Imagine it?s the future. You?re driving at night, high-beams blazing. You didn’t have to remember to turn them on?they brightened automatically. As you approach an oncoming vehicle, your high-tech lights?which make thousands of individual points of light and use data from the car’s onboard camera and sensors to focus the beam?make a dark hole in the brightness to protect the other motorist’s night vision. Further down the road, a deer emerges from the woods, and the lights mark it with a thin ray of brightness. Potential catastrophe has been averted, thanks to adaptive-beam lighting.
In Europe, where such systems are available amid a different regulatory system, that future is now.
If you’re like most people, you probably don’t think much about your car’s headlights, other than to switch them on and off and occasionally to flash the brights. At least, that’s what  Michael Flannagan, a headlamp expert at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI), has found in his extensive study of automotive lighting. “Even expert drivers don’t seem to understand the risks associated with darkness,” he said. “Our estimate is that there are slightly over 2000 people killed each year because of darkness?mostly pedestrians. They loom up out of the darkness far too quickly for drivers to react to.”

According to Flannagan, part of the problem is that drivers?even skilled ones?tend to underutili...