Wouldn’t it be just grand if we could always trust our intuitions? Courtship would be unnecessary: Blissful love-at-first-sight would lead directly to a Harlequin-inspired 50th anniversary with nary a divorce settlement in between. And why bother deciphering incomprehensible price-to-earning ratios, when picking high-yield, dividend-paying stocks could be as simple as tossing darts at a dartboard?
As ludicrous as it will sound, I can’t help but wonder if the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety (IIHS) — they of innumerable crash tests and a withering supply of insurance claims data — is applying this same instinct-over-logic reasoning to some of its newest safety mandates. It recently decreed that the next absolutely-must-have, you’re-taking-your-life-in-your-own-hands-without-it automotive safety device is swivelling headlights. So convinced are they of the accident-reducing abilities of these high-tech “adaptive” headlights that they are contemplating making them essential equipment for any manufacturer looking to gain the organizations’ prestigious Top Safety Pick+ rating for their vehicles . That’s a big deal. So influential are the IIHS’s “recommendations” — like tougher front crumple zones to pass the organization’s “small overlap” collision test — that it pretty much guarantees almost every car, even bargain-basement subcompacts, will have swivelling headlights if the mandate becomes official in 2017.
There’s only one problem: They have no idea why they work.
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Oh, we can intuit that headlights swivelling in response to steering input will help drivers “see” farther around a corner in the dark. And indeed, in IIHS tests, drivers claimed to see roadside objects fully one-third of a second sooner with the swivelling headlamps than they could with fixed beams. Even at a lowly 50 km/h, that’s five precious more metres to avoid an accident.
More importantly, says the IIHS, its sister organization, the Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI), says that the insurance data for cars equipped with swivelling headlights — Acuras, Mercedes-Benzes, Volvos and Mazdas — revealed significant reductions in property damage claims (five to 10 per cent). Bodily injury liability losses shrunk even more. In other words, insurance claim statistics would seem to back up the supposition that seeing farther around a corner might help you prevent an accident.
The problem is — and even the IIHS is at a loss to explain this — these seemingly logical gains make no sense. Police accident statistics show that only seven per cent of multi-vehicle crashes occur between 9:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. More curious is that an even smaller percentage of these nighttime crashes occur on a curve where, the IIHS says, “adaptive headlights would be expected to have an effect.” In fact, Matt Moore, HLDI’s vice-president, says, “These lights appear to help in more situations than we anticipated, though we don’t yet know why.”
2017 Volvo S90
Handout, Volvo
The improvements should be more in the order of two to three per cent, says Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Lighting Research Center — and even then, that’s only on curves. “In fact, it’s closer to one to two per cent in shallower corners,” says John D. Bullough, the center’s director of transportation and safety lighting programs, “and it’s only on the tightest of corners that we estimate a three to four per cent safety benefit.”
Bullough sees much more accident reduction potential — as much as seven per cent of all nighttime accidents, not just those on curves — in the new matrix-type adaptive high beams sold in Europe. For instance, Audi’s amalgam of 25 computer-controlled LEDs is so precise it can selectively blank out light that would otherwise shine directly onto oncoming vehicles, while still illuminating the high beams at full power everywhere else; because of the millions of beam configurations possible, there is no longer any distinction between — or need for — high and low beams. Some estimates are that these computer-controlled lights can project their high beams 25 metres farther down the road, and Audi says the A8’s headlights are so precise that the matrix system can even detect pedestrians and flash a single individual LED at them, alerting both pedestrian and driver.
Unfortunately, such sophisticated illumination is not yet available in North America. That’s because a rule dating back to 1968 in the U.S. — predating even the formation of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) — still requires distinct “high” and “low” beams. And, for better or worse, the NHTSA refuses to adopt European certification for fear that current multi-beam lights might cause too much glare.
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Even that might be a red herring, though. Indeed, counterintuitive to everything we hold dear about automotive headlights, we might actually be better off if we never dimmed our lights. While we do feel more “comfortable,” says Bullough, when an approaching car dims its headlamps, “we would still be able to see farther down the road if we just kept our high beams on all the time.”
Nor are headlights the only safety gizmos that the IIHS presumed would be a safety boon. When the organization first started looking into approving such “active” safety devices, it also posited that modern lane departure warning systems would reap similarly large injury and collision reductions.
But, contrary to the IIHS’s initial presumption, “lane departure warning appears to hurt, rather than help avoid collisions.” In 2010, the institute’s research initially estimated that 7,529 fatal crashes could have been prevented or mitigated if all cars had some form of warning when drivers inadvertently drifted out of their lanes. According to the IIHS at the time, this would have been “the biggest potential fatal crash reduction of any of the features studied.”
Audi’s engineer Juergen Whilhelm introduces Audi’s revolutionary Matrix Highbeam and Laser beam fog light technology.
Joe Klamarjoe, AFP/Getty Images
Instead, the HLDI found that cars with lane departure warning systems “were associated with higher claim rates.” In other words, lane departure systems might be more likely to cause an accident than prevent one. And, once again, the IIHS is not quite sure why, though Moore posits it could be that “drivers may be getting too many false alarms.”
Supposition is no reason to mandate safety devices. Sometimes, even statistics — no matter how copious or evidentiary — defy common sense. Before we make something obligatory, it behooves us to determine not only why we need it, but why it works.
I’m not quite sure why the IIHS wants to promote swivelling headlights. The bigger problem is that neither do they.
Adaptive headlights still banned in Canada … for now
According to Daniel Stern, general editor of the global vehicle lighting industry journal, DrivingVisionNews.com, matrix-type adaptive high beams aren’t yet legal in Canada. “Although Canada recognizes the international UN headlamp standards, adaptive high beams are on hold until the U.S. adopts a final rule,” says the Vancouver-based automotive lighting expert. More to the point, Stern says the exemption was made “because the Canadian government came under some pressure from American automakers to restrict their use.” While that does indeed smack of monopolistic pressure, Stern says there is also some logic to the delay. The NHTSA is working on its own specifications for adaptive high beams, says Stern, so developing “a UN-spec headlight for Canada and yet another for the U.S. would add a lot of cost.” In the meantime, manufacturers like Audi, Mercedes-Benz, Volvo and even Toyota are chomping at the bit, having already developed what they are sure are superior headlights.