Crummy Headlights Decimated the IIHS Top Safety Pick List

Things became grim the moment the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety added headlight performance to its testing regimen. An initial report on midsize cars came back with only a single vehicle receiving a good score, and IIHS wasn’t any kinder toward SUVs or pickup trucks. The general consensus seemed to be that most headlights are absolutely terrible at providing adequate visibility but great at blinding oncoming traffic.

Adding headlight effectiveness to the ratings criteria for the IIHS’s Top Safety Pick+ designation ended up cutting the previous year’s list practically in half. Down from 79, only 38 models received the safety plus appointment under the new measurements.

“The field of contenders is smaller this year because so few vehicles have headlights that do their job well, but it’s not as small as we expected when we decided to raise the bar for the award,” IIHS President Adrian Lund said in a statement.

American automakers, which have dwindled from the list over the last few years, can blame the new headlight guidelines for this year’s particularly bad performance. Only three U.S. models earned the Top Safety Pick+ distinction: Buick’s Envision, Chevrolet’s Volt, and the Chrysler Pacifica.

Asia did much better. Toyota had nine winners and Honda was second with five. Subaru and Nissan both had three. Hyundai had a couple too, including the 2017 Hyundai Santa Fe seen being demolished in the above photo.

The new IIHS ratings criteria requires that vehicles must earn a “good” or “acceptable” rating on the headlight evaluations to merit a consideration for a Top Safety Pick+ award. Testing evaluates not only forward distance illumination but also curved road effectiveness and how much glare other drivers are subjected to.

With higher-tech crash prevention systems like brake-assist and collision detection becoming more common in vehicles, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety decided to take a careful look at headlights — something that wasn’t necessarily benefiting from, or improving with, those other advancements. “Some lights with the newer technology are not doing as good of a job as older headlights,” Lund said.

With around half of all fatal accidents occurring at night, you would hope that automakers would go the extra mile to make sure headlights are up to snuff. However, IIHS says that government standards for the basic safety equipment, established by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, allows for large variations in illumination.

“We’ve raised the bar,” Lund told USA Today. “Automakers have not focused enough attention on whether or not headlamps are aimed such that they light up the road for the driver ahead of them.”

In addition to a positive headlight assessment, vehicles must receive good ratings on all IIHS crash tests and have “advanced” or “superior” collision avoidance systems to garner a Top Safety Pick+ award. A standard Top Safety Pick rating requires identical criteria with the exception of the headlight ratings.

[Image: Insurance Institute for Highway Safety]