For people to put neon or LED tubes under the dashes but if they put them under their car, they get laughed at and called a ricer? Shouldn’t it be looked at the same?

 

to me.. outside lighting, other than HIDS is always pretty tacky 'ricey' and 95% of the time its a crappy kit or install with the tubes showing and/or only covering part of the sides/front/rear..



most interior LED lighting (which i still usually don't like) is more of like a 'mood' lighting that lights up an entire area (foot wells for example) and you can't see the tube/LEDs anywhere.



The only interior LED lighting I like is the white or sometimes blue done in a clean manor. interior lighting can also provide a service sometimes, where as exterior fugly tubes just always looks tacky for the most part.





comparing interior lighthing to exterior neon tubes is apples and oranges in my book..





utter CRAP ^^^





Clean and can be of some purpose ^^^





tacky as hell in my opinion.

 

"mood" is the word..



i have my interiors lit up with amber LEDs in the footwells as well as 'rings' surrounding my separates.



J7Oqwl.jpg



may look tacky to some but it sure does add "mood" to the car. i find it pleasntly relaxing.

Do note that the color isn't that harsh in real life. it's just the camera settings i used that made the light scatter.



any opinions?



EDIT: footwell LED strips can't be seen from outside or inside the car. they're properly hidden under the dash. LED strips are hidden inside frosted plexiglass so you can't see the naked LED when unlit. the frosted LED ring does a good job of distributing the orange light equally so no obvious "dots" are seen underneath the ring.

 

interior is for the driver to enjoy it and be happy. exterior is to be an attention whore and piss everyone else off

 

To be honest, even most OEM lighting systems can get a bit tacky/distracting while at night. The S class has a pretty cool ambient setup though:







I prefer to go the other way with interior lighting. Enter the Saab night panel; at the press of a button all of the dash lights extinguish, apart from a small segment of the speedometer. What an absolutely brilliant idea.

 

That Saab idea is awesome... Now I know what I'm doing next time I have my dash off...

But I'm leaving the tach and speedo needles lit, with the numbers on dull white/blue..

 

The Renault 25 was the first to implement this idea - only the speedometer and fuel gauge were lit up on the dash. In the event of abnormalities, other gauges would become back lit with a "check gauges" light (temp, oil psi, volt)

 

If I was less lazy I would have a kill switch for all cabin lights except the speedometer.