By Daniel Stern, DVN Chief Editor
There’s really no debate possible: ADB is truly a revolutionary breakthrough. Specifically, what it’s broken through is the century-old dilemma of the night driver: high beams with adequate seeing but excessive glare, or low beams with reasonable glare control but inadequate seeing distance. An ADB system, thoughtfully specified and configured and correctly installed and aimed, gives high-beam seeing with low-beam glare, thus resolving the quandary as ideally as can presently be done.
As everyone reading this already knows, night drivers in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, just about alone in the developed world, can’t have the safety benefit of ADB, because US regulations still prohibit it. NHTSA’s proposed ADB regulation has been analysed and reported quite a bit in the pages of DVN. We can hope at least the worst of its problems will be addressed in a thoughtful and appropriate manner, but one way or another it’s probably reasonable to assume some kind of ADB will eventually be legalised in the United States.