Non-Tacky Interior Lighting

it really would have been nice to have some low-level lighting in the car so I could glance at a map on the floor.

A strip of cool white LEDs under the dash aimed at the floor would be a simple answer to this. For a quick fix they make LED lights on a flexible neck that plug into the 12 volt outlet.

After looking at some previous projects here on PC, most people seem to be using either LED or neon lighting. I was leaning toward using LED lighting until I found out about electroluminescent (EL) wire. If you don't know what it is, it's basically a cable that glows when electrical current passes through it. (It's also the same thing as the backlight in your watch.) It has the benefit of being flexible and you can cut it to length and it can run on the 12v system.

EL comes in sheets and ribbons too. EL needs an inverter to drive it. They're all AC inside. The inverters are small and reasonably priced. I think you'd need a pretty good sized piece to have useful lighting though. I seem to recall a poster on this forum pulled the toyota logo off his trunk, tucked in some blue EL wire and drives around with an electric blue glow at night.

Now to my color choices. I'm not going for bling, so that's why I'm keeping the colors conservative. I picked red and blue because that is what's used for nighttime bridge lighting on ships.

Red light will not interfere with your eyes becoming dark adapted. However in a car red lights normally mean trouble, and it might make them less noticable. Turquose is the color that night vision is most sensitive to. A little goes a long way. The law would prefer that you have no red or blue lights visible from outside the car (red from rear is OK) LEDs are easy to dim. It would be nice if the new lights dimmed with the old ones. The back of the dimmer switch might be the logical place to pull power. LEDs will run best if you give them a current regulated power supply, the nominal 12 volt in cars can overdrive them.

I had about eight feet of amber LED side lights on the last Prius, contact me if you have questions.

 

If you want light to see something, LEDs are probably the way to go. EL looks good, but it isn't too bright. While red lights mess with your night vision the least, consider the colors of your map. Any red markings on a color map will be "white" (and disappear) and the blue markings "black" under a red LED.

 

More a characteristic of fluro colours when exposed to light in the violet end of the spectrum. This is just the affect that attracts bees to flowers and fluro safety vests.