So I've bought myself a used Mazda 3. Its incredible and super clean, aside from a few maintenance issues I'm working out. Only one thing bothers me in particular and that's the dashboard. The instrument cluster specifically.

In the day because of the way its designed its really dark. I can see fine but its still dark even at max brightness. At night, these awesome backlights turn on and its crystal clear.

Is there any way for me to get it to stay on? It would be nice. Or maybe some way to get it to be more visible without being invasive. I'm relatively inexperienced with this stuff.

 

There are a few different lighting control buttons on the 1st gen 3s model. The first is the dash dimmer control on the dash left of the steering wheel. The second is the toggle located above the cluster between the speedometer and tachometer.

That toggle has two modes, and it changes function depending on if your lights are turned on or not.

With Lights Off: the toggle will switch between different red backlight settings (IIRC there's about six of them)

With Lights On: the toggle will switch the cluster between day and night mode. Day mode will light up the red back lighting to whatever level you chose when setting the backlight with the headlights off. Night mode will drop the red lighting to a much more minimal setting so as to not blind you.

Hope that helps.