Study: Most Vehicles Have Poor To Marginal Headlights
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) -- Daylight Saving Time ends this weekend, which means we'll be spending more time driving in the dark.
If you have trouble seeing the road, it may be your headlights. New cars do a surprisingly poor job of lighting up the road and old cars lose their brightness after a few years, according to recent tests.
But there is an easy fix for that.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety tested new car headlights for the first time and most of them failed. Among sedans the Insurance Institute gives a "poor" rating were the Nissan Altima, the Kia Optima, the Cadillac ATS, the Chevy Malibu and the Hyundai Sonata.
Among small SUVs, not one of the two dozen tested earned a good rating. Only a handful were labelled "acceptable" or "marginal". Among those deemed "poor" are the Jeep Wrangler, the Kia Sportage and the Honda HR-V.
Of the 11 pickups tested, most headlights failed including the Ford F-150 and Chevrolet Colorado.
David Zuby, Chief Research Officer at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, says "The average driver is probably struggling to see what he needs to see to drive safely on the roads at night."
And, he noted, the price doesn't matter. Headlights on some expensive new cars flunked their test including the Mercedes C-Class and the BMW 3 series cars.
The Toyota Prius was the only midsize car out of 31 that got a "good" rating.
We conducted our own unscientific experiment, driving around San Francisco's Presidio in the dark. We compared Nissan's 2016 new Altima with its Maxima.
In our first test, we parked the cars and aimed the headlights across the street. We tried to spot our producer and her white dog Oscar by a flagpole.
We could barely see them.
Still, the Maxima, which got an "acceptable" rating, did a better job lighting the area than the poorly-rated Altima. So it wasn't a shock when we drove the Altima down a dark street at 10 miles an hour and could not clearly see our producer and her dog crossing the street until we were right up on them, just yards from the crosswalk.
We tried again, with the better-rated Maxima and were surprised to find its lighting wasn't much better.
We did not see our dog walker until we were almost on top of the crosswalk.
In fact, neither car had headlights that were bright enough on that dark street. Even at close range, we could only see her legs. And headlights are critical, because while 25 percent of driving is done at night, half of all crashes happen in the dark.
Eighty percent of cars on the road use halogen lights, according to a AAA survey, but many fail to give enough stopping distance on roads without overhead lights. That's almost half the roads we drive.
And AAA surveys show that some of the newer headlights, high intensity discharge and LED units, did not perform well enough at speeds as low as 45 miles an hour.
The only bright spot is high beam assist, which is an option on the Mazda CX-3, the only SUV that earned an "acceptable" rating in the highway safety test.
"It enables the drivers to use the high beams more often as it switches between low beams and high beam in response to oncoming or leading traffic", says Denby.
Experts say you can do some things to increase nighttime visibility. Use your high beams more often. Only 1 in 5 drivers do, according to the Institute. And improve your headlights in your older autos with a simple kit you can use at home.
AAA says that after 5 years or so, the protective coating on a car's plastic lens deteriorates. That cuts down your light, and increases the glare for other drivers.
We asked the American Auto Club in Southern California, which has done headlight studies, to show us how to restore the coating on halogen reflector headlights.
The kits, which cost anywhere from $10 to $30, use a little fine sandpaper and polish. It takes about 30 minutes to restore each headlight. We used a light meter to show the brightness before, and then after.
The strength doubled, from 510 to a little over a thousand on the light meter. Twice as bright, and cleaning can also reduce the glare from your headlights by 60 percent, says AAA.
And with many of our headlights leaving drivers in the dark, that is one thing we can do on our own, to safely light our way.
To see the complete list of cars and SUV tested: http://www.iihs.org/iihs/news/desktopnews/first-ever-iihs-headlight-ratings-show-most-need-improvement and
here:
http://www.iihs.org/iihs/news/desktopnews/most-small-suv-headlights-rate-poor-in-iihs-evaluations.
