Grumble grumble.... stupid, stupid Welsh plod ....
 

My Dad just swapped his Hatch WRX for a Skoda Fabia vRS (actually surprisingly good and only 1/2 second slower... not my cup of tea though).

Anyway virtually the first time he drove it he was hooning along somewhere in North Wales getting to grips with it and got tugged by some welsh plod.

"You have got your front fog lights on" said the plod.

"No I haven't" said my dad.

"Yes you have and I'm going to fine you £35 (or what ever it was) for having your fog lights on"

Dad's getting hot under the collar and starts to protest, "I haven't got my ruddy fog lights on. It's the middle of the day.... look" and points to the light switch turned off.

Anyhow Plod starts writing a ticket so my dad gets out of the car and suggests to the plod that he try to turn them off.

Plod tries for 10 minutes to turn off the RUNNING LIGHTS ... without success.

Tears up the ticket and goes about his merry way :hjtwofing

Stupid stupid plod.

My Dad reckons it is a new EU directive or something that came out this year. Only the front lights come on and dim with the head lights?!??? :wonder:

Yup as of end of Feb this year ALL new cars have to have daytime running lights. Obviously lots of new cars before this had them enabled in the run up before this.

With VAGs this can be side lamps, head lamps or fog lamps, and is all programmable: Some VAGs can allow them to be dimmed, so say the foglights are daytime running lights, they can be dimmed to 50%....basically its down to how the dealer programs the body control module.

Good news is you can disable it, or mess with it. Be it via dealers or VAG-COM.

For example: My Golf had "Highway lights" enabled, but "Rain lights" disabled. What that meant is when I'm going down teh road at above 50mph, the headlamps turn on...even on a bright sunny day, and they wouldn't switch off until after the journey unless I overided the switch. Then, when its a dull grey drizzley day, the lights stay off...when they should really be switched on.

Modern cars. Nightmare, at this rate every car owner willl need to buy a laptop to adjust the personal settings :cuckoo:

Yeah, won't be long until we become passengers at this rate!

I think it was the sheer @ss-hole-ish-ness of the plod that amazed my dad. He's never been pulled before.... believe it or not!

One would *think* and hope that the plod who "watch over" us would be made aware of the new rules?? Especially traffic plod!!!

Perhaps you should explain to your father that the modern police 'service' is more about raising revenue than upholding the law :(

I think these running lights are a great idea though. It gets quite foggy in these parts at times, and you wouldn't beleive the number of head ons I've nearly had with people straddling the white lines, but don't think they need to turn their lights on because it's not dark :eek: :brickwall:

Doesn't the Road Traffic Act (or at the very least the Highway Code) already say you have to switch on dipped headlights in daylight, if it's foggy? Totally agree that there are far too many idiots on the road who regularly don't do it, but it shouldn't need an EU manufacturing directive to put that right, just better driver education and strict enforcement by plod against the culprits.

Have they changed the law about what is permissible? It always used to be that you could only use fog lights which are below a given height above the ground if the visiblility was poor.

What are these "running lights" like? are they at low level which was confusing the cop who stopped the car in Wales?

Les

I just wish they'd diasble sidelight/parking/marker lights....the amount cars driving at night just on marker lights (NOT dim-dip, which rarely exists on modern cars), is getting stupid.

The idiocy here is most of the cars have automatic headlamps and the driver has overidden it: I.E they switch the switch two clicks from off-->auto-->marker lights...but still need to turn the switch one more click. :rolleyes:

My Audi has the option for running lights (now on, switch next to the light switch) and I leave the lights on Auto and get on with it. They come on more often than is needed so I'm happy to let the car get on with it :)

Running lights is basically a contrived elf-and-safety shorthand for 'dipped-beam headlamps with rear lights switched off', first made popular in the US thanks to everyone there being so terrified of being sued. I'm pretty sure the EU equivalent which was finally agreed on very recently will actually state that Audi-style LED strips along the bottom edge of the normal headlamp are going to be the minimum requirement for new-built cars and bikes. Other alternatives might still be an allowed option in the new directive, I'll have to try and fish out the article I saw it in.

Thanks for the explantion. Had not heard about that before.

Les

My XC's dipped head-lights are on all the time - can't see the point of turning them off ever.

The only problem with DRL as part of the main headlamp cluster is it makes it harder to see the front indicators flashing. This can be highly annoying when waiting to pull out of a junction or onto a roundabout.

