Just Turn Them On, Dummy

**A driving light rant**

Dusk on a Calgary arterial. That grey half-hour where the sky still has some light in it but the road doesn’t. I’m rolling along behind a dark sedan and I realize I can’t actually see it. No red. No outline. Just a shape that resolves itself about two seconds later than it should have.

Then it happened again, next intersection, different car.

Both drivers happened to be women. I mention that only because it’s what I saw, and because it means nothing. I’ve been behind plenty of men driving blacked-out ghost cars in the rain. This isn’t a gender thing. It’s a competence thing, and competence is distributed pretty evenly across the population, which is to say thinly.

## What’s actually happening

Here is the mechanical reality, and almost nobody driving knows it.

Since 1990, every new vehicle sold in Canada has had daytime running lights. They come on automatically. They light up the **front** of your car. That’s it. That is the entire job. Daytime running lights do not turn on your tail lights, and on most vehicles built before about 2021 they don’t turn on your side markers or your licence plate lamp either.

So from the front, you look fine. From behind, you are a matte-black object moving at 60 km/h with nothing on it that emits or reflects meaningful light.

The reason drivers don’t catch it is that the manufacturers made the dashboard glow. Your speedometer is lit. Your infotainment screen is lit. Your climate control is lit. Every visual cue inside the cabin says *the lights are on*. The one cue that would tell you otherwise, a dark instrument panel, was engineered away sometime in the 2000s in the name of looking modern.

You are not being lied to exactly. You are being allowed to assume.

## The law is not ambiguous

Alberta requires headlights during night time, defined as a half hour after sunset to a half hour before sunrise, and any time you can’t clearly make out objects 150 metres ahead. Rain, snow, fog, blowing dust, that grey dusk hour, all of it counts.

Separately, the equipment regulation says your tail lamps must emit red light visible from at least 150 metres to the rear, and that tail lamps must come on and stay on when the headlamps are lit. The province spelled out both halves. Front and back. There is no version of the rule where lighting up your front end satisfies it.

Nobody enforces this. I’ve never once heard of a ticket for it in this city. So it lives in that dead zone of rules that exist on paper and are enforced by nothing but the collision statistics.

## The regulator already admitted the design was broken

Here’s the part that gets me.

Transport Canada saw this coming and fixed it in 2018. The amendment gave manufacturers until September 1, 2021, and after that every new vehicle sold in Canada had to do one of three things: turn the tail lights on with the daytime running lights, turn everything on automatically in the dark, or leave the dashboard dark so the driver notices something’s off.

Read that again. The federal regulator’s own remedy for the problem includes *make the dashboard go dark so the human figures it out*. That’s an official acknowledgment that the glowing dash was fooling people for two decades.

Good fix. Here’s the catch: it applies to new vehicles only. Every car built between roughly 2000 and 2021 still does the old thing, and those cars are going to be on the road for another fifteen years. The problem is fixed going forward and untouched going backward, which is how essentially every regulatory fix works.

## The part that actually bothers me

I’m not a communal safety guy. I don’t want more campaigns, more signage, more automated enforcement, more of the state managing your attention span on your behalf.

What bothers me is the erosion underneath it.

There used to be a short list of things a driver did on purpose. Check your mirrors. Check your fluids. Turn your lights on when it got dark. Small acts, done deliberately, that added up to a person who knew what their machine was doing. Automation ate that list one item at a time, and each individual bite was defensible. Automatic transmission, fine. Automatic lights, sure. Lane keeping, backup cameras, blind spot chimes, adaptive cruise, all of it sold as taking the burden off the driver.

But the burden was the training. Every task you hand to the car is a task the driver stops thinking about, and a driver who has stopped thinking about six things is not more attentive to the seventh. They’re just less present overall. You end up with a lot of people piloting two tonnes of steel through a snowstorm in a state I can only describe as ambient.

And when the automation is partial, which it almost always is, the driver has no idea where the boundary sits. They don’t know their daytime running lights are front-only because they were never asked to know anything. The system handled it. Except it didn’t, and there’s no alert for the gap, because the gap was designed in by an engineer who assumed somebody would still be paying attention.

Accountability doesn’t transfer to the machine. Only the awareness does.

## What to do about it, which takes four seconds

Turn the knob to ON. Not AUTO, ON. Leave it there. Modern vehicles will not drain your battery; the lights shut off with the ignition.

If you want to check yours right now: pull up at a red light at dusk behind another car and look at the pavement. If your tail lights are on you’ll see red spilling on the road behind you in your mirrors, or on the car ahead of you when you brake. Nothing there? You’ve been invisible, possibly for years.

That’s it. That’s the whole ask. One knob, one time, and you stop being a hazard that other drivers have to detect by inference.

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*Turn them on. Please.*