The Glaring Problem with Headlights
What Next | Daily News and Analysis
Slate Podcasts
4.3 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 26 May 2025
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As What Next celebrates Memorial Day, please enjoy this episode from our colleagues at Decoder Ring. What Next will be back in your feed tomorrow.
Something seems to have happened to car headlights. In the last few years, many people have become convinced that they are much brighter than they used to be—and it’s driving them to the point of rage. Headlight glare is now Americans’ number one complaint on the road. The story of how and why we got here is illuminating and confounding. It’s what happens when an incredible technological breakthrough meets market forces, regulatory failure, and human foibles.
So if you feel like everyone’s driving around with their high beams on all the time, it’s not your imagination. What once seemed like an obscure technical concern has gone mainstream. But can the movement to reduce glare actually do something about the problem?
In this episode, you’ll hear from Nate Rogers, who wrote about the “headlight brightness wars” for The Ringer; Daniel Stern, automotive lighting expert and editor of Driving Vision News; and Paul Gatto, moderator of r/fuckyourheadlights.
This episode of Decoder Ring was written by Willa Paskin and Olivia Briley, and produced by Olivia Briley and Max Freedman. Our team also includes Katie Shepherd and supervising producer Evan Chung. Merritt Jacob is our Senior Technical Director.
If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at DecoderRing@slate.com, or leave a message on our hotline at 347-460-7281.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey everyone, it's Memorial Day today. So we're taking a little breather. Hopefully you are too. |
| 0:07.8 | And instead of bringing you a regular show, we're going to send you an episode from our friends over at Dakota Ring, which is another Slate podcast all about cracking cultural mysteries. |
| 0:18.9 | Their mystery in this episode is perfect to listen to if you're on a road trip. |
| 0:23.4 | It's all about why headlights have gotten so bright. Seriously, like staring at the sun, |
| 0:30.0 | levels of illumination. I'm going to be back with more news tomorrow. Meanwhile, here's Dakota |
| 0:36.0 | Ring. Before we begin, this episode contains adult |
| 0:41.2 | language. Nate Rogers grew up in Los Angeles, and over the years, like a proper |
| 0:50.9 | Angelino, he spent a lot of time in cars. |
| 0:57.5 | But in the late 2010s, he started to notice something on the road that felt new and unpleasant. |
| 0:59.8 | It happens in different degrees, |
| 1:02.1 | but the experience is having somebody's lights of their car |
| 1:05.0 | in an emotional sense kind of run you off the road. |
| 1:08.4 | Nate would be driving, and it would feel like the headlights of the car behind him, |
| 1:12.1 | or the one coming towards him, or the one perpendicular to him at an intersection, |
| 1:16.3 | or blasting into his eyes. |
| 1:18.6 | And the lights will be so bright that they will kind of stagger you and knock you out of your senses. |
| 1:25.2 | The first dozen, two dozen times it happened, Nate shook it off. |
| 1:29.3 | Maybe someone had forgotten their high beams were on. |
| 1:31.5 | But it happened so much that you start to notice it and then you started to fixate on it. |
| 1:36.1 | 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. |
| 1:43.5 | Everywhere he went, he could feel these lights interfering with his ability to see and with |
| 1:49.2 | his emotions. |
... |
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