Forget about adaptive matrix LEDs; if we want to be able to see more outside, we need to turn the lights off inside
Now seems like a good time to address a topic that affects almost all of us drivers, and disproportionately through the winter months: cars with dashboards lit up like Christmas trees.
I’ve driven plenty of ambient-lighting horror shows over the last few years. Some would have made your average festive Nordmann fir look half-dressed and decidedly unjolly; others, to be fair, used lighting as decoration quite judiciously.
There really are some brands that seem to be beginning to do it well; others are doing it really badly; and others still are just doing it for the sake of doing it. I’m not against the idea of it full stop, but a few dos and don’ts certainly seem to be emerging.
Let’s depart in the obvious place. Light pollution inside a car ought to be minimised. And where it is emitted, it should be done with extreme care. Perhaps not eradicated, because we are where we are and there’s no going back now on screens and displays doing jobs that buttons and dials used to. And also because when it’s done well, it’s quite nice.
There has been much muttering about headlights lately, specifically how the latest active ones tend to dazzle. I have plenty of sympathy: this is absolutely true. I was recently given a demonstration of a new Audi headlight that actually projects a beam of light directly at pedestrians whom you’re approaching, not unlike a prison watchtower’s searchlight picking out an escapee.
It was billed as a safety feature. At no point was the pedestrian surveyed to report what the experience was like for them.
It’s a little as if some car design departments have forgotten how the human eye works. As if they’ve never sat in a bedroom on Bonfire Night with the curtains open and got a better view of the fireworks simply by switching all the lights off.
The brands making the gaffes aren’t the ones you would expect-the new arrivals, who might not know better.
BMW’s ‘interaction bar, an ugly, plasticky ribbon that spans almost the full width of the cabin of the likes of the 5 Series, 7 Series and iX, shows a brazen disregard for your night vision with the lurid brightness of its gratuitous glare. It’s for no better reason, mostly, than ‘because tech’ or ‘red equals sporty’. I can’t stand it.
Mercedes delights in putting a particularly bright band of light just below the windscreen of many of its cars – about as high and troublingly close to your eyeline as it’s possible to put one. It then puts extra bands around other high-placed features like air vents, having already made most of the surface of the car’s dashboard a de facto digital display in some cases.
Audi’s philosophy doesn’t seem to be quite as OTT. The Q3 I tested the other week used discreet beads of light at lower levels (which actually help you to navigate the centre console after dark by marking its boundaries) and gentle patterns in the door cards.
Porsche tends to use indirect, reflected elements that just have that appealing glow, accentuating the design of the fascia. It doesn’t seem to mess about with 101 selectable colours. This is much better thinking.
Unfortunately, no brand seems about to bring back Saab’s old ‘night panel’ function: a button, inspired by the firm’s aeronautical experience, that you could press to extinguish every light in the cabin except for the speedo, illuminating only things like the fuel gauge as necessary (when slipping below a quarter full, for example). I remember really looking forward to night-time drives in these cars, so well did it work.
So here’s an idea for Euro NCAP: stop messing around with ADAS, buy up a hundred old 9-3s and 9-5s and send them on rotation to Munich, Stuttgart, Paris and Turin, making each city’s car design population drive them through the winter months. They will soon understand how wrong they’re getting it.
