2003 & onwards Headlight Pain

Since 2003 all bikes in the EU have had to have their running lights on at all times. Now I know that does help you to be seen a little better & to be fair anything that helps the cage drivers notice you a little better has gotta be a good thing. The thing that annoys me is that rather than just passing a law to say you have to have your lights on, they have taken away your ability to turn them off at any time by having no off switch.
However I don't want my lights on every time I have my ignition on, there are various times that I want my ignition on but don't want my lights dragging the power out of my battery at the same time. So I reckon its about time I bypassed this silly EU rule with my own switch so that I can have the ignition on but without the lights doing there very best to make sure I can't start it when I forget to turn the ignition off for a while by emptying all the voltage out of my battery.

Just wondered if anyone else had either thought about bypassing the automatic lights or even better had already done it by adding an independant light switch? Any ideas or feed back as always is welcomed.

Mr Intruder wrote:

Since 2003 all bikes in the EU have had to have their running lights on at all times. Now I know that does help you to be seen a little better & to be fair anything that helps the cage drivers notice you a little better has gotta be a good thing. The thing that annoys me is that rather than just passing a law to say you have to have your lights on, they have taken away your ability to turn them off at any time by having no off switch.
However I don't want my lights on every time I have my ignition on, there are various times that I want my ignition on but don't want my lights dragging the power out of my battery at the same time. So I reckon its about time I bypassed this silly EU rule with my own switch so that I can have the ignition on but without the lights doing there very best to make sure I can't start it when I forget to turn the ignition off for a while by emptying all the voltage out of my battery.

Just wondered if anyone else had either thought about bypassing the automatic lights or even better had already done it by adding an independant light switch? Any ideas or feed back as always is welcomed.

Sounds like a good idea. Just a thought - would there be any problem with the MOT?

Can't see how there could be unless you rode into the MOT station with your lights off John.
They would only ever be looking to flick from main to full beam and that would be that. They would never be looking to switch the lights off & as there would have to be a separate switch, which could be located anywhere on the bike to over ride the lights there would never be an issue.
I haven't had a look at the wiring diagram yet but it will be very easy indeed to pop in an over ride switch. I actually did the same thing to my DRZ a while ago and it took longer to cut the hole for the switch than it did to splice into the wiring. Obviously the Intruder would have a nice shiny chrome one.

Lucky me .... mine has an on/off switch !

If not I might fit an override ... I don't think it's an MOT failure, my guess is that if it has a switch fitted it's got to be working that's all.