The One With the Headlights

I remember when my mom first complained about driving at night. She was probably in her early 50s. I recall thinking, at the time, it was absurd to be scared of driving at night. I mean, all the best stuff happens at night, right? Who doesn’t love going out at night? There’s no difference between driving during the day and driving at night. 

And then I turned 50. 

I hate driving at night! But in my defense, driving at night has changed over the last several years. Incandescent and halogen lights have been replaced with LEDs that are SO. MUCH. BRIGHTER than anything on earth. To put it in perspective, a 40 watt incandescent bulb gives off 450 lumens. A 15 watt compact fluorescent lamp gives off 1000 lumens. The sun gives off 35.7 octillion lumens. And these new LED lights give off slightly more than that.

Apparently the car manufacturers all got together with the pressing question - how can we make cars safer? Someone (under the age of 50) piped up with, “I know! Let’s put the light source and refraction technology from a lighthouse in an SUV! Drivers will be able to see in the dark for 200 nautical miles!” The reasoning behind this shift to LED lights is that they’re better at illuminating the road. You know, so drivers can more easily see the carnage from all the accidents these lightbulbs cause. 

I live in the country, surrounded by cornfields on all sides. There are no street lights around, the roads are one-lane, and the speed limits are high. The other night I was driving home from my mom’s house in the dark on one such country road when a truck came speeding up behind me. His spotlights headlights shone in my rearview mirror and both side mirrors, roasting my  retinas. I envisioned Sponge Bob when a spicy bubble popped in his face and his eyeballs caught fire, disintegrated to ash and blew into the wind, and I suddenly understood how cartoonists come up with their ideas.

I flipped my rearview mirror to nighttime mode which dimmed the lights from the power of the sun down to a military-grade searchlight, but the light bouncing off my side mirrors was still blinding me. It was like being followed by the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas. 

I was driving behind a couple cars that were going 60 mph. The guy behind me wasn’t content driving that speed so he tailgated me which, as we all know, was highly effective in getting all the traffic in front of me to move faster. I slowed down, encouraging him to pass me. This apparently was interpreted as an invitation to follow even more closely. Honestly, I didn’t even think it was possible to follow more closely. It was as if he was connected by a trailer hitch.

I slowed down even further and he finally, aggressively, whipped his searchlight-on-wheels around me. Of course, he was still behind a line of cars that were driving 60 mph so his angry maneuvering really didn’t grant him any gains, but he was no longer my problem. I slowly stopped seeing spots and was able to focus once more. That is, until a line of vehicles with LEDs approached me from the opposite direction and I was back to sizzling corneas and sudden onset blindness.

Back in my day, we were taught to dim our brights when approaching other cars lest we blind them. It was in the rules of the road book. It was taught in driver’s ed. It’s literally a law in Illinois (and most states). In Illinois, you must dim your high beams (switch to low beams) when an approaching vehicle is within 500 feet, and also when you are following another vehicle within 300 feet, to avoid blinding other drivers. So how is it that cars equipped with lights brighter than a supernova are allowed to be on the road? Someone help me understand the madness.