Here in CA it's easy to spot the 80's and 90's cars in a sea of DRL equipped oncoming traffic. I recently acquired an 80's car and feel invisible without DRLs even though I know that's a bunch of BS. The car is red.

The DRLs use the high beam filament, so unless you're driving around with your high beams on all the time at night, you shouldn't have to worry about early bulb replacement.

Liking DRLs or not is a personal opinion and none of my business.

 

Cause the govm't said you are a hazard to the populace unless your headlights are on; turning thm outissimple enough but illegal. Now you know how Frankenstein felt. The villagers are warned you've escaped.. Wait''l self-driving arrives. then you will have nothing in your mobile cell.

 

One more time. You sit in the car, you drive from point A to B, you cannot see the Daylight Running lights ever, so why the big deal in just leaving them alone ? Are some of you mental or something ?

 

If by mental you mean, "of or relating to the mind", then yes. We all are. While the concept of self is greatly debated, there are very few definitions that exclude the concept of the mind - and consciousness in general.

 

Not in the United States of America. Canada, Denmark, Finland, Hungary, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden yes, USA no.

 

I like them because we have a lot of morons on the road that don't bother turning on their lights at dawn/dusk or when it is raining, here in So. CA. Sometimes even at night they don't bother. At least you've got some indication there's a car coming in your direction if they've got DRLs.

I kind of wondered what happened to them. I recall back in the 1990's, my Saturn had them. Then my 2005 Scion didn't.

 

speaking of lights, I was on the freeway yesterday and it was dark (about 9:30PM), and was passed by a black blur, a motorcycle with a broken rear light, and he was wearing all black.

I tried to catch up but the Fit was unable to. I hope he did not die.

 

I guess you're one of those people who drive in rain/foggy/snowy weather with no lights on, haha

 

Here in the US, they're optional. Some makers use them on their US models, some don't.

IIRC, back when they first started to appear in the US, GM had petitioned the NHTSA to specifically amend the safety standards to permit DRLs. Apparently, some states had laws specifically prohibiting them, which the standards change overruled. Since DRLs were already being required in Canada, GM wanted to be able to standardize things as much as possible and minimize the differences between vehicles for both markets.

 

After reading some studies, for me it is pretty clear I'll take the advantage of the odds of reducing an accident. I can't see any reason to disable the lights.

Daytime Running Lights: The Studies

Some motorcyclists say they feel safer without helmets. Granted, in many cases the helmet makes no difference but I always wore mine because of the odds. Not to mention, the bugs, rocks, rain, wind,......

 

my 93 civic had them, and when it was stolen and wrecked with 260k i had never changed a single bulb in the car, and my 08 fit has 124 k and still original bulbs, but do what you like. bulb life is no issue at all.

 

5th gen civics didnt have them stateside. Must have been wired from a previous owner.

Ive owned almost every year 88-00, couple doublers. Ive encountered zero factory DRLs

EDIT when did Canadaland put their DRL law into effect?

 

1-1-1990..

 

I can think of two times when they are useful.

When one is parked so one's lights will shine into someone's store or business it is polite to leave the headlights off until you are pointed somewhere else. The parking lights allow you to illuminate your other lights so people will be able to see you backing out.

When one is approaching a guard gate people turn their headlights out so as not to blind the person on duty. The parking light position allows the other lights to stay on for safety.

This thread has made me pay attention to oncoming traffic and indeed about half of the cars now seem to have some form of DRL. The thing that struck me was how dim most of the DRLs were. If the car wasn't pointed right at you you couldn't see them at all. The only ones that stood out were some of the LED versions that don't use the headlight optics. I suppose that they can be made more omnidirectional.

He was probably perfectly safe as long as he was going at that speed. Nobody could rear-end him!

 

I got a 2011 GE Fit




I switch over to use my fog lamps as DRL
the headlights remain off until I manually turn on the light switch

 

I don't like lights operating on their own, especially when I have a perfectly good switch for operating them. What's the big deal, indeed?

Back when DRLs were coming out, I read a letter in C&D where the writer wholeheartledly approved of DRLs, because something that helps you see a car on the road in broad daylight is a Very Useful Thing. But the writer thought that they didn't go far enough in keeping us safe and suggested a safety feature to complement DRLs: Daytime Beeping Horns. You see, shining lights in your face may be a good way to get you to notice a car that's facing you, but what if it isn't facing you or isn't in your field of view at all? Daytime Beeping Horns can help here. By modulating the pitch and frequency of the beeping, Daytime Beeping Horns can tell you a lot more about the cars around you than simple lights that you have to actually look at. Smaller, lighter vehicles would have higher pitched DBHs while bigger, heavier vehicles would have deeper sounds. The interval between beeps would change based on the vehicle's speed- the faster the vehicle is travelling, the faster its horn would beep. And none of us would have to exert any energy to be safe because the cars around us would be busy notifying us of their presence whether we want them to or not.

But I look at where I'm going and the world around me. If more people did that then we wouldn't have DRLs.
I wear my seatbelt. If more people did that then we wouldn't all have bombs mounted in our steering wheels.
I shift my own gears. If more people did that then we wouldn't have all these hydraulic pumps robbing cars of power and efficiency.

Yes, it does seem that quite a few people are mental or something.

Enjoy your DRLs, BTW.

 

Here is an article from 1995 that talks about both DRLs and parking lights:

Parking Lights Really Lack a Purpose--by Day or Night - Los Angeles Times

 

 

God help us all, with someone like you.

 

Well we already have blind spot monitors and cars that automatically brake when you get too close to the car in front of you, and have beeping proximity sensors for when you're backing into/out of a parking spot and cameras to help you see, cars that can parallel park themselves and cameras that help you parallel park and back into parking spaces.

So not too far off. Probably won't be too long until all of those nannies are standard equipment across the board.