We Need to Ban LED Headlights
It’s late at night, probably around ten thirty or so. I’m peacefully driving down the back country roads when suddenly, I see the light of Jesus Christ himself. No, I pause, I’m not having a near-death experience. However, it is a humble explosion of thirty trillion lumens that bathes my entire car, rearview, and side mirrors in blinding light. The source, of course, is the LED headlamp of a 2025 Ford F-150, which also comes equipped with a supplementary beam of light attached to the top of the windshield, just in case the gigawatt raygun flashbeams didn’t incinerate the cells inside my head enough.
He also happens to be inches away from my bumper, so close that it's as if he’s trying to inspect what’s going on in my car, trying to discover why I refuse to go another twenty over the speed limit. I can barely stomach looking in my mirrors. I try to motion that nothing interesting is happening in here; I’m just trying to stay alive, and you're actually making it really, really difficult.
On the other side of the road, I see two SUVs. They both hit the same pothole, causing a strobe-like effect. For a second, I feel like Ra, the Sun God, has been strapped to the front of their cars and is pointing his cool, white coloured sunbeam sceptre right at me. Nope, just my retinas burning from the extreme light of their LEDs.
This, of course, filled me with perfectly explicable rage. Whatever happened to warm, yellow lights that were perfectly proficient at illuminating the streets? Even in my old 2014 Chevy Cruise with its burnt-out headlight, I could see perfectly fine at night.
The new cool-white LEDs are a hazard on the streets. The lights are so bright that I often lose sight of the road. And if a person walks across the street, I don’t know if I’d see them through the blazing sunlight of a 2026 Santa Fe.
With almost every second car having LEDs, the evil halo effect multiplies. The increasing presence of LED headlamps on the roads makes owning a car with LEDs necessary; so as other people’s lights get brighter, your car can combat the overpowering high beams with laser beams of your own. This makes driving at night so incredibly dangerous that I think I would rather drive in the pitch black. I sometimes think I should be driving with a pair of sunglasses at night.
What I’m trying to say, after detailing a frontal assault on my eyes that would make even the United States proud, is that headlights need to have a lower regulated Lumen level to keep the roads safer and my pupils intact.
And while we’re at it, we should just ban cool white lights altogether.