Remember when you parents makes you feel like you’ve opened a portal directly to hell on the roof of the family car when all you do is turn on the dome light? Some parents went so far as to tell their children that it was illegal driving with headlights on at night and by doing so, the innocent and lovely children were brought parents have risk pulled over And Tickets sold. Actually, parents are dirty liars. No state in the United States has a law against driving with a dome light Although there are some potential loopholes that the certainly not corrupt police can exploit to stop you.
While no state has a law that explicitly prohibits the use of overhead lights while driving at night, if police want to stop you, they will find a way. California Highway Patrol Sergeant Brian Pennings told ABC30.com that the California Vehicle Code makes it illegal to add interior taillights to a vehicle, so if you’ve upgraded your overhead lights to brighter or colored LEDs, a dishonest police officer may choose to pull you over. If a driver has their overhead lights on and is clearly distracted from the road while doing something like rummaging through their wallet or finding a piece of gum they just dropped, the officer may pull them over for distracted driving, which is illegal in most states. Sergeant Pennings told ABC30,
The answer to your question is no, it is not illegal to drive with your interior lights on… but there is one thing you need to consider: if you use those lights, the driver’s ability to see objects outside the car during the dark hours will be significantly reduced. So this can be very unsafe.
While not illegal, glowing dome lights actually make it harder to see when driving in the dark. Dome lights reflect off the inside of the windshield and essentially make the inside of the windshield brighter than anything outside, especially on dark roads. It’s the same concept as when you turn on the lights at night in a dark room and suddenly can’t see out the window. The light also causes your pupils to constrict, making it harder for you to let in enough of the dim light outside to see what’s going on. That’s the strongest argument for the dangers of dome lights, but there are others; when a driver’s eyes have already adjusted to the dark and you suddenly shine your lights into their field of vision, it can be dangerous. Dome lights placed behind the driver can reflect light from the rearview mirror and shine into the driver’s face, or if the driver peeks into the rearview mirror, the light will shine directly into their eyes.
Dad’s creepy headliner probably isn’t that big of a deal in modern cars. Retina-burning digital gauge clusters, giant dashboard-mounted iPads, and animated LED strips make the headliner obsolete. Even if modern parents aren’t driving a brand-new car with tons of screens and mood lighting, the vast majority of vehicles on the road are equipped with LED headlights and taillights that put runway lights to shame, so suddenly losing your night vision isn’t a big deal. In any case, it’s not illegal to drive with your headliner on in any state in the United States.
