With the advent of LED illumination, new-car headlights are brighter than ever these days – so it can often feel like driving at night is an unpleasant, glare-filled experience, especially if you have light-sensitive eyes in the first place.
Here are some of our top tips to avoid being dazzled when driving at night – and also how to make sure you’re not dazzling other drivers yourself. After all, the old adage says treat others as you would expect to be treated yourself, right?
Clean your windscreen – thoroughly
We don’t just mean give it a squirt with the wash-wipe system; we mean make sure the glass is as clear as possible. Get squished bugs, dust and oil smears off the screen before you drive by using a special cleaner and giving the forward-facing glass area a good scrub. If your wiper blades are tired, so they judder over the windscreen or fail to clear the area in their sweep effectively, replace them – doing the job yourself is simple and won’t cost you much, as new blades are only tens of euro apiece on most cars.
The reasoning behind all the above is that any imperfections and dirt on the windscreen will further refract the beams of light emitted by oncoming headlights, which in turn will make them seem more dazzling. It might seem counter-intuitive (after all, wouldn’t a layer of dirt make it harder for the light to get through the glass than if it were spotless?) but it really is the case that a glitteringly clean windscreen will reduce headlight dazzle as much as possible.
Wear tinted glasses
A bit of a controversial one, as there are mixed reports on the efficacy of these items. But if you’re really struggling with headlight glare at nights, they might be worth investigating. Night-driving glasses are non-prescription specs with a yellow tint to the lenses. They’re said to reduce glare, without dangerously omitting the amount of light you need to see at night from getting to your eyes. Studies have shown they might not be as effective as the manufacturers of the glasses claim they are, but they still could be worth a shot if you detest being dazzled.
Look away from the light
Not completely, of course – it’d be unsafe to turn your head entirely away from your direction of travel, or (worse still) close your eyes briefly while the oncoming vehicle passes you by. But, having first made a visual check of the road in front of you to make sure that there are no obstacles, impending sharp turns, junctions or other road users in your path, then you can avert your eyes slightly left and downwards to look more at the kerb of the road, rather than straight down the lane. Once the oncoming car with bright headlights has passed in the opposite direction, you can then marginally readjust your vision to looking straight ahead again.
Tilt your mirror or use the camera view
It’s not only from oncoming cars that you can be dazzled, but also when vehicles with bright headlights are coming up behind. In this instance, you need to tilt your interior mirror down to deflect the glaring rays away from your eyes. All car interior mirrors have a little tab at their base – simply flick this away from you, and the mirror should tilt down. Once the car behind turns off, or overtakes you, then you pull the tab back towards you and the mirror returns to its original position, giving you a full view of the road behind. On some newer cars, instead of just plain glass, the interior mirror can show you a live camera feed from a rear-facing lens mounted on the vehicle; if you have this tech, use it, as it will reduce glare at night compared to the standard reflective glass.
Make sure you’re not running on main beam yourself
If you don’t want to get a face full of main beam from an oncoming car, best to make sure your own vehicle’s brightest forward illumination is not engaged. It can be difficult in the modern era, as cars equipped with automatic high beam or even highly advanced full matrix-LED headlights have clever software systems which manage the brightness of the forward illumination themselves. However, these technologies need to physically ‘see’ (via medium of a forward-facing camera) either oncoming headlights or taillights ahead of you before they will revert back to dipped-beam lighting, and that does sometimes mean impatient flashes from cars coming the other way. But certainly, if you’re in an older car, or a newer one where you don’t have auto high-beam or matrix-LED tech, carelessly leaving your own high beams on will likely get you dazzled by irate road users. There’s a universal bright-blue indicator lamp in the instrument cluster on all cars made for decades and decades now which tells you when your main beam is on – it’s hard to miss when it’s blazing away in the binnacle.
Adjust your headlights properly
Again, this is becoming a lost art as many modern cars – especially ones with LED lamps – tend to have self-levelling systems which are supposed to stop them glaring. Even if they don’t have self-levelling, pretty much any vehicle made after the year 2000 has a dial on the dashboard within the cabin, which allows you to raise and lower the field of the headlamps according to how much weight you’ve got in the car (it should be on ‘0’ if you’re running solo in the vehicle, and a higher number – usually ‘3’, but it can be more – if you have a full load of passengers and heavy stuff in the boot); just make sure you’ve not got this dial set to the minimum setting as described above if you’ve got a carful of stuff and people, as otherwise the headlights could be dazzling other road users.
However, on older cars without either self-levelling of dimming or the rotary dial inside the passenger compartment, you’ll need to adjust the headlights using controls that are typically mounted on the back of the lamp units themselves. For this process, you’ll need to park your car about 7.5 metres away from a flat, vertical surface (something like a garage or brick wall), with the vehicle pointing at it, and then open the bonnet and use the requisite tools plus marking tape to get the beams down to a height that won’t dazzle other users. There are plenty of online step-by-step guides and videos of how to do this effectively to help you out.
Don’t drive at night
This is an extreme measure to take and not exactly practicable year-round, especially in a northern-hemisphere country like our own where, for many damp and grey months of the year, it feels like it is permanently dark out. But we do know there are some people who say that, because of the brightness of modern headlights, they no longer enjoy driving at night – so they simply don’t bother. It won’t be helpful for you if you work regular office hours of nine-to-five and you commute to your place of employment in a car, but if there’s a way you can get all your weekly driving done in daylight hours (even in the depths of winter) without major impediment to your lifestyle, that’s one surefire way of avoiding night-time dazzle from headlights.