The reason this is a safety issue is that the behavior leads to lights on overnight and unnoticed in your garage and you have dead lights for your ride the next day.
I have an edge 530 and an edge 130. The 530 allows you to only turn on the lights when you start recording and turns off the lights when you save or discard your ride. The Edge 130 will continually try to turn on your lights whenever it is on, and will only attempt to turn the lights off very briefly right as it shuts down.
Here's how it fails to work properly in practice:
- you come home and save your ride. While waiting 2+ minutes for the 130 to sync your ride, if you go outside of the range of your bike it will not turn off your lights.
- If you turn off your lights yourself, but do not turn off your garmin, the garmin will turn them back on.
- if you are in your house and plug your garmin in, it turns on. It will try to turn on your lights repeatedly. If you are close enough for it to eventually succeed at turning them on, there's a very good chance it will not turn them off when you power off the edge 130.
See that? Even if you manually turn off your lights the garmin may turn them back on after you've left the garage.
Turning the lights on outside of recording a ride causes all of those unintended consequences and the behavior must be changed. On the 530, it's not the default which is a mistake by Garmin. On the 130, it's not even an option which is unforgivable.
Bonus issue: 'light network forming' and other light network messages that pop up during rides are not generally useful to the rider. Has anyone at garmin tested lights as sensors with these computers?
