A vehicle surroundings monitoring apparatus includes an image pickup apparatus for taking an image of the surroundings of a vehicle, a preceding-vehicle detecting apparatus 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 apparatus 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 apparatus for adjusting at least one of an exposure amount of the image pickup apparatus and the brightnesses of the pixels output from the image pickup apparatus beforehand in accordance with the brightness of the environment predicted by the predicting apparatus.