Yes, but if you have DRLs you don't have to turn on the headlights as often. My DRLs consume 54W (2x27W) while the head, parking, tail, side marker, and interior lights together consume over 150W. This means that if I drive a lot in rain, dusk, dawn, and other situations where DRLs are enough I might even save gas.
BTW, have you seen this:
formatting link
"Because the new Audi?s daytime running lamp is powered by LEDs, it is the first car in which the use of daytime driving lights has virtually no effect on fuel consumption, thanks to the low voltage demands and exceptional energy efficiency of LED technology."
DRLs are not an acceptible substiture for headlights, and the requirement as to when headlights should be turned on is mandated by law, so essentially any time you have DRLs on when it would be acceptible for a non-DRL equipped car to have their lights off you are consuming more fuel than when you have them off. Electricity doesn't come from the air, you know.
It's also a question of the small things adding up over time. If everyone in America sent me a penny, just one slim (not even copper) penny, I'd receive two million and eight hundred thousand dollars. Each penny is almost insignificant, but two point eight million dollars is not.
No, not at all. I just have to wonder how many people who make the DRL power consumption a big issue leave their computers on all day and never give it a second thought (or drive a car that gets lousy gas mileage, or owns and uses a dishwasher, or three color tv's, or, like Barbara Streisand with all of her liberal causes, goes shopping in, not just an SUV, but a motor home, or whatever it is that people want to micromanage in other people's lives but ignore in their own. I really don't care one way or another. It just seems to be habit with people who complain and point fingers about certain almost insignificant things to ignore something in their own lives that may have an order of magitude greater impact on the very end result that they are otherwise so focused on. Leaving a 150 to 300 watt computer on all day and all night is just one example that I pulled out of the air as an example that many here might be able to relate to.
Bill Putney (to reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with "x")
Ahh - but look at how much the postage cost to get those pennies to you. Same with SPAM - money-making response rates in the fractions of a percent that make it pay, yet the cost to businesses of fighting it and wading thru it is several orders of magnitude over that. Some would argue that *all* the costs of having DRL's far outweight what benefit could be argued that they provide even if true.
Bill Putney (to reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with "x")
But... When you are driving in any of those conditions you should have your headlights on for safety. Not only is it important that you be able to see other drivers need to be able to see you. Taillights, side markers and headlights enable them to do that.
Only if the law (under which those regulations were written) explicitly overrides state law. Federal law allows windshield tinting. State law does not.
Not quite. My car has(had) parking light DRL's. It uses the turn signal filament - when I turn the park lights on now, they're dim compared to what the DRL's were. (01 Trans Am)
No, *you* need to get a grip. Although I doubt that we're currently using 400MGallons per year for DRLs, the figure is certainly close to that. Try researching: here are two urls to gander at.
formatting link
first is a DOE report on converting to LED lights; DRLs areincluded. They estimate that if all *exterior* lights were convertedto LEDs, it would save about 1,397,000,000 gallons per year. Ifyou believe them, DRLs alone would account for 35,000,000 gallonsper year. If you go for a more back-of-the-envelope calculation, the howstuffworks calculation comes up with 406,000,000 gallons.
Not exactly. Federal safety standards apply to the manufacture and preempt state safety standards. The tint applied at the factory preempts any state restrictions. The mini-van, being classified as a truck can have darker rear and side glass then a vehicle classified by the feds as a passenger car. States can and do have their own restrictions on aftermarket tints applied to the front and front side glass; this action is not preempted.
Yeah! Believe those stupid laws of physics and simple arithmetic if you want to, but it's stupid! Rick Blaine's arbitrary notion of what's significant and what isn't, now *there's* good science.
The Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Act (which contains all of the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards) is indeed so written.
Tinted glass supplied by the vehicle's manufacturer in compliance with applicable FMVSS provisions is legal in every state, simply because no state has the authority to rule otherwise.
*AFTERMARKET* tinting (lights, tires, and all other items of motor vehicle equipment) are not regulated by Federal standards and are under the jurisdiction of each state.
Careful, Bill, you're running dangerously close to crashing into the big eco-greenie argument for electric cars: why, by just moving all the energy generation to centralized locations, we can control emissions that much more easily! So why should 3-400 (useless) computer watts be a problem for the environment? The greenie weenies seem to think that the nations electric distribution infrastructure can handle thousands of times that much additional load when we get past our foolish love affair with owning infernal combustion engines and get smart and downsize everything to 1500lb electric shoeboxes on wheels! (Remember the 2003 blackout? I do. *Suuure* it can handle the additional load!)
As Dan is fond of saying: Pffft.
Oh, and by the way, *my* computers don't sit idle all day--some are doing SETI@Home
formatting link
, and the others are displaying my hundreds of Mopar pics as screensavers.
You know, Bill, I'm all for the profligate, conspicuous, excessive consumption of fuel and energy. The bigger and faster it is, the better I like it. I like my A/C ice cold, my windshield and backlight *perfectly* defrosted in the winter (I won't drive a car with a spec of snow on it) and I use my windshield wipers with wanton disregard as soon as I've got a spot of dirt on the glass. There isn't a freeway ramp in town I have had occasion to use that I haven't done so using at least 75% throttle. If I ever got my hands on a car that had an engine block heater, I'd be dumping
500 watts into my motor oil two hours before I was scheduled to leave the house on a cold morning. I heat and cool my house the same way, and I use the dishwasher like there's no tomorrow. I've got a spare refrigerator in my garage just for beer, and that space is separately heated when I have occasion to work out there from November through April. My computers spend their free time calculating fast fourier transforms on static (static!) just on the odd chance that there's little green men out there broadcasting their equivalent of The Honeymooners to us.
All that being said, DRLs are still a dumb, bad idea that I wish would die! die! die!
:-)
Curiously, I don't mind fog lamps. (ducking...running...)
...without telling us what you find inaccurate or providing an alternate formula. IOW, you've made up your mind and don't wish to be pestered with facts.
MotorsForum website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.