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Idiocy explained

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  • Idiocy explained

    Does it seem to you that it is becoming increasingly common to see cars driving at night without their headlights on? You aren't alone, and there's a pretty good reason.
    Modern cars use LCDs in their instrument panels, so those panels have a backlight that needs to be on even during the day. Thus, one of the big clues you forgot to turn on your headlights (ie: it being to dark to see your speedometer) has been removed.

    Add to that that theses cars often have "daytime running lights" which are totally adequate for driving on city streets with streetlights, and the driver might well not notice that they forgot to turn on their lights and thus have no tail or marker lights and may well be invisible from angles other than the front.

    Sort of like how decades ago manufacturers switched to running the turn signals with solid-state electronics instead of electro-mechanical relays and suddenly a lot more people were driving with a turn signal on because they couldn't hear the loud click they expected to warn them they'd left a blinker on.

  • #2
    My car is like that.. I've caught myself a couple times not noticing the lights are off until I hit a dark area along the road. I have a green little light thingie that pops up on my dash board when the headlights are on but otherwise nothing else. My car also has the 'daylight' running lights, but unlike other cars that the lights are clear, my are amber.. so when my car is running, from the front it looks like I just have the parking lights on.
    Just sliding down the razor blade of life.

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    • #3
      I discovered a way to compensate for the headlights/DRL issue.

      My in-car sat nav can be set to change to "night mode" when the headlights are turned on. This makes the map background turn black, so at night if the headlights are off, the background is still "map grey" and shines with the relative brightness of a thousand suns, which is pretty obvious.

      Of course, this depends on the car coming with factory sat nav...

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