Vigo said:The DRL were so berkeleying bright that they illuminated the road just fine, even on a street with no lights. But the rear lights weren’t on. The only way we really would have known was that the dashboard lights were too bright, but they weren’t ridiculously so.
I see this particular problem on the roads a lot. What makes it worse is since so many instrument clusters are 'screens' anyway now, they're never off. In the old days you would still know your headlights were off because your gauges would be dark! Now they're just 'still bright', and so many people who do mostly urban driving don't ever drive in the 'actual dark' enough to realize that bright gauges wash out your night vision, so 'city folk' just keep their gauge brightness cranked to the max all the time anyway. One less way to notice you didn't turn your headlights on..
I see the same nearly every morning anymore while driving in to work.
My GTI is the opposite example. The instruments are always backlit, but the backlighting turns off if ambient light is below a setpoint (sensor on the dash top) and the headlights are not turned on. That way, the driver knows that he/she needs to turn their lights on if they cannot read the instruments. Not foolproof, but pretty close assuming the driver is at least sort of paying attention.
