Ten minutes before the dark season: lights, wipers, washer

By late October it is dark by six and you leave for work in twilight. The car behaves as it did in July: it starts, it drives, it stops. It will not tell you that the headlights are dimmer than they were, that a wiper is leaving a streak, that the tank still holds summer fluid. You find that out on the first dark, wet evening — in traffic, with oncoming headlights in your face. You can find it out earlier: ten minutes in the yard, no workshop and no tools.

Headlights cloud over without you noticing

Headlight lenses are plastic, and plastic ages: ultraviolet light breaks down the protective coating and the surface yellows and goes hazy. Light passing through it scatters instead of going where you are pointing the car.

The cruel part is that this takes years: today is slightly worse than yesterday, and every evening your eye accepts the new picture as normal. There is nothing left to compare it with.

Laboratory measurements show how serious it gets. The American motoring club AAA tested the headlights of two cars around eleven years old: on dipped beam they gave roughly a fifth of what new units do. That is one test rather than a rule for every car, but the order of magnitude is honest. First signs can appear by the third to fifth year.

Checking takes seconds. Look at the headlight in daylight, from the front and the side: can you see the bulb and reflector inside, or has the lens turned a matt yellow? Look for condensation inside too.

What a wall tells you

Park on level ground, nose to a wall, and switch on dipped beam. What you are reading is not brightness but shape and symmetry.

A healthy dipped beam has a clear horizontal cut-off: the light stops rather than fading away. Both patches sit at the same height, the cut-off stepping up on the right to light the verge and road signs without dazzling anyone coming the other way. One patch higher than the other means the aim has moved. No cut-off at all, just a pale cloud, means a clouded lens or a misplaced bulb.

Check the car as you drive it: level ground, normal tyre pressures, an empty boot. A loaded one lifts the nose and puts your beams into oncoming drivers' eyes — which is what the levelling dial in the cabin is for, the one many people turned once and never turned back.

Precise aiming is set on a beam-setter — part of the running costs and upkeep of the car. The wall is for something else: seeing that something is wrong.

One dead bulb — and from behind you read as a motorcycle

That lights stay on around the clock in Latvia is a legal requirement, covered in the post on the dark season. The question here is different: of everything you switch on, how much lights up?

Walk round the car with someone from the household, or stand in front of a shop window after dark: dipped beam, main beam, daytime running lights, position lamps, number-plate light, indicators, reversing light, brake lights, rear fog lamps.

The traffic rules (Ceļu satiksmes noteikumi, CSN — Cabinet Regulation Nr. 279) are stricter here than drivers expect. You may not drive at all if both dipped-beam headlamps are out in the dark: paragraph 222.1, in the same list as brakes that will not stop the car. And if one dipped-beam headlamp has failed in the dark, or the rear position lamps are out, you may drive only to a parking place or a workshop, with hazard lights on. The same applies if no brake lamp works at all. That is paragraph 223.

The prohibition is not the point, though. One dead rear lamp changes how you are read: the driver behind sees a single light, builds a motorcycle out of it, and is wrong about both your width and your distance.

The wiper leaves a streak exactly where you are looking

The rubber edge hardens and tears from sun, frost and grit. A worn wiper does not fail outright — it leaves a streak, and that streak runs through the swept area, straight across your line of sight.

In daylight you barely register it. In the evening, under oncoming headlights, every streak becomes a smeared patch of light and the glass stops being transparent at precisely the wrong moment. This is the outside of the glass: misting on the inside is a separate story.

The rules name the wiper directly: you may not drive if the windscreen wiper on the driver's side does not work in rain or snowfall (paragraph 222.3). Note the wording — the driver's side specifically.

• Run a finger along the edge. Smooth and soft means it still works. Notched, hardened or split means replace it.
• Go by the symptom, not the calendar. Streaks, judder, skipped patches, squealing — the wiper is done. Usually that is a season or two.
• Lift the wipers off the glass before a frosty night. One frozen to the windscreen tears its edge the first time you switch it on, and sometimes the linkage too.

Summer fluid freezes on the first night below zero

Summer washer fluid is essentially water with detergent. It freezes on the first night below zero and, freezing, expands — it can split the reservoir and damage other parts of the system. You usually discover that in spring, when the tank empties in a day.

And the washer is needed in winter above all: salt, sand and road film land on the glass constantly, and without fluid the wiper does not clean but grinds that mixture across the windscreen, destroying itself and the glass together. The rules, incidentally, name the wiper and say nothing about the washer: nobody but you will be keeping an eye on it.

Change the fluid now rather than in December: run the remainder down, fill up with winter fluid, and hold the washer until it jets so the fluid reaches the hoses and the pump. And one rule somebody breaks every winter: never pour hot water onto the glass — it cracks.

Ten minutes, in order

The rules require the car to be checked before you set off, not on the road — paragraph 25.1. Put together, it is a single lap of the car:

• Headlights from the front and the side — lens clarity, condensation inside.
• A wall and dipped beam — equal height, a clear cut-off, the levelling dial back where it belongs.
• A lap with a helper — every lamp front and rear, brake lights and the number-plate light included.
• The wiper edge under a finger — and then the second wiper, the one people forget.
• Tank and jets — winter fluid, jets hitting the glass rather than missing it.

What shows up in a lesson

In autumn it shows in the first few minutes. A student who arrives with tired lights and a streak across the windscreen behaves differently: they pick up the pedestrian a fraction later, spend longer hunting for the edge of the lane, finish the lesson more tired — and put it down to the darkness rather than the car. The difference between "it is hard to see" and "the car is showing me less" shows only once you remove the second half.

The dark season does not make you a worse driver. It simply stops forgiving what summer let you get away with.

The wording of the rules may be amended — check the current text on likumi.lv (verified in September 2026).