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Given it's a safety feature the main reason not to do it would be if somehow it made things worse. Even if the effect is almost negligible you're still going to
by icc97 9y ago
Given it's a safety feature the main reason not to do it would be if somehow it made things worse. Even if the effect is almost negligible you're still going to save a couple of lives per year.
Once LED lights are more standard and there's less issue of replacing bulbs or wasting electricity it seems a no brainer.
- gambiting 9y agoWell, that's the whole separate point in this discussion - normal headlamp bulbs are 60W - so you are using 120W of power to run two of them. How many cars are on the road for a country the size of Poland at a busy time of the day? 100k cars? That's 12 megawatts of power being used every day just to run some lights - and that's not counting rear lights at all. Generating 12 megawatts of power using thousands of ICEs is a massive waste of fuel, and it's probably incredibly hard to prove that conclusively, but I wouldn't be surprised if burning that fuel caused more deaths overall than having the lights on saves. I don't know if we can find any studies that would say either way though. Automotive LEDs are still within 10-15W range each, so while better than halogens they are not free. And finally, I think there was a Polish study that said that yeah, while with the lights on you are more likely to notice a car, you are less likely to notice a cyclist - and hitting the latter has much worse consequences than hitting the former. So it might have made things worse.