One reason DRLs shouldn't be opposed...

I suspect that has something to do with the "sea of DRLs" around them. During daylight hours, it is much easier to see an unlit vehicle when most other vehicles are not equipped with DRLs (in most cases).

I'm pretty sure that Nate will have something to say about this, but, IIRC, doing this has undesirable effects on the operation of the ABS system in certain makes of vehicles.

DRLs have been manditory in Canada for many years now. They make vehicles MUCH easier to see in the daylight. If you drive along the road, you'll sometimes find an older vehicle without them. You don't notice them until they are much closer to you.

The KIA Sedona (2004) runs the headlights and taillights as DRLs. Most vehicles use the high-beams at a reduced intensity. However, there are more using the signal-lights are DRLs.

The only problem is with really stupid drivers. I can't tell you how many times I've seen cars driving at night using only DRLs. You can't see them until you're right on top of them, and then you only see the headlight beam in front. The back is totally dark. I wonder if they don't notice that the dashboard is very dark, since the DRLs don't turn on the dash lights? I guess these people never check their speed, fuel, etc.

If you really want to disable your DRLs, simply apply the parking brake 1 notch. Most people have brakes worn enough that 1 notch of the parking brake doesn't apply the brakes. When the parking brake is on, DRLs are off. Some people use this if they are sitting in the parking lot of a store, etc. It also works well at a drive-in movie, as you can have the car running without the DRLs on.

Bingo, you hit the nail on the head. You also stumbled over how the studies were skewed to prove that DLR's reduced head on collisions.

What they did is equip a couple thousand vehicles with DLR's and drop them in a metropolus with a couple million vehicles without DLR's. Of course the DLR's stick out and draw everyone's notice. Thus, those test vehicles had lower incidence of collisions. Thus, DLR's are better than no DLR's.

Of course, once every friggin vehicle on the road has them, nobody is going to stick out, and the incidence of frontal collisions will go back to what it was when everyone didn't have them.

Same logic happened with the center mounted rear stop lamp.

Ted

Saying that a California driving law is based on logic completely defies any logic at all. Most Californian legislators are elected based on their total illogic by gullible voters who think that there's still such a thing as a free lunch. That's how California ended up with a Senator Feinstein.

Anyway, if those enlightened legislators of California even had half a clue, they'd have mandated tail-light laws. When you get multi-car pile-ups in a fog, it wasn't because no one had their headlights on. It's because the below-average-intelligence Californian speeds up when he can't see the ass-end of the car in front of him. Otherwise, someone might get in that precious space and cut his time by a tenth of a second or so. Californians are, in general, not very bright and they pass as many laws as they can to ensure that the not-very-bright get to increase and multiply. The laws of California are specifically designed to override the laws of nature, with predictable--and disastrous--results.

"Arthur Alspector" wrote in news:DchPc.4$ snipped-for-privacy@news04.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com:

The Boeing 777 has a joystick? Which airline and which model(s)? The one's I've had flight deck visits to had yokes. The flight deck picture on the Boeing web pages shows a yoke, not a joystick. I've also been in the cockpits of 707, 727, 737, 747, 757, 767, DC-9, DC-10, MD-80, L-1011, and several Airbus models. The Boeings, DC, MD, and L-10 all had yokes, while Airbus had slide sticks.

I use to train Navy pilots on link trainers driven by some old HP PDP-11 (IIRC) computers - there was force feedback on the sticks. When we fired up the computers and the electronics on the joy stick came to life, the stick would slam around violently once or twice. More than once, when the trainer operator made the mistake of engaging the computer as the pilot-in-training lowered himself into the "cockpit", or if the computer happened to crash (happened frequently) at that critical moment, the pilot was singing soprano for a few minutes. We instructors were enlisted, and I can't help but wonder if it was done intentionally on a couple of occasions - a figurative fragging.

I guess the air bag would need to be dash-mounted.

Bill Putney (to reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with "x")

And somewhere around the time of 08/01/2004 20:50, the world stopped and listened as Garth Vader contributed the following to humanity:

Or remove the bulbs, or wire a switch in series with the lights so you can manually control the on/off more easily.

And somewhere around the time of 08/01/2004 22:14, the world stopped and listened as doc contributed the following to humanity:

I take it you don't like California. Either way, I'm in California, and I have to agree with you. Average speed on many highways here is 80MPH. The CHP has a field day every day ticketing people for speeding. Everybody here speeds, and if you actually do the speed limit (65 in most places, 70 in others), chances are that you will get rear-ended, or if you live in LA, shot at.

Dan, are they wasting gas in Northern Europe or are they saving lives there?

Richard.

How wait taillight laws help? If you can't see for at least your stopping distance, you run a risk of driving off the edge of the road.

Next is the side-mirror-mounted turn signal....

A brief point of clarification. The Daytime Running Lamp is a "DRL". By contrast, a "DLR" is, as everyone knows, a David Lee Roth. While equipping every vehicle with a David Lee Roth might decrease the chances of a collision - or increase it, as many young Camaro drivers have certainly smacked into trees during the opening chords of "Panama" - the cloning process would add hundreds of thousands of dollars to the cost of each car, and there is a chance that the NHTSA would accidentally mandate a "SH" - Sammy Hagar - in the place of the mandated DLR, causing the Apocalypse.

Nonpower brakes and nonpower steering aren't even *close* to the same as power brakes without power and power steering without power.

It sounds like *you* have no experience with large cars not equipped with power brakes or power steering -- they're perfectly manageable.

That stopped working on GM cars years ago, and it also renders your dashboard "BRAKE" warning lamp unable to warn of a problem.

I stand corrected. Never thought of it that way. However, I would still question the amount of extra drag on the motor. They don't really show a calculation in the How Stuff Works page, more of a total amount, so we never really see the impact on average MPG per car. I would suspect that properly inflated tires would affect MPG much more than DRLs.

It's not an "either/or" question. There are perfectly good, inexpensive DRLs that use a total (for BOTH DRLs!) of 12 whole watts. These are fairly common in Europe. I have a set of them -- made by Hella -- on my shelf, waiting for me to have time to put them on my truck.

So you *still* don't get it.

Why, my goodness! Your ignorant little guess is *certainly* much more scientific than the valid mathematical calculation under discussion here! Thanks for sharing it.

YDRC- DEC made the PDP-11, not HP. ;)