Today, of course, the latest generation of headlights work much like modern televisions with tightly packed arrays of pixelated lights blinking at up to 5,000 times a second, allowing drivers to essentially use high and low beams at the same time.How headlights evolved from open flames to laser pixels Following the short-lived idea of using open flames to light the way, the first electric headlights appeared on the 1912 Cadillac Model 30 and, by the next decade, were quickly becoming mandatory equipment across the nation.The first split-intensity headlights offering separate low and high beams were produced in 1915 but wouldn’t be included in a vehicle’s OEM design until in 1924 and the floor-mounted switch that controlled them wouldn’t be invented until three years after that — a full decade of having to get out of the car just to turn your lights on and blink between brightnesses!That changed with the passage of the Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966 and the formation of the National Highway Transportation Authority (the NHTSA) in 1968, which took the existing hodge-podge of state-level vehicular regulations and federalized them, as well as the formal adoption that year of Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS) 108, which dictated that all headlights be constructed of sealed beams.Because Standard 108 defined headlights as only having high or low beams — and legally requiring they remain separate — it tacitly excluded all of the technical advances that followed, specifically adaptive driving beam (ADB) headlight systems as found in Audi’s matrix LEDs, Lexus’ Blade Scan LEDs or Ford’s Adaptive Front Lighting System, none of which you will currently find operable Stateside."