In Sweden you have to have lights on all the time.
Actually I reckon it is a good idea especially when the weather is dull.
I’m guessing if the driver is a stargazer him/herself and is leaving the area (a field perhaps, somewhere away from the sodium glare of towns and cities)
Yeah, the parking lights that Volvos have on all the time. Or at least they did when my Dad was driving a 740/940.
The Times had an article a few weeks back where the EU was suggesting making it mandatory to have car headlights/parking lights on all the time when driving during certain months of the year.
I guess, but if there’s enough moonlight to be able to drive a few hundred yards with no lights, I can’t imagine how dim vehicle lights are going to make a big difference, but then there are probably lots of things in which my imagination leads me to the wrong conclusion…
Surprising how bright a full moon in a clear sky can be.
DRL’s aren’t dangerous; oblivious drivers are dangerous. I wish I had DRL’s. I already have automatic lamps on everything I drive and have driven going on ten years. As I’m spending so much time in Ontario right now with my US vehicle, I know I tend to stand out during the day by virtue of not having DRL’s.
Yeah, what Pushkin said. I can certainly get my car turned around, in a nearly empty field, without headlights on. It’s rare that a night is so dark that you can’t see well enough to drive, especially if the sky is clear enough for setting up the telescope, and someone that’s been out in the darkness for a couple of hours can see quite a bit, but even if it’s somehow fantastically dark one night parking lights are bright enough to get you moving without blinding everyone else (I hadn’t learned the trick of pulling up the parking brake one click to keep the lights off)
Besides, it’s plenty o’ fun to come barreling down a deserted mountain road at 2:00AM with your lights off!
Not so much in an urban well lit environment… or so my experience with a city PD officer would suggest! 
No action taken other than to run my info.
Thanks for the good discussion, everyone. I’ve learned a lot.
It seems that if DRLs worked as designed, they would lower head-on collisions … and have no effect whatsoever on rear-end collisions.
That’s because every single driver in this perfect world would, without fail, manually switch from DRL mode in the daytime to full headlights and taillights in low light conditions (dusk, dawn, fog, rain, snow, sleet, etc.).
However, since such a perfect world with perfect drivers doesn’t exist, it seems that we are trading off lowered head-on collisions with an increase in rear-end collisions caused by drivers who drive in DRL mode when they should be flipping a switch to turn on their taillights too.
So, I guess my question in the OP has been answered: DRL reduces head-on collisions, and the reason that DRL does not automatically engage taillights is that in the daytime they can be mistaken for brake lights … which would cause more read-end collisions.
However, I ain’t buying it. I think it would be safer to have drivers drive with headlights **and ** taillights on all the time, night or day, than have a certain percentage of drivers out there driving at night without taillights on because they think their taillights are on when in fact they are not.
I suppose it will take 10 years or so of real-life traffic data to reach a conclusion on that one.
But you saw him. If he had no headlights at all you might not have seen him at all. That the point of them.
People do forget to trun on their headlights, even without DRLs. I used to see it a lot when I was a kid. It used to happen more on well illuminated city streets. People would drive with no headlights and not know it. DRLs don’t light up stuff worth crap, but people can still see you. If you’re on a dark highway and mistake the incredibly dim glow for your headlights you probably shouldn’t be behind the wheel. It’s a huge difference. Like the difference between holding reading by candle lights vs. a 40 watt bulb.
Having just started down the path of amateur astronomy, I know that a brief flash of a torch is bad enough. Sort of why I was trying to gather red cellophane from sweets at Christmas, to try and wrap up the end of my maglite 
DRL’s are high-beam lights used at a reduced wattage. They’re highly visible day or night without being blinding. Tail lights are only highly visible at dusk and beyond, beyond they’re intentionally not as bright as brake lamps, and their red color is simply not as visible in white light – they’re at the low end of our visible spectrum. So there’s no point to having them on during the daytime.
Maybe the best of both worlds would be to have full time DRL’s and universal auto-lamps.
Not necessarly. Over on my side of the house, the DRL’s are the standard low beam headlights and tail lights. Just the same as if you had turned on the headlights.
I’ve got a mini-Maglite (2 AA battery size) that I replaced the bulb with a T1 red LED for darkroom use. No chance of white light leaking out from the edges of a gel, or the gel falling out at the worst possible moment - such as when the paper safe is open.
You just need to watch the polarity when you assemble it - fortunately, LEDs come two per pack at Radio Shack, so if you blow it the first time, you’ll have a spare to use the right way around.
The only tricky part is clipping the leads to the appropriate length while keeping track of its polarity. Also, this will probably be irreversable to the flashlight - the LED’s legs are a bit bigger (and square) than a regular bulb’s, so the contacts might not be able to hold onto bulbs again.
Oh? Now I have to question the very effectiveness of that type of DRL, and that would put me squarely in the camp of the “what’s the use” crowd. Low beams during the day seem like a waste, and their visibility over extended distances isn’t appreciably better than a car without headlights during the day. Kind of purposeless like the tail lights thing. Now that you mention it, are there US/Canada differences? Everything here is required to have DRL’s, and I get behind enough Volvos and haven’t noticed the tail lights on.