I have a warning light that keeps coming on in my car. It’s the tire pressure light.
For some reason, the car has decided that one of my tires does not have enough air. It does. It has pretty much the exact same amount of air pressure as the rest of the tires. At least according to an actual tire gauge. I checked.
But the light still comes on. Something is messed up somewhere in the system to cause the light to malfunction. Now the choice is, fix the sensor system, or ignore the light.
What I have started to question is, why do we have all these lights?
There has always been a term for lights such as these… idiot lights. Since I do not pretend to know much about the workings of most vehicles, I often have to rely on such lights. But at the same time, I know enough not to depend on such lights.
In this case, I am capable of checking the pressure in my tires. In fact, I enjoy little tasks like that. They almost make me feel that I do actually know something about cars. At least the easy stuff. But it would seem that car makers would rather believe we know nothing, so we should have a light for pretty much everything. Which is great… until something goes wrong with the system.
Turn the key to your car and you will likely see several lights flash to life. Some are actually useful. Others are there to perform simple tasks that we should really be doing ourselves, like checking the air pressure in your tires.
Really, I am coming to believe cars have far too many warnings lights. On the other hand, there are some people who could really use to have a few more.
