When you drive a Prius (like me), and you always have your lights on (like me), you probably have been irritated by the dimmed speedometer and unreadable display in bright sunlight (like me). If you didn’t read the owners manual (like me), you also probably didn’t know about this trick to get the brightness back (like me). Here’s how:
You need to do this every time you start the car or turn on/off the lights. Return to a dimmed dashboard while driving by pressing the brightness selector briefly.
Aha, and how does the Prius perform as for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daytime_running_lamp#Environmental_impact ? 😉
I think you must be mistaking me for someone who hugs trees. 😉
But seriously: Cars should not have a light switch. Lights should always be on. Like on my bike. For safety reasons. Besides, when you stop the engine, turning the lights off instead of the stupid buzzer makes much more sense to me.
Please no, don’t turn off the lights when the motor stops. After all, when waiting for a train crossing I turn off my engine, but it would be rather unsafe to have no more lights and be invisible to other traffic.
Also, when the lights were to be turned off automatically, I would have to keep the engine running to take a picture like this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sybrenstuvel/1270327282
Actually on topic: why would they design it in such a way that you have to go through this procedure every single time you drive your car? In our Twingo we simply have a knob for the dash brightness, nothing fancy but it does the job perfectly.
In a Prius (and most newer cars) the motor automatically turns off when standing still. So that’s no longer an issue.
Twingo: Knob for brightness
Prius: Push button for brightness
Only difference: for maximum brightness with lights on, hold button. That’s not really a big deal. Glad I found this 🙂