Originally Posted by
joeyduck
I agree but the tail light thing has frustrated me for twenty plus years. Too many idiots (car makers need to take some blame) drive with their daytime running lights on and oblivious to the fact their tail lights are off; the blame for the manufacturers comes with the fact they also have the dash lights on with the DRLs.
I finally felt vindicated when they actually had a segment on the radio about this issue and someone was doing some lobbying to change it. I personally run lights all day any day.
Originally Posted by
Tundra_Man
When we got my wife's car a year ago, it took me a while to adjust to the fact that the dash lights were always on, and actually got dimmer when the headlights were illuminated. My truck has automatic headlights, so I was used to not manually flipping the switch. I don't know how many times I started driving her car at night and realizing after a few blocks that the headlights were off. My brain saw the dash lights on and just assumed that the headlights were on.
Took me a good six months to re-train myself.
Had that problem also with my wife's 2014 Mazda CX-5 we got last summer. It's our newest car by almost 20 years. It has dash lights on all the time, and a dimmer switch that lets you keep the dash lights on full brightness or have them dim down when the headlights come on. And yeah like you we've also gone a couple of times with DRL's only because the dash lights were on full brightness. But if you make it dim with the headlights and turn the headlights on when it's still light out, you can't see anything on the dashboard hardly. And so Mazda had to add a little dash light to tell you that the headlights are on, but it doesn't really help.
So I thought about trying to ride to work all 5 days this week. I rode Monday and Tuesday, but unfortunately didn't happen today. I forgot to set my alarm last night when I crashed into bed and didn't wake up until 6:30. Oh well. I'll try for a 4-day bike commute week, which would still be more than any week so far since I started in 2013.