Piston Slap: A Smarter Way To Turn On Headlights?

Piston Slap: A Smarter Way To Turn On Headlights?

Jay writes:

Sajeev,

I almost ran into someone the other night! They didn’t have their lights on! This seems to be happening more often.

It seems like a simple fix—most cars already have some type of photocell that detects daytime versus nighttime for the auto headlight feature. Why not have a simple reminder on the dash for the driver if the headlights are not in the “auto” position and it is dark out?

Sajeev answers:

While the answer is difficult, I suspect I know the problem’s root cause. It first surfaced when I was a child, thanks to the gee-whiz electronic dashboard on Project Valentino.

The Valentino’s gauges were always illuminated, from the moment you turned on the key to the moment you removed said key from the ignition barrel. The driver need not activate the headlights to see the gauge cluster, and they might be lulled into the belief that the headlights are on because the gauges are illuminated.

This issue manifests when the automatic headlights are accidentally turned off. This likely makes no sense to those who never owned a Lincoln from 1980 or later, as many brands feared digital gauge technology until the current millennium.

A car wash attendant’s hamfisted hands accidentally defeated the Valentino’s automatic headlights back in 1988. My mother didn’t realize what happened until she was being questioned by a police officer one dusky evening on her commute home. Of course, the gauge cluster still lit up like the revolutionary piece of Malaise Era technology it truly was, and that’s where this long-winded answer starts to make sense.

Hindsight being what it is, my mother was seemingly destined to get pulled over by the police and get a ticket. She likely stuck out like a sore thumb with everyone else having their headlights on to illuminate their traditional analog gauges. But 1988 was almost a decade before the advent of daytime running lights (DRL), a feature that sort of looks like headlights to the untrained eye. That year was also a long, long time before the mass adoption of electronic gauges with multifunction screens that never turn off.

Both of these headlight distractions are currently in full effect on our roads. I don’t necessarily blame modern motorists for forgetting to turn on their headlights because it’s even easier to bump the headlight knob or steering column stalk than it was to defeat the same system in my beloved Valentino. So, how do we fix this?

As you suggested, hopefully, the solution doesn’t include more technology in our vehicles. Ambient light sensors are used in many applications, be it headlights or auto-brightness settings for dashboard screens. These sensors can, in theory, speak to a body control module. This module could accept an input that shows the headlight switch’s position, or whatever telltale that warns of a dead light bulb. With rudimentary programming, the body control module could do the math, then inform the driver that the headlights should probably be turned on via a warning message in the gauge cluster’s pixelated screen.

But nobody reads those screens. Just like my mother on that drive home back in 1988, these folks just wanna get home after a long day at work and see their families. Technology shouldn’t punish these folks, but that’s precisely what’s happening.

Ambient light sensors have been around for a long time. (This is me adding automatic headlights to a 1985 Ford Thunderbird.) Sajeev Mehta

Can artificial intelligence instead save the day? It’s only a matter of time before HAL 9000 every Nissan Altima can realize a distracted, tired, or stressed driver is overlooking their headlight switch position. It already commands the screens to dim at dusk to keep from blinding occupants, so why not?

But this begs the real question: have we just found out what will eventually kill the headlight switch? Only time will tell!

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