Transport Canada promised to fix 'phantom vehicles' by this month. But have they?
Loopholes mean that the proposed fix for dark rear ends is no fix at all
You’re driving down the highway at night. Maybe in a storm. All of a sudden, your windshield is full of the car ahead of you, and with not a tail light in sight. What the… then you realize the culprit: the driver is chugging (or speeding) along with just their daytime running lights on. Because their dashboard is lit up, they are clueless that they are invisible to those around them. Transport Canada in 2018 named them ‘phantom vehicles,’ and vowed to fix the problem.
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Effective September 2021 — now — all new vehicles ( cars, trucks, SUVs, 3-wheeled vehicles, motorcycles and heavy trucks) will have to be properly lit, front and back. Yay, right? Hold your confetti. We’re getting no such thing.
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It is a menace that turns from annoying to deadly in the time it takes Canadian weather to change its mind. Canada mandated daytime running lights (DRL) to be standard as of November 1, 1989. Ideally, drivers would pull on their entire lighting system whenever they drive, but since ideally doesn’t happen, daytime running lights did.
They didn’t go far enough. The result has been basically every car (as the pre-‘89 models age out) on our roads now sporting DRLs — in the front. But too many fail to switch the rest of their lights as well. Some brands like Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, Saab and Porsche, among others, got it right from the start, and even Hyundais and Kias have been properly lit for years. Still, there have been consistent failures to alert people to their dark rear ends across nearly every other manufacturer and random models and years.
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Historically, Toyota and Honda have been among the worst offenders, but we can’t omit the transgressions of Mazda, Ford…hell, nearly everybody who didn’t design their cars to light up the rear as a default across their lineup. Too many manufacturers have a dashboard that lights up, making it easy for drivers to assume that everything is fine. Remember life before DRLs? You’d start the car, realize your dash was dark, and remember to tug on your lights. DRLs give you a little light, hence people driving around with just their subdued DRLs leading the way. Add in bright urban street lights, and people don’t think about it.
After 1990, “b acklighting the gauges and the gradual conversion to electronic displays in the years that followed resulted in unintended consequences,” explains George Iny with the Automobile Protection Association. Illuminated dashes took away the reminder that the full lighting system wasn’t on. It’s now rare to find a car with a darkened dash.
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Most modern headlight stalks now include an “auto” setting, but you have to have it set in that “auto” mode for your full headlight system (including rear lights) to be triggered by the sensors when lighting drops. Furthermore, that still doesn’t mean that vehicles set in “auto” have DRLs with rear lights harnessed to them. People lend their car to others; people get their car cleaned; people drive rentals; that setting can easily be turned off without a driver noticing. And off you go, meek little DRLs leading the way, your rear as dark as Satan’s heart.
Like many, I was excited for September, 2021, Finally. Legislation that would require DRLs to be harnessed to rear lights! No more dark bums! I worried the pandemic might have delayed things, so I started calling around; no dealer or salesperson knew what I was talking about. A sales regulator asked me to call them when I found out. I hauled out the Transport Canada tab I’ve had open for three weeks and read it again, looking for my magic bullet.
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As of September 2021, the Canadian Vehicle Lighting Regulation will require that all new vehicles sold in Canada have one of the following:
- tail lights that come on automatically with daytime running lights
- headlights, tail lights, and side marker lights that turn on automatically in the dark
- a dashboard that stays dark to alert the driver to turn on the lights
I’m an idiot. It says “one”. One of the following. Even Car and Driver is mistakenly championing the move, believing Canadian vehicles now require all three of the options, not just one. Full lighting on at all times is what I preach and practice. But if I had to pick only one, I’d pick Door Number One, which is how the legislation should have read way back in 1989. The first one is causing most of the dangerous trouble. The second one is where they’ve left things open to interpretation; of course your tail lights come on when you have your headlights on and set in auto. I asked Transport two times for clarification that the vehicle must be manufactured so that drivers can’t override the “auto” setting — either intentionally or accidentally.
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I asked Transport Canada, “will headlights, tail lights, and side marker lights turn on automatically in the dark only if the driver has selected the “auto” setting, or will it override the driver’s input — making it truly a solution? Their statement: “ A manufacturer can chose to apply one or more of these three options. With respect to the second option (headlights, tail lights, and side marker lights that turn on automatically in the dark), we encourage you to contact the manufacturers to determine how they opted to comply with the requirements of the regulation relative to their specific vehicle configurations.”
I started doing just that, and got back the boilerplate answer from most: we are in compliance. Only Toyota (so far, I’ll update) was precise: “All new Toyota and Lexus vehicles come equipped with three stalk positions: Auto Mode, Parking Light, or Headlights. The stalk’s default position is Auto Mode. In this position, the tail lights automatically light up in low light settings and turn off in bright ambient lighting with daytime running lights. Based on their preference, drivers can manually move the stalk to Parking Light or Headlight position, which manually turns and keeps the tail lights on, in bright and low light settings.”
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This is the answer — the interpretation of Transport Canada’s wording — that we need to see from all manufacturers who don’t already have their DRLs harnessed to the rear lighting system. It’s what everybody buying a new car needs to be checking for, and those owning older vehicles need to check on their car right now. It’s easy to point out the culprits every time it gets dark out; make sure you aren’t inadvertently one of them.
For Subaru, “the switch is spring-loaded to automatically return to the AUTO position if the driver chooses to select OFF mode” on the next ignition cycle. Be like Subaru.
Am I raging against a non-issue? Possibly. But sloppy wording is what got us here thirty years ago.