Your headlights stop working at night while driving in Oregon. What does the manual recommend?
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A.
Shift to a lower gear and slowly apply the parking brake.
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B.
Stop in your current lane and wait for help.
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C.
Turn on your hazard lights and continue driving at your normal speed.
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D.
Toggle the switch, try other lights, slow down, and ease onto the shoulder. Correct
The answer is "Toggle the switch, try other lights, slow down, and ease onto the shoulder."
Toggling the headlight switch off and on can reset a bad contact. If that does not work, high beams, driving lights, or hazard lights may give you enough light to find a safe place to leave the road. Slow down and ease onto the shoulder. The other lights are there to guide you off the road, not to let you keep driving, and the lower-gear and parking-brake steps belong to the brake-failure procedure, not this one. A driver who hears 'try other lights' as permission to keep going picks C and drops the 'slow down' half of the rule.
The traps in the wrong answers
A. Shift to a lower gear and slowly apply the parking brake.
Lower gear and parking brake are the steps for brake failure on the same page; for a headlight failure you slow down and ease onto the shoulder. This answer misapplies the Brakes Fail steps ('shift to a lower gear,' 'slowly apply the parking brake') to a lighting failure.
B. Stop in your current lane and wait for help.
Stopping in a travel lane at night with no lights invites a rear-end crash; the rule is to ease onto the shoulder. This answer inverts 'ease onto the shoulder' as stopping where you are in the lane.
C. Turn on your hazard lights and continue driving at your normal speed.
The other lights exist to give you enough light to guide you off the road, not to keep going; the rule says slow down and ease onto the shoulder. This answer reads 'try other lights such as high beams, driving lights or hazard lights' as permission to keep driving instead of light to guide you off the road, and drops 'slow down.'
This question tests your knowledge of Vehicle Equipment in Oregon. Source: Oregon Driver Manual, "Headlights Go Out," p.85..
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