BMW E36 Blog

I’m almost sure that everyone has seen the new cars that turn their lights on automatically when they go inside a dark tunnel or some other dark places. For me, I’ve seen this too many times and I have to admit that this option is very useful and at the same time very cool to add for our BMW cars. The only problem with this idea (you may call it a wish if you like) as far as I know is that our cars are old and this option was not available at their production time. Taking this into account, I was wondering how hard it would be to implement such an option without crying at the front door of BMW engineers. I’ve a little background about electronics and I believe this is definitely something that can be done, not by me maybe, but I’m sure it can be done.

To prove this, I’ve made some digging for information about light sensors and after overwhelming results about motion detectors and such stuff, I managed to find three sample videos that can prove this is possible and I believe it’s even easy (well, let’s not get carried away, let’s say "not hard" :D).

Take a look at the following videos:

The way I see it, this electronic circuit should:

1. Work at 12-Volts: It should rely on the car’s battery to run
2. It can be overridden: I think A tri-switch would be sufficient for this, hmmm . . . where can I get such a switch?

3. It should have some delay in response: This is important to avoid light flickering.

I hope you like this idea. Now I will need to try and find some specific details on how to implement it, so please stay tuned. I will keep you posted.

BMW E36 Blog: The Ultimate E36 Information Source.