Back-up / Reverse Lights on Parked Cars

[lvstephanie]

Whoever thought that this "feature" was a good idea should be fired. I just spent a few minutes at the local shopping mall waiting for a car to back-up out of a parking spot, only to find out that the car had already been parked and its occupants had already left to go into the store. I guess I'm not the only person that thinks this is a design flaw instead of a feature. From what I've read online, this is a "feature" on GM cars in which any time a person hits a button on their key fob, it lights up the headlights as well as the reverse lights. I guess the idea is that it is to help illuminate the car to help people navigate to and around their car in the dark. Although this makes sense, it does not make sense to use the reverse lights for that illumination, esp. since people have been accustomed to seeing the reverse lights as meaning that the car is backing up. If they really wanted the illumination around the car, why not incorporate puddle lights to this feature as other models do under their side-mirrors or along their undercarriage. After all, the point of this feature is to provide illumination, not necessarily showing the light source itself as in other signaling lights. Keep the reverse lights as a signal for a car in reverse and add separate illumination lights to help with the navigation.