Really front indicators should not be in the same cluster as the main headlamp unit. But what do I know...I'm not a car builder :rolleyes:

As said, all new models (including facelifts) now have to have DRLs.

I did notice a new Fabia yesterday with ridiculously bright lights low in the bumper. As I got closer, I saw they were LEDs and must have been DRLs. Bl00dy dazzling, though. I'd call them a hazard in daylight!

I do think it would have been better to run a campain to tell people if its dark, very foggy or raining, TURN YOUR LIGHTS ON!! Points and or fine if you don't.

I haven't actually seen the lights working in the flesh... but from memory they look just like the old Impreza P1 lights under the front bumper... (didn't look that closely... was more interested in seeing the super charger / turbo combination and checking out 2 clutches & flappy paddle stuff TBH).

I'll be catching up with the old man in a few weeks. I'll have a proper look then.

Back in the day I had an old Cavalier with Dim dip... I thought it was a great feature... Don't know why they dropped it.

I know what you mean.

Slightly different, but still in the same vain... I was behind a modern bus/coach on Friday and it had all-in-one circular rear light clusters, split up into 3 sections. The top and bottom thirds were the tail/brake light... the centre third was the indicator. What with the cluster also being LED, it was hard to make out the indicator flashing (bright red surrounding and immediately adjacent to orange = hard to suss :rolleyes:).

OP, it's that kind of "I'm the law and therefore important and so what I say goes"-based arrogance that makes my blood boil. :mad: It's like "1984" in a nutshell (cue an Austin Powers' funny... :lol1:) -- the zero tolerence oppression of the common man :mad:

:lol::lol:

All that was on mr plods mind was £££££ ka ching..

I have been flashed a few times by other motorists,not realising they are DRLs,not fog lights :sleep:.some are quite bright and its an easy mistake to think they are fogs on certain vehicles.Drivers just appear to put fogs on even when its only a little foggy,and i'm sure its still only if visibility is less than 100 meters..
Is actually a website for motorists against DRLs

http://www.dadrl.org.uk/

Because they didn't do their research properly;)

The quickest way to get a halogen bulb to fail is to UNDER-volt it. It runs too cool, quickly blues over, (the blueing being the filament condensing on the too cool glass), and the now too thin filament, snaps.

NEVER dim halogen bulbs;)

When I heard that DRL's were to become compulsory on new cars I thought plod might struggle with the fog-light law after. Shame, as fog-light morons p!$$ me off ! I'd hazard a guess that plod will just forget all about enforcing it now.

True but its a easy vag com setting to either turn the DRL when indicator is on if its a bulb or I think the Audi's dim them if its a LED type DRL as standard.

Richard

IIRC Volvos have had running lights for years...

Its all-right.. the EU decided it.... That must mean it is better for everyone!

The stupid plod aren't stupid, they are just anti EU! That's all!

<edit> I just like saying STUPID PLOD.

STUPID PLOD. STUPID PLOD. STUPID PLOD. STUPID PLOD. STUPID PLOD. STUPID PLOD.

The same design brilliance (excuse the pun) gets taken a whole step further in the US, where a good number of cars have rear indicators that are entirely red (presumably it must be legal there as so many people have them, ie. the exact same colour as rear lights. Thrown in a good dose of spray on a rainy day, and the lack of speed-ordered lanes as is the norm stateside, and you have the perfect recipe for total and utter chaos, or full size road-car dodgems, if you prefer. Ya gotta love those yanks :freak3:

Had a similar thing years ago in my 106GTI.

Driving down a country lane at night with my full beam on. Plod sat in a layby. I see Plod, turn my full beam off and onto main beam.

Blue lights flash as they follow me down the road. I pull over to be asked why was I driving down the road with my fog lights on? "

No I wasn't" I said.

"Yes you were" Plod said. "You turned them off once you spotted us" he said.

Took me 5 minutes to explain that the 2 spot lights at the front come on with Full beam. This also included them accusing me of wiring my Fog lights up to the Full beam. :rolleyes::rolleyes:

Yep. Seen a few American jobs over here with all-red illuminating rear clusters, inc. the "turn signals" :lol1:

You can disable them either by software or you can switch to sidelights only. I just keep my dipped heads on

Incidentally, anyone know why US cars in the US don't have rear fog lights?

Yeah, the whole lot flashes.

I think it was American Federal standards that were first to make 3rd brake lights mandatory because of this.

I've noticed that some cars - certainly Audi's - they will automatically dim the DRL considerably while the indicator is flashing for exactly this circumstance, then go back to full brightness once the indicators stop.