Forvia Hella Ready with ADB; NHTSA: Not So Fast

April 17, 2026

Chris Clonts

The heart of the system: dimming only the high-beam pixels that hit an oncoming car or a car in the same lane ahead, thus allowing the benefits of high beams all the time without casting a glare in drivers, cyclists or even pedestrians walking against traffic. (Forvia Hella)

I’m riding in the second row of a Lincoln Navigator fitted with Forvia Hella’s adaptive driving beam (ADB) headlight system. The low- and high-beams are on, blasting everything in front of us for between 350 and 500 feet (122 and 152 m) with a bright, daylight-temperature LED light. Even the traffic and street signs at the edges of the road, which normally aren’t as well illuminated, are bathed in brightness.

A car pulls out in front of us, and the system instantly adjusts, creating a tunnel of unlit space on and just next to the vehicle ahead. So even though we still have high beams on the rest of the road, that driver isn’t facing the harsh glare that is the No. 1 complaint about today’s high-intensity headlight systems.

Automotive lighting fans have waited for systems like this to come to America since they were approved in Europe in 2006 and started appearing on vehicles there in 2012. Currently, only Tesla and Rivian have such systems in vehicles sold in the United States. We’ll get into why below.

Aaron Knettle, Lead Development Engineer, said since the company controls the software, they can easily change it to meet an OEM’s spec for system behavior. (Chris Clonts)

Hella’s system uses real-time data from cameras already on a vehicle to detect other vehicles in real time, said Aaron Knettle, a Hella lead development engineer. “We control our own software for object detection and how to respond to that,” he said, adding that the system can track and react to up to eight objects simultaneously, including pedestrians and cyclists. Knettle said whether the system blacks out only vision areas, such as rear- and side-view mirrors or an entire vehicle, is a decision made by the OEM.

The headlights can be made up with as few as 48 or as many as 16,000 LEDs. I got to see both extremes on the demo ride in the Navigator. Perhaps surprisingly, the system with only 48 beams performed nearly as well in creating the shadow for cars ahead (the system works for oncoming cars as well). The 16,000-LED headlights drew, of course, a shaper edge between light and dark. Forvia Hella calls that upper end their SSL/HD system and it comes with the ability to project things on the road ahead of the vehicle. For instance, warnings of railroad crossings or icy conditions ahead. The system includes an LED chip mounted directly on the driver/integrated circuit. What makes the shadows on oncoming cars happen is pulse width modulation on an individual pixel level, engineers said. The aesthetic result is that extremely slim headlamps are possible due to reduced lens-dimension requirements.

A common misconception about ADB systems is that when they “black-out” oncoming cars or, especially, pedestrians, is that it makes them more difficult to see. Only the high beam is affected, so what’s shining on the object is still the full light of a low beam.

A look at how the HD system works in turning off individual high-beam pixels so that a car ahead or an oncoming driver only sees a vehicle’s low beams. (Forvia Hella)

The only added requirement for the HD system is that more individual LEDs call for progressively higher compute. In case of an ADB software failure, the systems revert to normal low beam/high beam operation.

The holdup? Testing

In 2016, SAE’s vehicle lighting committee issued J3069, which outlined test procedures for ADB headlight systems. It updated the standard in 2021, changing things such as light/shadow boundary requirements due to the changing abilities of new systems.

In 2022, after discussions with suppliers, OEMs and the J3069 team, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), updated the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) No. 108, which governs all automotive lighting, to allow ADB headlights in America. NHTSA’s test came with two problems.

Problem one: “The OEMs must pass the test based on the vehicle,” said Antonio Pantoja, HELLA VP for technology and innovation. That’s as opposed to Europe, where the approval comes at the headlamp (supplier) level, which means any vehicle with that system is approved. Here, every make/model is approved separately. So, if Cadillac, for instance, wants to put Hella’s system on the CT5 and the Escalade, both cars must test separately. Europe has always placed a premium on lighting, though. The United States maximum for light from a high beam is 75,000 candela per lamp. In the EU, it’s about 200,000.

Antonio Pantoja, Forvia Hella Vice President, Tech Center USA Lighting & Innovation Americas, and Lead Development Engineer Isabel Vallejo. (Chris Clonts)

Problem two: “The test is difficult to pass. It’s very stringent,” said Carissa Silas, Forvia Hella manager of marketing and communications.

