I had rented a Dodge minivan for the weekend, and took a few minutes to get acclimatized to the unfamiliar arrangement of buttons and switches and toggles and levers on the steering wheel column. I was testing out what I thought was the dimmer control for the dashboard lights — move it up and the speedometer and odometer backlights would glow brighter; turn it down, and they would glow dimmer.
But while I was doing that, my cousin seated behind me pointed to the lights in the passenger compartment, and wondered aloud why they were turning on and off alternately. I hadn't even noticed because these lights are located behind the driver.
It turns out that on the speedometer backlight dial, if you go past the highest point on the scale, it switches on the lights in the passenger compartment. I have no idea why.
In the photo above, I'm referring to the tiny up-down regulator control, to the right of the giant knob.
What good reason is there to map two such dissimilar functions onto the same physical control? There aren't even two different modes of operation; just that an arbitrary position on the up-down dial is mapped to an entirely unrelated function.
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