The Internet Calls This Truck Button The 'Jellyfish Launcher' (Here's What It Actually Does)

The average car or truck dashboard has quite a few assorted buttons, and there's a distinctive chance that you've never even touched a few of them even if you've owned your car for years. Everyone learns the major dashboard implements in driver's ed, but there are some buttons that you'd never know the purpose of unless you tried them yourself.

An amusing side-effect of this is that, for buttons that don't have immediately obvious purposes, people tend to just make up functions for them as jokes. A frequent example of this that you may see from owners of certain pickup trucks on Reddit and TikTok is the "jellyfish launcher," a button depicting what appears to be a jellyfish being launched at a diagonal angle out of the bed. Now, obviously, no truck is equipped with a dedicated jellyfish launcher, but what, exactly, is that button supposed to be depicting? As it turns, the answer is much more mundane than you were probably hoping for: it's just rear lighting.

The purpose of the "jellyfish launcher" is to toggle the small set of rear lights on the back of your truck cab. You've probably seen them before, if not paid them any conscious mind; they're usually located right above the rear window of your truck cab, opposite the little lights you may find on the front of some trucks. These lights provide a little extra illumination down onto the bed of the truck, which is handy if you're loading or unloading at night, are backing up into a dark spot, or want to highlight your fancy cooler at a tailgating party.

As for that mysterious button, the "jellyfish" depicted in it is just supposed to be a light pointing down toward the bed of the depicted truck. It's the same symbol as the headlight symbol on your car's dashboard, but because it's angled downward and the little light lines look like legs, everyone started likening it to the round body and wiggly legs of a jellyfish. Perhaps if you were an enterprising sort, you could rig some manner of jellyfish launcher to the bed of your truck, but that particular button wouldn't turn it on.