This is why headlights are so bright these days

If you're a regular driver you may have noticed a rather annoying trend that's developed in recent years.

Picture the scene - you're driving at night and all of a sudden you're blinded by another cars headlights, headlights you swear weren't quite so bright a few years back.

Of course, as you are driving around at nighttime you really should be lowering the beams if cars are approaching in the other direction.

However, not all folks on the road embark on the simple road safety measure, leaving some drivers having to momentarily squint or even being left blinded as they are on the road.

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It's an obvious safety hazard, though the way newer cars are designed are not exactly helping things.

According to The Hill, newer cars have brighter headlights because of a shift from halogen headlamps with a softer, orange color to more blue-colored LED lights.

Mark Rea, professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, told Slate: "Imagine a car with two headlights: one halogen, one LED. They’d both meet the requirements. The light meter would say they’re the same, but the LED would look 40% brighter."

Trucks and SUVs are particularly popular across the US, all of which encompass some rather bright headlights.

These claims were backed up by Daniel Stern, chief editor of Driving Vision News, who told the New York Times in 2019: "Tall pickups and SUVs and short, small cars are simultaneously popular.

"The eyes in the low car are going to get zapped hard by the lamps mounted up high on the S.U.V. or truck every time."

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And it's not just trucks and SUVs, as expert Matt Kossoff, founder and chief product officer of The Retrofit Source, a vehicle light distribution, told the New York Times headlights have 'absolutely gotten brighter'.

The problem has become so bad in recent years that the Soft Lights Foundation have called for an outright ban on 'blinding headlights', and their petition has more than 52,000 signatures.

Mark Baker, president of the Soft Lights Foundation, told ABC News: "I've got a small car. This truck is so much higher than me. Those headlights are going straight into my eye.

"How is that going to be safe? So there's a mismatch between small cars and super large cars that NHTSA should be having standards for."