My old Cadillac CTS had a nifty feature that turned on the headlights when you used the wipers. What a concept!
I also echo Pochacco. In dry conditions, at least, I am usually impressed by the quality of the driving in CA in general. Much better than the rest of the country.
My DRLs are my headlights. 
I’m in Seattle this week. Color me confused how these people seem to have forgotten how to drive in the rain. I mean come on, the first time I was here it was Aug, and it rained. A local then explained the difference between summer and winter here. In the summer the rain is warm…
Back when I was driving in the US (I don’t have a car here), even with my Metro, I always turned the lights on so the folks behind me would see the tail lights.
The first rain of the season is news for some people. Well, so it seems to my mother. Every year, she happily announces it and says, “It’s great for the farmers!”
Hell, I’m from California and I could rant for at least a half an hour about stupid shit I see here every day. Because of narrow streets and obstructions everywhere, just about every corner is a blind one, so there are big convex mirrors everywhere so you can at least make an attempt to check cross traffic before poking your hood out into the mess. They work kinda okay most of the time, except for on rainy days when no one turns on their headlights.
It could be pouring down rain and not a single car has its lights on. Which means, of course, that you can see exactly jack-shit because rain-filled gloomy half-light and a rain-streaked mirror seen through a wet windshield doesn’t make for a good viewing experience. And then the fuckers flash their lights at me to let me know that I’ve got them on. I know I’ve got them on, you moron. I didn’t turn them on by accident. I’ve got them on so that I can avoid getting plowed into by one of you 80 year old half-blind accidents-waiting-to-happen.
Oh, and I’ve finally figured out why the speed limits in Japan are so low. They’re meant for the absolute worst conditions you could ever find to drive in. Thirty km/h seems quite reasonable in a blizzard at night on a twisty up and down road that has about 1.5 meters of clearance between its grand total of two lanes and no shoulder to speak of. It seems especially reasonable when half the people on the road turned their lights off at a stoplight to “be polite” to other drivers and forgot to turn them on again when they started driving. Not that it would matter anyway because no one cleans off the snow that accumulates in front of the lights when their cars are parked. The lights are just there for decoration, not because you’d actually need them for anything.
Sleel,
I feel your pain. When I was stationed at Atsugi NAF, I had a very nice Toyota Corrolla II hatchback which I had to ricochet off of a stone wall on the right side of the street to avoid a head on collision with a Japanese driver coming rapidly at me on my side of the street. The jerk got out of his car and asked me why I was driving so fast and on the wrong side of the street at that. He was very offended when I told him I preferred hitting the wall to hitting him head-on. He then told me that had I not been speeding there would have been no problem.
Do you really want a bad driving experience?
[ol][li]Come over here. Hop into a taxi. Invariably, the taxi driver has only two positions for the gas pedal: all the way down or all the way up. On top of that, he cannot keep the pedal in either position longer than one nanosecond. People who have spent their entire lives at sea in a rowboat would get seasick inside of five minutes in a Korean taxi.[/li][li]“Turn right on red after a full stop.” You must be kidding! If you were to stop your vehichle in the right turn lane just because the light is red, you’d have no fewer than ten vehicles piling up on you. All that red light means is the bulb’s not green. Drivers tear around the corner as though they’re Batman in hot pursuit.[/li][li]The taxi stops in the right lane/the bus driver opens the door for you. Now what do you do? Do you just hop on out as though you’re in the US or any country other than South Korea? NO WAY! Doing it that way and you will be hit by a motorcycle or a scooter passing the bus on the right. Why, yes, that would be against the law. Why do you ask?[/li][li]Speaking of buses: what should the driver do when he has a hankering for a cigarette and it’s clearly posted inside the bus that smoking therein is illegal? If you said, “Wait for his next break, exit the vehicle, and enjoy his tobacco,” you are wrong, wrong, wrong! He just lights up right there in the driver’s seat and continues with the route.[/li][li]Another bus driver question for you. Does the driver stop his vehicle for a red light when he is not turning right? You get one point if you say, “Perhaps.” You get ten points if you say, “Stop? Why on Earth would I stop?” Seriously, the bus drivers here plow through the town with complete disregard for either the laws of traffic or physics.[/li][li]And don’t even get me started on “lane discipline.”[/ol][/li]
Do you think I’m kidding? Check out this link and scroll down to the section on traffic safety. I have two gripes about the link, though. First, most drivers comply with basic traffic laws? Maybe on Bizarro Earth, but here in the real South Korea, that’s not the case. The second gripe is the assertion that motorcycles are sometimes driven on the sidewalk. Sometimes apparently equals almost all the time.