When my car is off, both the front side lights and the back side lights stay on. Does anyone have any ideas on what i should do?
Check the position of your parking light switch on the steering wheel, right in front of the speedometer.
I bet you have it turned on.
+1 to Remco’s comment.
Rather than an electrical problem, this is a problem of a car owner who never bothered to read the section of the Owner’s Manual dealing with the various switches to be found on the dashboard and adjacent areas of the interior.
Look on the plastic cover that surrounds the steering column, directly below the speedometer and tachometer. On the top of that cover, you will find a switch that was moved to the “wrong” position. When the switch is simply toggled to its other position, those lights will go off.
Now–please read the Owner’s Manual, because if you were unaware of this switch which sits directly in front of the driver, there could well be other important details about this car of which you are unaware!
Well, don’t feel too bad, Nate:
I’m embarrassed to say that the only reason I know about that insidious button is that my wife walked in one day saying that the lights on her car don’t turn off. It was about a month after we got the Legacy.
I go out to check and - sure enough - they don’t turn off so go back inside and check the schematic. There’s got to be a stuck relay somewhere, right?
Five minutes later I find the parking light switch on the schematic. "Mmmm… ", I go. “exactly what lights are on??”. So out I go and notice that just the marker lights are on. AHA! Looking through the user manual, I find the switch - hidden in plain sight like the nose on your face - toggle it and the lights happily turned off.
We’ve had Subarus since 84. I’ve done pretty much everything there is to do to them so know them fairly well.
Or so I thought: while they no doubt that had that huge toggle switch in the same location, I had never used the parking light feature until that fateful day.
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