If you grew up believing it's illegal to drive with the lights on inside your car, we regret to inform you you've been in the dark your whole life for literally no reason at all.
Why this is such a popularly believed myth is a strange one but Wales Online checked The Highway Code and it's perfectly legal to do so.
While you can’t show anything out the back windscreen of a car other than a red light, and the driver must not be distracted from the road, there’s nothing that fundamentally bars the interior light from being in the 'on' position, and the general consensus seems to be that it’s fine.
Of course one reason you might have been told not to do it as a child is because if you left it on once you got out the car it would drain the battery and then you'd really be in trouble.
What are your rights if you are pulled over by the police in the UK?
Speaking to the Mirror , a spokesman for the The RAC said: “There is no law against this [interior light]. However, if a police officer pulls you over and adjudges your interior light to be a driving distraction they have the right to tell you to turn it off.”
They also spoke to a police officer who said: “The only scrap of a chance may be if the interior light is white AND it is showing to the rear (which I would doubt) so that it is visible from outside the rear of the vehicle. The offence there is ‘showing a light other than red to the rear’.
“When you think about it a car has numerous lights within the cockpit nowadays, one more located in the roof probably won’t make much difference (Sat-navs, instrument dials, radios etc).”
