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Own the Night: 10 Tips for Driving After Dark

Night driving isn't just annoying, it's dangerous. Here are 10 tips to make your nocturnal migrations safer.

By Phil Berg and
Car on winding road under starry skypinterest
Spaces Images//Getty Images

Driving at night is a dreadful and dangerous. Road fatalities triple during the night, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Human eyes don't help much either. They're terrible at seeing at night with depth perception, peripheral vision, and ability to distinguish color diminished. Although headlights illuminate the road, typical low beams stretch from 160 to 250 feet in front of your vehicle, while high beams shine about 350 to 500 feet ahead. When you’re driving at 60 mph, it takes more than 200 feet to stop, so there's not much room for error.

So to traverse these dangerous and dark roads, here are 10 tips to keep in mind when driving after the sun goes down.

Aim Your Headlights

Aim Your Headlights
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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.

Dim Your Instrument Panel and Dash Lights

Dim Your Instrument Panel and Dash Lights
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Cars come with dashboard dimmer switches for a reason. With bright dashboard LEDs and large infotainment screens finding their way into vehicles, there are a lot of sources of unnecessary and distracting lighting inside a vehicle that can diminish your vision. Dimming dash lights can remove reflections on the windshield and allow your eyes to better adjust to the darkness ahead, improving nighttime visibility.

Other interior lights like map lights can also distract form nighttime driving, often casting light throughout the cabin. Not every car is a culprit when it comes to bright map lights—luxury cars do a good job with directing such lights—but it's best to not use them at all.

Don't Wear the Wrong Glasses

Don't Wear the Wrong Glasses

Glasses—prescription or otherwise—add another reflective surface between the driver’s eyes and the road, so choosing the correct glasses to wear is crucial to improved nighttime visibility. The best option? Prescription lenses with anti-reflective coating. This coating stops additional, unnecessary light from reflecting inside your lenses while allowing more light to pass through.

And don’t buy the late-night-TV yellow-tint sunglasses that say they help you see better at night. The Sunglass Association of America says that’s a farce. While companies pushing yellow-tint sunglasses say the added color enhances contrast, they cut down on the amount of light that passes through them, making distinguishing objects and road hazards more difficult, something you don’t want when you’re driving at night.

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Become a Retina Spotter

Become a Retina Spotter
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Driving at night means encountering nocturnal animals of varying sizes, like raccoons and opossums. However, there are larger, more deadly and dangerous animals, like deer, elk, and moose, that can cause serious damage. As noted in point number one, even high beams fail to illuminate much beyond your stopping distance, so avoiding a deer or other animals takes a particular skill—catching your headlights reflected in the eyes of an animal. These tiny bright spots often appear far down the road, giving you more time to slow down or come to a stop.

When encountering a large animal, the best strategy is to slow down as quickly as you can without exiting your lane or driving off the road. Deer will often follow your headlights and move in front of you, so swerving can increase the likelihood of an accident.

Don't Stare at Oncoming Lights

Don't Stare at Oncoming Lights
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Bright lights can seriously disrupt your concentration at night. Inside the car, your eyes are used to the dim glow of the instrument panel and the dark road ahead. It's very easy to become distracted and stare into a bright road sign or the headlights of an 18-wheeler headed your way without even realizing it. Turn your gaze away from other lights on the road, and don't look at oncoming high beams.

Even though you may sometimes find yourself trying to determine if that oncoming car's high beams are on, or if they're just mis-aimed, look away. If a car behind you has its high beams on, often you can move your rearview mirror to reflect light backward to alert the driver, and to get the reflection away from your own eyes.

Give Your Windshield a Wipe With Newspaper

Give Your Windshield a Wipe With Newspaper
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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.

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Bolt on Some Fog Lights

Bolt on Some Fog Lights
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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 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 more significant.

Add Auxiliary Lights—Cautiously

Add Auxiliary Lights—Cautiously
T-Bilt

When it's time to light up the night, there are plenty of auxiliary lamps available. These light kits vary in naming conventions—they're sometimes called driving lights, spotlights, 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. Many states regulate the brightness of auxiliary and standard lights. The reason is that light from a high-intensity discharge (HID) source or 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 select a pair of lamps that are designed for road use.

Clean and Adjust Your Exterior Mirrors

Clean and Adjust Your Exterior Mirrors
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Dirty mirrors are just like a dirty windshield and can reflect and distort light that distracts the driver. Dirty mirrors reflect the lights from cars behind you in a wider, diffused shape that can produce glare in your eyes, so clean them up. Also, aim the exterior mirrors so that you can move your head out of the path of lights reflected in them.

We like to aim them downward just slightly. That way, you can see cars behind you by tipping your head slightly forward, but you keep the other car's headlights out of your eyes—and prevent them from temporarily blinding you with their high beams.

Also don't forget to switch your inside rear-view mirror to the Night or Auto Dim setting, which darkens the mirror to prevent glare.

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Keep Your Eyes Healthy

Keep Your Eyes Healthy
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To reduce the effects of eye fatigue at night while driving, eye doctors often recommend keeping your eyes moving, scanning all around your field of vision instead of focusing on one area. The American Optometric Association suggests checkups every three years if you're under 40, every two years until you're 60, and annually after that.

You can have the cleanest windshield and the best headlights, but they do nothing if your eyes are strained and they can’t correctly perceive road objects or other dangerous hazards.

Headshot of Anthony Alaniz
Anthony Alaniz

Anthony is a freelance writer covering the automotive industry and horror entertainment. 

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