Do You Know Width Lights, Position Lights And Parking Lights?

Speaking of car lights, the most familiar ones are low beam, high beam, turn signal, brake light, reversing light, daytime running light, fog light and license plate light. If you put a car in front of you, almost 99% of people can accurately distinguish these lights.
But you must have heard of the terms width lights, clearance lights and parking lights. I think many people are not familiar with these lights. They just know that there seem to be these lights on the car, but they have never paid attention to them, let alone find them accurately. Today we will talk about these uncommon lights.
Width lights: The real name is "front position lights" and "rear position lights". The width lights are literally understood as lights that "indicate the width of the vehicle". In fact, this name is just a common name, because the accurate description of this light in the relevant national standards should be "front position lights" and "rear position lights". Its function is to indicate the existence and width of the vehicle at night or in low light conditions.
For family cars, front position lights and rear position lights are required, and the installation position should not be more than 40 cm away from the edge of the car body.
For halogen headlights, the front position lights are inside the low beam lights. If you look closely, you will find that there is a very small bulb below the low beam lights. It is the front position lights, which is what we usually call width lights. Some cars have daytime running lights, and they will also use daytime running lights instead of front position lights.
The rear position lights are actually the tail lights. When you look at the car in front at night, the red lights on the rear of the car without braking are the rear position lights.
When we turn on the headlight switch to the first gear, the front position lights, rear position lights, license plate lights, and instrument panel lights should be turned on at the same time. Now many cars have self-luminous instrument panels. Even if the headlights are not turned on, the instrument panel backlight is always on. However, when the headlight switch is turned on, the brightness of the instrument panel will decrease to avoid too much light affecting the driver's vision.
Clearance lights. Clearance lights literally mean lights that "indicate the outline of the car body". If you understand it this way, isn't it repeated with "width lights"? In fact, there is a little difference between the two.
The position lights are mainly for large vehicles with a body width greater than 2.1 meters. For example, a large truck with a body width greater than 2.1 meters must be equipped with position lights. Are position lights and width lights repeated? In fact, they are not repeated, because these vehicles are often tall and large, and only using width lights to indicate the width is not enough to ensure safety, so there should also be lights above the vehicle to indicate the height of the vehicle, which is equivalent to indicating the entire outline of the vehicle, so it is called a position light. Family cars are generally not high, so there is no need to use lights to indicate the height of the vehicle, so there is no such thing as position lights. Therefore, position lights are exclusive lighting configurations for large vehicles.
Parking lights. Some car owners may encounter such a problem: the car is locked, but the lights on one side are always on, and they don't know how to turn them off. In fact, you accidentally turned on the parking lights, and the reason for turning on the parking lights is that you forgot to turn off the turn signal when you got off the car.
The parking light is a lamp used to alert other pedestrians and vehicles when parking at night. After parking, the parking light on the side close to the road should be turned on. The parking light switch is the turn signal switch. For example, if you park on the right side of the road at night, you should turn on the left parking light. The way to turn it on is to turn the turn signal lever to the left when getting off the car. If the right side of the car body is close to the road when parking, turn the turn signal lever to the right, so that the right parking light will always be on.
Parking lights are generally front and rear position lights, but only one side is lit when used as parking lights. And according to regulations, parking lights are not allowed to turn off automatically, that is, if you do not actively turn it off, the parking lights must be on unless the battery is dead. So if your car has a parking light function, then you must remember to check whether the turn signal is turned off when parking, otherwise the parking light will always be on, increasing battery consumption.