapes coming out that prove Nixon's involvement in the coverup. The last story we see is Nixon resigns. It takes a little over a minute in a movie. In real life, it took about two years.

[Willa Paskin]

Five men were arrested early Saturday while trying to install eavesdropping equipment. It's known as the Watergate Incident.

[Josh Levine]

What was it like to experience those two years in real time? What were people thinking and feeling as the break in at Democratic Party headquarters went from a weird little caper to a constitutional crisis that brought down the the President. The downfall of Richard Nixon was stranger, wilder, and more exciting than you can imagine. Over the course of eight episodes, this show is going to capture what it was like to live through the greatest political scandal of the 20th century. With today's headlines once again full of corruption, collusion and dirty tricks, it's time for another look at the gate that started it all. Subscribe to Slow Burn now, wherever you get your podcasts.

[Paul Gatto]

Hi, I'm Josh Levine. My podcast, the Queen tells the story of Linda Taylor. She was a con artist, a kidnapper, and maybe even a murderer. She was also given the title the Welfare Queen and her story was used by Ronald Reagan to justify slashing aid to the poor. Now it's time to hear her real story. Over the course of four episodes, you'll find out what was done to Linda Taylor, what she did to others, and what was done in her name.

[Willa Paskin]

The great lesson of this for me is that people will come to their own conclusions based on what their prejudices are.

[Paul Gatto]

Subscribe to the Queen on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening right now.