Many people have reduced vision in low light, especially older people. As you get older, other diseases like cataracts can also make it harder to see at night. And here is a scary fact: you may need twice as much light at the age of 50 to see as well as you did when you were 30!
There are five signs of night driving issues:
1) Not being able to see road signs clearly.
2) Inability to judge distance and speed.
3) Struggling to read car instruments
4) Difficulty adapting to glare from headlights.
5) Experiencing a loss of side vision.
These night driving glasses tend to be similar to shooting glasses and in some cases they are identical. Shooting glasses are yellow because this color is known to filter out blue UV rays. It's also claimed that yellow lenses improve a person's ability to see and discern objects as well increase depth perception. Shooters who wear these glasses for hunting or target shooting often find that they increase the contrast of objects against an overcast sky. But do they really help you see better while you're driving at night?
A 2019 study showed that people wearing night driving glasses had a harder time seeing pedestrians in their path than people who were not wearing night driving glasses. Those wearing the night driving glasses sometimes took up to 1.5 seconds longer to see pedestrians while driving.
Glasses with yellow tinted lenses can enhance contrast in certain daylight conditions, since the yellow tint blocks some of the sun's blue light. This high-energy visible blue light is more likely to cause glare when it enters the eye, compared to other forms of visible light.
Amber or copper colored lenses can block much more blue light than yellow lenses, but they also prevent more light from entering the eye, which reduces visibility even more in low-light conditions. In fact, even yellow lenses reduce the overall visible light to a degree, since they also block some blue light. This might be a good thing during the day, but not at night when maximum visibility is important.
Researchers at Harvard's Schepens Eye Research Institute conducted a study involving 22 participants to find out whether night driving glasses provided any benefit for nighttime driving.
The experiments were conducted in four simulated night driving conditions with the subjects wearing either yellow tinted night driving glasses or glasses with clear lenses. Scenarios included testing with and without a headlight glare that mimicked oncoming traffic. The experiment measured the subject's reaction time to seeing a pedestrian walking alongside the roadway.
The study found that night driving glasses did not appear to improve how well participants detected pedestrians at night. The experiment data suggested that wearing yellow-lens glasses when driving at night does not improve performance in that critical task.
In fact, the results found "that wearing yellow-lens glasses may slightly worsen performance," but the finding "was not statistically significant." Their conclusion was that the findings did not appear to support the use of night-driving glasses.
If your eyes are healthy and you don't have vision problems and don't need prescription glasses, then it's best not to wear any glasses at all. If you need prescription eyeglasses then having an anti-reflective coating is worth the small extra cost.
The reasons are that these glasses will allow almost all of the visible light to enter your eyes, they will let your eyes focus properly and reduce or eliminate the glare causing reflections of streetlights and headlights in your lenses.
Note that the AR coating only reduces the glare caused by the eyeglass lenses themselves so there is no visual benefit to wearing non-prescription lenses with AR coating.
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