The dangers of DRLs 4612

On Fri, 08 Jul 2005 23:59:17 -0400, James C. Reeves

baaah baaah baaah

Oh my, are you really so inexperienced referencing scientific documents? Reference the document and add a comment that specifies the page.

No. Nothing is easier than providing a link and the page number.

I will show you an example:

www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov-pdf-nrd-30-NCSA-Rpts-2004-809-760-images-buttessmentofDRLs.pdf (page 23)

Unfortunately this document doesn't support your views at all, which is why you didn't post it. According to this NHTSA buttessment DRLs reduced bane opposite-direction two-vehicle crashes by 5%, bane two vehicle opposite-direction crashes with motorcycle involvement by 23%. Pedestrian-cyclist baneities were reduced by more than 12%

No wonder you were trying so hard not to name your sources...

You won't believe it, hate develops. Maybe Bob Lutz spit in your corn flakes. Maybe you don't like the styling of the Pontiac Aztec. There are lots of reasons for people to change their minds. And your rant about the Malibu you claim to have owned clearly shows your hate.

You should try reading comprehension 101. And while it is not the best style to complain about simple spelling mistakes your spelling in general is atrocious and makes one wonder, whether you have the necessary education to understand scientific texts.

Apparently you failed to understand what you read, or you would have known the NHTSA's findings on DRLs.

If I had to use the manual switch much of the time I would agree with you, but the automatic system works so well that I very rarely have to intervene manually.

The last thing I want is a chime when the lights turn on or off. If someone is too blind to determine whether his lights are on they should not be driving in the first place.

If you were unable to understand the statement 'snow and bright sunlight' reading comprehension 101 is indeed warranted.

No, they are worth quite a lot, especially for showing you have no clue what you are talking about.

I am beginning to wonder whether you and DS really are independent people or whether there is a connection (other than both of you thinking your opinion is the holy truth).

... and often enough don't do what the driver wants, which is why my car has a 6-speed manual transmission.

I think even the hardcore pro-Reeves people in here will disagree about your '99.9% appropriate shifts'. I find that automatic transmissions rarely shift when I want them to (upshifting too late under light load, not downshifting quickly enough for pbutting, manual interaction necessary for downhill driving etc.). It surprises me that a control freak like you would leave the shifting to such an imperfect automatic system. Or are you going to tell me that your driving is so bad that you don't even notice when the automatic doesn't shift at the right time?

Almost everywhere in the US the system works. Maybe your local aliens use a fog machine and searchlights to create your brightly lit fog or you mistake spray from sprinklers for torrential rain.

and manually intervene in the rare case it doesn't switch when I want it to.

No, that's simply correct. Maybe your daily brightly lit fog is a freak weather phenomenon (I have been through a whole lot of fog, but brightly lit fog is very rare in my experience, maybe you are just making it up to rant about a system you don't like. In any case it is not the norm just about anywhere in the United States and other countries. And aside of your brightly lit fog and inexplicable torential rain from a sunny sky the system works very well.

If you are confused by a simple automatic system and a switch that says 'auto' and 'on' you are not mentally fit to drive a car.

What I said was that most people understand that no automatic system is correct every time. They may or may not know enough to intervene, but on average the system makes sure that even the greatest idiots get their headlights switched on at dusk and off after sunrise.

Only in your little hole in the wall.

A majority of people don't have your high failure rate. Your desperate attempt to spread brightly lit fog and torrential rain from a sunny sky over the US doesn't change that.

You are making that up. Even the bright lights around town here are not bright enough to trigger the sensors in the cars, and even if it did, in the 5 seconds it takes from pulling away from the gas pump under the brightly lit canopy to the time you enter the highway are sufficient to make the automatic system switch.

What you are missing is even basic understanding of the logarhitmic nature of light intensity. The light under a medium-density tree canopy is still several times as intense as the seemingly bright lighting in a gas station at night. My lights work remarkably well in that respect. They do indeed come on when I drive into dense forest, but that does make sense, especially when coming from bright sunlight.

But how come you all of sudden don't know what the automatic headlights do when driving unter a tree canopy?

That something is called stupidity and is just as prevalent in drivers of non-DRL cars.

Your theory doesn't hold up. In your brightly lit fog and torrential rain from a sunny sky the reflection of the headlights on the pavement are not visible.

What really triggers the stupid people to switch on their lights is a sufficient number of lighted cars (IOW the ones with smart people or an automatic system on board) having their headlights on and it being already so dark that the fact that the cars have their headlights on registeres in their numbskulls.

Pileup is the one clbuttic driver error accident. Taillights don't help there (they rather hurt because they take away from the signal effect of the brakelights).

Pile-ups happen when a large number of people are tailgating (i.e. following each other at significantly less than the recommended 2 second distance). If you are seriously saying that you can't see a car in your headlights, that is less than 2 seconds in front of you, you need to stop driving NOW and visit an ophtalmologist to determine the reason for your blindness.

No, they involve people going in the same direction at too high a rate of speed for conditions and too little distance to the cars in front of them.

Visibility very rarely is a factor in pileups, improper speed and distance always are.

Nonsense. Keeping proper distance and adjusting speed to conditions prevents pileups, not lighting. But if it were so, automatic lighting systems would be all the more important.

Nonsense. Pileups happen when people are following too close and are unable to stop in time when they see the brakelights of the cars in front of them.

Accidents, where the driver turns too hard due to power steering with insufficient road contact are quite frequent.

And what would you have done differently if you had had full control? Braking in a way that outperforms ABS' stopping distance and at the same time keeps the car maneuverable is very difficult even for the best drivers. And from everything you posted here I doubt you are even a good driver.

The system still did what it was supposed to do, i.e. turn on or off the lights at a specific light intensity. In the rare case you need the lights to be on even though the light intensity is greater than the trigger value manual interaction is easy.

Nonsense. In just about 100% of conditions the system works reliable. Maybe you live in a bright fog hole, where it torrential rains from a sunny sky daily but reality shows that the system usually works better than the average human driver does under the same conditions.

Chris