Headlights and taillights — Minnesota Permit Test
Headlights and taillights on the Minnesota permit test — 6 rules, each with the reason behind it and a question on it while it is fresh.
The rules
Every motor vehicle except a motorcycle must have two white headlights that work on high and low beam.
Two lamps give the width of the car as well as the light. One lamp reads as a motorcycle from a distance.
Two white headlights that work on high and low beam.
Red taillights must light up when you press the brake pedal.
The car behind reads your brake lights before it reads your speed. That light is the whole warning.
Red taillights that light up when you press the brake pedal.
High beam headlights must make objects on the road visible at least 350 feet ahead.
At highway speed, 350 feet is about the distance it takes to see something and stop for it.
High beam headlights must make objects visible on the road at least 350 feet ahead.
Dirty headlights can cut light output by as much as 75 percent, so clean them as often as the windshield.
Road salt and film build up slowly, so the light fades without the driver ever noticing it go.
dirty headlights can reduce light output by up to 75 percent
Have your headlights inspected at least once a year to make sure they are aimed correctly.
A lamp knocked out of aim lights the ditch or the eyes of the driver coming the other way.
Have your headlights inspected at least once a year to ensure they are aimed correctly.
Daytime running lights turn on by themselves, but taillights and parking lights do not.
That is how a car ends up driving at dusk lit at the front and invisible from behind.
Taillights and parking lights do not turn on automatically.
On the test
What headlights must a Minnesota car have?
Two white headlights working on high and low beam. Two lamps give the width of the car as well as the light. One lamp reads as a motorcycle from a distance. Minnesota Driver’s Manual, p.23: “Two white headlights that work on high and low beam.”
How this works
Most practice tests hand you a bank of questions and leave the manual somewhere else. This one puts them together.
You read one law and the reason behind it, then answer a question on that law while it is still fresh. Get it right and you move on; get it wrong and you have found the gap while it is cheap to fix, not on the morning of the exam.
Learning one rule at a time, and proving it immediately, is what turns a manual you skimmed into something you actually know — and it makes studying feel like getting somewhere rather than like waiting to find out.
What it costs
- One payment, once — not a subscription. Nothing renews and there is nothing to cancel, for an exam you sit one time.
- Free to start: a 10-question test and the first section of cards. No sign-up and no account.
- Paying opens the rest of the cards, unlimited full-length practice tests, and retests built from exactly the questions you got wrong.
- Every level up to Prepared — 3 tests passed in a row.
- Do the work, fail the real exam, and we refund you.
Where these come from
Every rule here is checked against Minnesota Driver’s Manual, published by the Minnesota Department of Public Safety, and against the state code itself. Last checked 2026-09-22.
- src/assets/drivers-manuals/MN.pdf (Minnesota Driver’s Manual, May 2025, Minnesota Department of Public Safety, Driver and Vehicle Services, retrieved 2026-09-14; sha256 pinned in SOURCES.json)
- src/assets/drivers-manuals/MN.pages.txt (the plain pdftotext fixture every citation here was cut from and verified against; sha256 pinned in SOURCES.json)
- src/assets/drivers-manuals/SOURCES.json, MN entry -- the folio offset of 3 and its basis, the folio marker, the extraction-flag score and the welded compounds it costs, and the record of where the exam shape comes from