A vehicle surroundings monitoring apparatus includes an image pickup means for taking an image of the surroundings of a vehicle, a preceding-vehicle detecting means for detecting a preceding vehicle from the taken image, a monitored-region setting means for setting predetermined monitored regions around the preceding vehicle on the image, a predicting means for predicting a brightness of an environment the preceding vehicle is going to enter, on the basis of brightnesses of pixels in the monitored regions, and an adjusting means for adjusting at least one of an exposure amount of the image pickup means and the brightnesses of the pixels output from the image pickup means beforehand in accordance with the brightness of the environment predicted by the predicting means.