Discovery 2 driving light hack

Nothing wrong with my driving. It’s everyone else.

Words I’ve uttered a few times since relocating to the Midlands.

There must be an epidemic of colour blindness because red lights no longer mean ‘stop’. They mean ‘proceed at full speed if you think you can get away with it’.

And the number of cars spotted in hedges, in ditches, and driven into trees has shot through the roof compared to ‘darn sarf’.

I’m only half joking.

So with that in mind, Lucky’s lights get switched on for every trip.

Gotta make myself as visible as possible, right?

But it’s a pain the backside… switching them on, switching them off.

It’d be nice if Lucky had driving lights that came on automatically with the ignition, and off again when the ignition’s killed.

Something like that can’t be hard to fudge, right?

Find a live feed, that’s only live with the ignition on, and attach it to the side lights feed.

So I whipped out the multimeter. Stripped the steering column of its plastics. And set to work figuring out which of the mass of wires I could piggyback on to.

Closeup of a multimeter with 14.01 volts reading on the display. There's some dashboard clocks visible in the background — Land Rover Discover 2 driving lights hack

Turns out I had to knock up a little mod to the multimeter, because access to the wires for testing was only accessible from the rear of a multi-plug.

Neat little trick though.

Closeup of a pin nail, bent at right angles, and zip tied onto the end of a multimeter probe. — Multimeter hack

Once the sidelight feed was discovered it was onto the live ignition feed.

Then it was a case of attaching the two together.

There’s no power drain. And no negative side effects.

Even the ‘lights on bonging’ only happened a few times, when turning the ignition off, before it got bored and gave up.

In fact, the only side effect is the heater unit operates with the ignition off but lights on.

Guess I know where I got the power feed from!

A multimeter probe, touching a specific wire in a connector block, that's inserted into a car fusebox — Land Rover Discover 2 driving lights hack

Closeup of a multimeter prove touching a wire inside a steering column — Land Rover Discover 2 driving lights hack

With the sidelights measured in candles (probably about 3 tealights) I’m thinking it might be worthwhile figuring out which of the wires is dipped-main headlights and using them instead of the pathetic sidelights.

And while I’m doing that, might as well add in an ‘enable / disable’ switch in one of the dash clock surround spare holes. Just in case I ever need to switch off Lucky’s driving lights.

But that’s for another time.

Old Landys Rule!

Phil.