Own the Night: 10 Tips for Driving After Dark

Plenty of us hate night driving—there’s no feeling quite like getting someone else’s high beams shined in your eyes. But beyond the pure annoyance, few of us realize how dangerous it can be. Fatalities on the road occur at a rate three times greater at night than during the day, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. While only a quarter of all driving is done at night, more than half of all driving deaths occur then.

Your depth perception, ability to distinguish color, and peripheral vision are all worse in low-light conditions. You tend to be more tired at night. And consider a basic fact: Typical low beams illuminate the road from 160 to 250 feet in front of your car, and normal high beams shine from about 350 to 500 feet. At 60 mph it takes more than 200 feet to stop. So even with your high beams on, there’s not a lot of room for error.

But we can’t just sit around waiting for the sun to come up. Here are 10 tips to keep you safe on the road when the sun goes down.

We’ve found that headlights even in brand-new cars are sometimes uneven or pointed lower than necessary. So it’s worth the effort to aim them correctly. If you do it yourself, use the instructions in your owner’s manual. And be patient. It may take a few tries before you have them pointed perfectly. Just make sure those newly aimed lights are not blinding oncoming traffic.

Even lights that are aimed correctly can cast a dim glow if something is blocking the light, so be sure to clean the road grime from your headlights often. If you have an older car with plastic lens covers, those covers might have yellowed or faded over the years. The best fix is to buy a headlight polish kit to remove the haze so your lights shine through brightly. And check that they produce the same amount of light as they did when new. Aged incandescent bulbs make less light than new ones.

Cars come with dashboard dimmer switches for a reason. If you’re driving around with the dash light on max, you could be compromising your forward vision. Racers take the nighttime driving very seriously—in fact, endurance racers and rally drivers cover their dashboards with black felt to avoid stray reflections. While you shouldn’t do that in a road car, we like to turn down the dash brightness quite a bit.

And don’t leave your map lights on. Less-expensive interior lights will disperse light all over the interior and shine into the driver’s eyes, too. Most luxury cars have focused reading lights that pinpoint objects without causing glare. The rule of thumb for a good map light is that you should never see the source of the light from the driver’s seat. Still, as good as your map lights may be, it’s best to avoid driving with them on.

Windshields that appear clean during the day may reveal streaks that can cause glare at night. A detailer’s trick is to polish glass with newspaper to remove residue. Try not to touch the inside surfaces of your windshield, side windows, or mirrors with your hands, even if it’s to wipe off mist. The oil from your skin will smear, and light will glare when it shines through any place where you touched the glass. Instead, keep a cotton or microfiber cloth in your door pocket.

Fog lights, as the name implies, help the driver see the road instead of simply lighting up the fog in front of the car. They’re are aimed as low as possible because fog itself often hangs no lower than a couple of feet above the road, and if a fog light is aimed high, it will produce glare in the fog and will blind oncoming drivers.

These lights can be useful even when it’s not foggy, however, because they spread wider than typical low beams, so they can help you see farther beyond the road’s shoulder. One point to remember: Fog lights placed low on a car’s front fascia will also create large shadows in front of small rocks, bumps and uneven potholes and make them look much larger.

When its time to really light up the night, there are plenty of auxiliary lamps available. These lights vary in name—they’re sometimes called driving lights, spot lights, or pencil beams.

But you’ve got to be careful with them. Some are meant only to supplement your high beams, and many of them are intended for off-road use only. So be sure to check the legality of the lights for road use in your state—some of them are against the law. The reason is that light from a high-intensity discharge (HID) source or from LEDs can be like instant daylight, and after a while your eyes will adjust to the increased brightness. Then when you turn off your extra lights for oncoming traffic, your ordinary low-beam headlights appear impossibly dim. Your eyes will need to readjust as if you’ve just walked into a dark movie theater, and that can take up to 30 seconds.

It’s best to temper your enthusiasm for driving lights, then, and select a pair of lamps that are meant for road use.