Can glasses reduce glare for night driving?

As part of our efforts to raise awareness during National Road Safety Week 16-22 November, coordinated by BRAKE the road safety charity, we wanted to focus on driving at night or in poor light conditions. If glare from headlights and streetlighting is a problem then anti-glare glasses can help you when driving at night.

If you are particularly susceptible to headlight glare, then the first piece of advice is to visit your optician for an eye test. If you need prescription glasses, then wearing these will help, especially if you buy a pair with an anti-reflective coating. These will boost the eye’s ability to cope with glare, and also reduce the reflections created from the lenses themselves.

Zeiss (the pioneers of optical lens design) have just developed an innovative new DRIVESAFE lens in response to surveys and customer feedback from Optometrists and spectacle wearers complaining of feeling uncomfortable and even unsafe due to problems with their vision when driving. This new hi-tech lens is suitable for all-day wear, but makes driving more comfortable.

The DRIVESAFE lens takes into consideration 3 aspects in its design;

• It is optimised for how the pupil dilates in poor light conditions (which correspondingly gives us a poorer depth of field and more peripheral aberration)
• The DriveSafe coating minimises the irritating shortwave light from modern car headlights (LED or Xenon HID) which is the part of the spectrum that produces the glare. However, lenses with this coating can also be worn in daylight and are perfectly suitable for everyday use.
• The Varifocal lens design accounts for the very dynamic eye movements whilst driving when we are switching our gaze from the road ahead to the dashboard, flicking our eyes between the right and left side mirrors and the rear-view mirror, glancing back at the road…all in rapid succession. The distance vision and transitional zones of the DriveSafe progressive lenses have deliberately been made large enough to provide optimum support for a driver’s eye movements. At the same time, the near zone of the lens is large enough for activities such as reading, so the spectacles can be worn all day long.

This Zeiss hi-tech lens is in sharp contrast to cheap yellow polarised night driving glasses sold on Amazon for £10-20 which are advertised to reduce glare from oncoming headlights. However, these really only change the white glare to yellow glare; they do not make the brightness of lights less bright, they just make everything look yellow! This may soften the lights, but will also make darker areas of the road even less visible. The important thing to remember is to not use tinted glasses at night as this can actually make your vision worse.

For more information on antireflection coatings or the new Zeiss DRIVESAFE lenses please phone us on 0115 9332999.