Driving into low sun: the lens, the visor, and the four habits that matter more

Driving into low sun is two problems at once. The sun itself sits in your eyeline, which no lens fixes and the visor does. And the road, the bonnet and the car ahead throw that sun back at you as glare, which is exactly what a polarized lens removes. A polarized brown lens is the right tool for the second problem: it strips the glare and cuts the haze that flattens the road, without being so dark that the shaded verge disappears. The habits matter as much as the lens: a clean windscreen inside and out, the visor down, more following distance, and knowing that low sun arrives at the same times every day.

What low sun does

When the sun is within about fifteen degrees of the horizon, it is in the part of your view where the road is. Three things happen.

Direct sun in your eyes. Your pupils close, your eyes water, and everything darker than the sun, which is everything, becomes hard to see. No lens dark enough to make the sun comfortable is safe to drive in.

Reflected glare. Low-angle light reflects off flat surfaces at exactly the angle that polarizes it most. The road becomes a white sheet, the bonnet a mirror, the car ahead a bright block. This is the light polarized lenses were designed for.

Windscreen scatter. Any film on the glass, inside or out, scatters the low sun into a haze across your whole view. This is what turns a bright road into an invisible one, and it is the part most drivers never fix.

The lens

A polarized lens removes most of the reflected glare off the road and bonnet. That alone changes a low-sun drive from a squint to a normal one. Our polarized vs non-polarized post explains why.

Brown is the low-sun tint. It absorbs more blue than grey does, which cuts the haze and separates the road from the verge and the car ahead from the glare around it. The warm cast is a fair trade at the ends of the day. That is the T01 Brown.

Grey keeps colours true and works well if you prefer no cast. Slightly less contrast in haze. The T01 Grey.

Not dark. Low sun means the shaded side of the road, the far verge, the interior of the car ahead, are all in deep shade against a bright sky. A dark lens makes the shade black. A medium lens is the low-sun lens. We do not publish a transmission figure, because none has been measured; every product page says so.

Not blue mirrors. They are too dark and the wrong cast for the road. Our driving lens post covers all five.

The visor

The visor blocks the sun itself, which no lens can. Set it so the bottom edge sits just above the horizon: low enough to hide the sun, high enough to leave the road visible. Angle it to the side window when the sun is at the corner. On a long straight road with the sun dead ahead, the visor and the lens together are what make the drive possible.

The windscreen

This is the one that most people skip and the one that matters most. The inside of a windscreen collects a film from the plastics in the cabin, from breath, from fingerprints. It is invisible until low sun hits it, and then it scatters the light across your whole view.

Clean the inside of the glass with a proper glass cleaner and a clean microfibre cloth, then buff dry. Clean the outside too. Top up the washer fluid, because the sun will show you every streak. Replace worn wiper blades; they smear rather than clear.

The habits

1. Know when it happens. Low sun is within about an hour of sunrise and sunset, and in winter the sun stays low all day. Morning commutes east and evening commutes west are the worst. If you can shift a journey by half an hour, do.
2. Slow down and drop back. If you cannot see the brake lights of the car ahead, you cannot react to them. Double the gap.
3. Use the lane markings. When the road surface is a white sheet, the painted lines are still visible at the edge of the glare. Steer by them.
4. Watch for the unlit. Pedestrians, cyclists and dark cars vanish in low-sun glare. Assume they are there.
5. Take the sunglasses off after the sun goes. Dusk arrives fast after low sun. A lens that was right at five is too dark at six.

Frequently asked questions