Summer's here and as the longer, warmer days permit lowered windows, opened sunroofs, and dropped tops, it's time to start thinking about a new set of shades. But not just any sunglasses will do — they need to have some behind-the-wheel benefits. What makes a set of specs suitable for a sunrise commute or a weekend road trip? The Motive crew headed down to the local mall and raided the Sunglass Hut to investigate the matter. And maybe stop at Orange Julius. And pick up some new socks because, I mean, we were already there and all.
A few attributes make for good driving sunglasses. The first is peripheral coverage. When you're checking mirrors, monitoring blind spots, or peeking out to spot traffic around a corner, lenses that wrap around are key to visibility. A pair of glasses with flat lenses and thick arms can have you running like a blinkered horse towing an olde-timey carriage.
Polarization is also helpful. Polarized lenses reduce glare by filtering out horizontally oriented reflections — i.e., the ones searing straight into your eyeballs — thanks to their laminate coating of vertical stripes. These stripes allow only vertically polarized reflections past the lens, filtering out blinding glare.
In the same way that polarized lenses help kill bad light, lens color makes a big difference in how you see the road ahead, and each color has its own advantages. Yellow lenses like those of the Tag Heuer glasses we tested last winter help in low-light conditions, while darker tints predictably help on very bright days — at the beach or in the snow, where lots of reflective surfaces assault the eye. For common driving situations and a more versatile range of protection, most sunglasses companies recommend brown lenses.
With those parameters in mind, we have picked a selection of glasses from four popular brands, with an eye toward those styles offering the highest levels of comfort. All of them fall just above or below $150, a price we think is a happy medium between the cheap sets whose life cycles can be predicted by the moon's orbit and the designer glasses whose style, cost, and gaudy brand logos appeal more to the same people who like gold trim, white leather, or Hummers.
The Ray-Bans might be the most expensive of our bunch, but they also offer the sharpest definition through their medium-brown polarized lenses. The brand itself is one of the most trusted and well-respected names in the business, though the same can no longer be said of its former poster boy, Tom Cruise. The High Streets are the most fathead-friendly of this bunch, with a wider shape that's loose and comfortable, yet the arms still bend in at the rear to keep the glasses in place. But there are some weak points.
Peripheral coverage is important for driving glasses, and these don't have it. The lenses don't wrap around quite enough and the wide plastic arms work as blinders in some situations. These Ray-Bans may have been our top choice if it weren't for this problem.
We hadn't had any experiences with Maui Jim prior to this test, and while a company founded on a small island in the Pacific might not have a whole lot of experience with driving, they certainly know plenty about sun. The Kanaha style (Hawaiian for "gathering site") is appealing for its lightness and simplicity. And indeed those assets paid off in our experience. They're the Lotus Elise of this sunglass set. Furthermore, the frameless lenses are the polar opposite of what turned us off from the Ray-Bans. Peripheral visibility is excellent, and the lenses, which turn the world a happy shade of reddish-brown, wrap around just enough.
The Kanahas aren't without fault, though. When we first tried them on, their rubber nose grips and the small line of rubber bumps at the ears provided impressive grip, but then we hit the road for a weekend trip to Detroit. Perhaps the glasses just got nervous heading to the anti-Maui, but the rubber bumps turned into small pressure-point annihilators and became irritating. These glasses are great for short drives, but not so good for the long haul.
The Juan Pablo Edition Oakley Gascans didn't quite fit the standards of our group, but his fame proved irresistible. These glasses aren't polarized but they do use Oakley's patented "Iridium" lenses that are said to balance light transmission and reduce glare. The bad news is that they don't do the job as well as polarized lenses do. The good news is that they were the only pair that didn't black out the radio display in the BMW we drove during the test.
That's really the only good news with this pair, other than their ability to make a young blonde guy look a little more like the Terminator. As with the Ray-Bans, the arms of these Oakleys work like blinders, only worse. Also, they convinced us that brown lenses really are more versatile and provide a pleasant hue that a dark-grey tint can't match.
It isn't too often that our favorite in a group of products also happens to be the cheapest, but that's the case here — and by a pretty wide margin. The $110 Arnette Manifestos aren't as heavy as the Ray-Bans or Oakleys and don't cut off peripheral vision, either. But they're not flimsy like the pair from Maui Jim, and they're also the most attractive of the bunch. The Ray-Bans may have provided the sharpest definition, but these came in a very close second. They were slightly too narrow for most of our heads, but not painfully so.
The glasses here are just a small sampling of the many shapes and sizes out there, so don't fret if you think we have terrible taste. Just keep in mind some of the universal impressions we came away with. Look for a pair of driving glasses with thin sides or at least lenses that cover your entire field of vision. Lenses that are brown and polarized are more useful behind the wheel than your run-of-the-mill black ones. Make sure they fit well and try to avoid cool details that might turn annoying over time. And for God's sake, don't buy something just because a race driver has his name on them.
