Found this article in my local free newspaper:
---- Daytime Lights On The Horizon For All European Motorists
Drivers in the UK may be forced to drive all day with their lights on, even in the spring and summer, if a road safety proposal the European Commission is considering becomes law in 2010. However, driving with dipped headlights during the day will increase petrol consumption and increase exhaust emissions, warns the AA Motoring Trust. An alternative, Light-Emitting Diode (LED) lights, fitted to new cars would produce a smaller increase in pollution while increasing the visibility of road vehicles and reducing accidents. However, making older cars retro-fit costly LED lights or use dipped headlights is not an option, according to the AA Trust. As far as Germany's Federal Highway Research Insbreastute (BASt) is concerned, using dipped headlights increases fuel consumption by 3%, while LED lights reduce that to 0.3%. Austria is the first western European country outside Scandinavia to make it compulsory for all vehicles to drive with dipped headlights during the day, on road safety grounds. From 15 April, this will be enforced with a 15 euros (about £10) fine for those not complying. The European Commission is considering a similar law across the union. Andrew Howard, head of road safety for the AA Motoring Trust, said: "We would support moves to make daytime running lights a mandatory fitting on new cars. "These lights should be less bright than dipped headlamps, but brighter than side lamps, and should be LED-style lights with low energy consumption. These would be likely to make roads safer by allowing road users to distinguish easily cars that are on the move." ----
3% increase in fuel consumption? Sounds a bit much. Headlights (+ tail lights and dashboard illumination) would be ~125W, which is 1-6 hp. Compare that with even a small car with, say, 50bhp, it's not a lot.
And the idea of dimmer-than-headlight lights is crazy, IMO. While it may make cars more visible during the day, it will only encourage people to turn their headlights on later (or not at all) as it gets dark-foggy, thus making them effectively less visible than they would otherwise be.
I don't really care if they do make day-running light compulsory, but please, let's do it right, and not some half-arsed, half-baked idea.
