8.4 Nav and Dashboard Dimmer and Visibility Settings and Mild Rant

[Rick3478]

So the default nav screen display with white road on light gray background is pretty much unreadable under most lighting conditions. Turning the dimmer down to night mode is much better, but affects both dash and nav screen so there is no setting where both are readable.
And the dimmer doesn't even work well for the dash, the first notch down from full on is 50%
and I'd like something a little brighter than that, but less than 100% which doesn't exist. Soon heading down the path of personal profile settings hoping for a headlight on/off/theme nav screen combination that might be better, but my expectations are pretty low at this point. WTF were they thinking? Doesn't anyone test this stuff? Anyone have helpful pointers they can share?

 

[Dewey]

Do you have a dark mode in your settings?

I have that on my 12” and changed it immediately.

 

[Rick3478]

Do you have a dark mode in your settings?

I have that on my 12” and changed it immediately.

Not sure. What menu/submenu would I find that under?

 

[Dewey]

Not sure. What menu/submenu would I find that under?

Not sure. Hopefully somebody with an 8.4 will chime in if it has that ability.

 

[SD Rebel]

Try switching to the different color schemes, I found the default rather unattractive. I love the blue scheme personally, no issues with visibility in any light conditions. Plus it only effects the NAV screen, it doesn't change the rest of the Uconnect screens.

 

[Dewey]

Do you have a dark mode in your settings?

I have that on my 12” and changed it immediately.

This is what I changed. Not sure if the 8.4 is the same.

 

[Rick3478]

This is what I changed. Not sure if the 8.4 is the same.

View attachment 136581

Probably not, I haven't seen any menu that looks like that. How did you get there? Do you have to create a profile first and then more options appear under it? The user manual seems only slightly better than useless, so I'm sort of poking around blindly.

 

[Dewey]

Probably not, I haven't seen any menu that looks like that. How did you get there? Do you have to create a profile first and then more options appear under it? The user manual seems only slightly better than useless, so I'm sort of poking around blindly.

Setting then Display. Likely much different on the 12” than your 8.4”. Seems odd the 8.4 doesn’t have that option. My 2017 with an 8.4 was dark to start with. No idea why they decided to go with the bright white display on the 5th gens. Looks cheap to me that way. Black looks so much better.

 

[Rick3478]

So I figured it out, more or less. Thanks for all the help, folks!

Dimmer control: No effect with headlights off, 100% dash and nav brightness no matter what else you do. Only two possibly useful positions with headlights on, all the way up is 100% which is too bright for night driving, first notch down is 50% or less which is too dim for daytime and marginal for night, everything lower than that is too dim to use for anything.

Nav display settings: Not under Nav where you might expect it, instead look under Vehicle|Settings. There, you have to set display mode to manual, then you can independently adjust the display brighness for headlights on and headlights off. These both have to be set all the way up to 10 since the dimmer had to be set at 50%. And you can't set them both at the same time, you can only adjust the headlights on setting when the headlights are on and can only adjust the headlights off setting when the headlights are off. So you also have to be turning the headlights on and off while making the adjustments. And lastly, change theme mode from the default light (which is hard to read under all lighting conditions) to dark.

Still don't understand how this got out of the development lab. I've fired people who did better work. But those days are past and maybe it's just as well. Rant over, thanks again!