We were driving home from West Palm Beach yesterday after two wonderfully relaxing weeks at a condo owned by my cousin. Just after we got on the Florida Turnpike, the skies opened up and the rain was coming down in buckets, so much so that I wondered whether I should pull over and wait it out. Of course I had my wipers wiping furiously and my headlights beaming because, in Florida as in many other states, when your wipers are operating, you must have your headlights on.
You would be surprised — or maybe you wouldn't — by how many other cars on the road didn't have their headlights on even given the horribly reduced visibility. It occurred to me that it would be a fairly simple engineering change (and in software it would be even simpler) to force the headlights on whenever the windshield wipers turn on.
Given the simplicity of such a change and the lives that might be saved by doing so, I'm stunned that the feature isn't a standard specification for every new car.
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My recollection (from decades back) is that older Volvos did exactly that, and that they did so because in Sweden it was the law that if your wipers were on, your headlights needed to be too.
ReplyDeleteOur Subaru isn't especially new, but it has an "auto" setting my wife uses -- if the car is on and the light conditions call for it (which they do in rainy weather), the lights are on.