Open Up, It’s Time To Ingest More Volkswagen Phaeton Trivia Through Your Ear And Eye Holes

I don’t know what day you’re reading this, but for me, it’s almost 4:00 p.m. on Friday, it’s pouring down rain outside, and I’m in the mood to make you force you to watch another video about the Volkswagen Phaeton. Is everyone already sick of me pushing Phaeton content? Maybe. Can they stop me? Nope. Besides, you’re the one who clicked on this story. That was your own choice, not mine. 

Also, what’s the point of writing for a site with a large audience if I don’t at least try to help smaller channels out? B Sport, the channel that keeps releasing these Phaeton videos, still has yet to cross the 100,000-subscriber mark, and that’s just wrong. Surely we can get them a little closer to that number.

Anyway, where were we? Oh yeah, the Volkswagen Phaeton, the most unnecessary, incredible car ever made. For the latest entry in this mini-series, we’re going to focus on the Phaeton’s lights. Remember, this car was developed in the late 1900s, and basic LEDs were about as advanced as lighting got back then. At that point, Audi still had yet to kick off the daytime running light craze.

If you don’t want to learn about or be reminded of what was considered cutting-edge lighting back in the early 2000s, I totally get it. Here’s a link to Automotive News that you’ll probably find more interesting. For the rest of us, it’s lighting time.

Like I mentioned earlier, LEDs were still relatively new when the Phaeton was first released, and I still vividly remember one of the buff books marveling over how many LEDs Mercedes managed to cram into the taillights on a new E-Class. So if you’re too young to remember 9/11, I’m going to need you to trust me when I say the Phaeton’s LED taillights were seriously cool at the time. 

And if you look at the headlights of the 2002 version, what may initially look like a DRL was actually a turn signal at first. It didn’t become a DRL until the 2007 refresh. The refresh also added something special for the lighting weirdos — a cornering light tucked away behind the indicator light. Would it have been cheaper to just have one of the fog lights turn on in a corner? Sure, but it wouldn’t have been as effective or looked as good. That was also in addition to the cornering function built into the actual headlights. 

You also got puddle lights under the doors, as well as one under each side-view mirror. Meanwhile, the floor lighting didn’t turn on immediately to make entering the car at night ever so slightly less jarring. Are any of these things nearly as exciting as the heating and cooling system? Not really, but my favorite thing about the Phaeton’s lights isn’t how many it has. It’s how many little Easter eggs there are to discover. It’s just tiny detail after tiny detail that few people would ever notice, but they’re included anyway. Just because they could. 

Should Volkswagen have developed the Phaeton in the first place? Probably not, but I’m oh, so glad it did.