Michael Larson, a lighting Engineer with General Motors who was chair of SAE’s ADB task force, agrees with that assessment. He said the organization had been talking with the NHTSA for 10 years. Since the task force knew the NHTSA wanted a vehicle-level test, it came up with a set of tests that would allow European systems already on the road there to pass here. “Maybe there would have been some software updates because of some of the special things here in the U.S., he said. “Well, NHTSA, they went a different way.”

He said the NHTSA tests call for multiple sub-tests on “curves and straightaways and different speeds and things like that.” He said it was more testing than J3069, which the industry can deal with. “The problem,” he said, “is they came out with really restrictive glare requirements. So much so that low beams of today (on non-ADB vehicles) wouldn’t pass the new test.”

Forvia Hella’s adaptive driving beam (ADB) headlight system can use individual pixels to display information on the road ahead of the vehicle. In this instance, an icy-conditions warning. (Forvia Hella)

Since most ADB systems keep the low beams and high-beams on at the same time (thus the enhanced driver vision), “this makes it so we have to do something different for low beams to get ADB to pass and then we also have a lot of things to do with the shadow to meet the requirements,” he said. “It’s really difficult.”

Hella VP Pantoja said it’s the sheer number of variables that also make the test difficult. “Different drivers or suspension settings can affect it,” he said.

SAE Media reached out to the NHTSA and did not receive a response. It’s possible the agency feels caught between two competing goals: the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, seeing the sad state of U.S. automotive lighting, began testing new vehicle headlights and publishing the results in 2016. Originally, the goal was to drive overall night vision improvement. But as LED headlights became increasingly popular as costs fell, IIHS also tested for what had become a rampant complaint from drivers, especially older ones: blinding glare of LED headlights that were either aimed badly or had low beam cutoff points that were too high.

The business side of the SSL HD chip sandwich: The tiny LED beams. (Forvia Hella)

“So, really what happened is that NHTSA basically made ADB a glare prevention device, not an enhanced visibility device,” Larson said. “It’s still going to be a benefit. But NHTSA is getting a lot of complaints about glare, so they're very sensitive to it.” But it is still basically a zero-tolerance policy for glare.

The test itself is done with photocells, which stand for an oncoming driver’s eyes and are placed on a track, in curves and straightaways and at the tops of hills. Then the brightness is measured. Larson said, though, that the restrictive glare levels were derived from very low-mounted headlamps. “Like headlamps we don’t even mount – nobody mounts them this low anymore – at 620 mm (2 ft),” he said, adding that was probably the standard height 30 years ago. “Things are higher now, and drivers’ eyes are higher, also.”

In a speech at SAE International’s World Congress in April, NHTSA Chief Counsel Peter Simshauser said the agency was open to negotiated rulemaking on some issues. That more collaborative process differs from notice-and-comment rulemaking, which can be more adversarial. However, Simshauser did not address ADB regulations directly.

“We’ll get there.”

HELLA’s Pantoja said that it would be ideal if NHTSA were open to discussing possible changes to FMVSS No. 108. But Larson said that’s not likely, citing the administration’s negative response to petitions from automakers and lighting suppliers urging reconsideration of the final rule and even the adoption of SAE J3069.

The history of the auto industry, though, is one of adapting and overcoming regulations and test requirements. When the IIHS introduced side-impact testing in 2003 (and NHTSA updated FMVSS No. 214) that showed severe intrusion and damage on vehicles, many OEMs claimed the test was too difficult. But engineers redesigned door beams and made other structural changes that passed easily.

You could almost describe the Hella SSL HD chip as an SOC for ADB. (Forvia Hella)

And so it should be with ADB headlights. Forvia Hella engineers said they are working with customers on passing the FMVSS No. 108 standard. And GM’s Larson said engineers are up to the challenge. “We're very resourceful. We will figure it out. More automakers are going to bring out vehicles. It just takes time and money and resources and all this time people aren't enjoying the benefit of ADB,” he said.

“We’ll get over the hurdle, but it’s maybe a hurdle that we didn’t have to get over.”