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The DRL Saga
An irreverent history
of motorcar daytime lights
- only the names have been changed to protect the
guilty.
Chapter 1 In the Beginning
Once upon a time, tribes of wild and horny
Vikings set out to rule the World. They succeeded in conquering a large part
of Northern of Europe.
Due to over supply, the bottom of the market soon fell out of
ransacking, raping and pillaging so the reinvented themselves into peace
loving Nordic and Scandinavian
nations worshiping metal gods like
Rolvo and Saabrina. Things were good with plentiful iron ore reserves and gigantic forests. The Gods had an insatiable appetite for metal which kept mighty steel furnaces burning
brightly. Their plan was to re conquer
the world with motor cars.
Saabrina made fiendishly fast and agile motor cars with small, unburstable
3 cylinder 850cc two stroke engines that won world
Rallies. Rolvo
made sturdy cars favoured by lumberjacks and in the Netherlands; Rolvo
made quirky little automatic cars driven by rubber bands.
Like the United
Kingdom, these born
again Vikings drove on the left hand side of the road. But as all other nations on continental Europe drove on the right hand side of the road this
caused much confusion, so in 1967, they changed to driving on right hand
side. This of course caused accidents
to rise astronomically particularly when drunken Vikings forgot the new rules coming out of the pub.
So the Rolvoites thought how can we stop
this massacre? Gustav the Rolvo head honcho said “I know - ve
vill make our parking lights brighter and drive
with them on all the time, Rolvos will stand out
and also be visible when our fair land is laid waste and frozen over ”.
About this time, antique dealers and old men in England developed a liking for Rolvos due to a
reputation for safe but reliable
performance. The quirky automatic rubber band driven
cars were favoured by old ladies because they could go just as fast backwards
as forwards – great for one way streets!
Ever eager to keep their steel furnaces at full blast the Rolvo marketing men were dreaming up new ways to attain
their desire to conquer the world
with motor cars and hit upon the
adage “Safety sells”
Having exhausted seat belts, side impact bars, side bumper lights,
crumple zones and child seats; they were in search of new gimmicks. Because their cars were becoming so heavily
laden with safety equipment, thick windscreen pillars were needed so they
started to experiment with lattice girder pillars. They even started scraping the barrel with
wacky ideas like putting a chemical coating on the radiator matrix.
They claimed left the air behind a Rolvo
cleaner than the incoming air, but the boffins forgot
about the ravaging effects of winter grime and macerated summer insects being
baked onto the wonder coating, so the suggestion box was now empty.
One dank and dark winter’s day, Kev the
senior Rolvo tea boy had returned from the cash and
carry with new stocks of using the boss’s estate wagon. He parked close to the office, but in his
youthful haste, he forgot to turn
off the headlights.
Gustav spotted this and was enraged.
He shouted “you wonker - with a flat battery
a man can die in Sweden! - I’ll make you push it 10 times round ze factory!”
But Kev, a bright spark, with his eye on
promotion retorted “hey Boss vy do ve not make ze eadlights on fully bright
all ze time.
Ze people will notice every time a Rolvo thunders past!”
“But what about the poor
minions – wont they be harder for drivers to see?” cried acting trolley dolly
Bev. “They will just ave to jump out of the blinking road” retorted Kev.
“Well what about the environmental pollution, fuel cost and burnt out
light bulbs” asked Bev.
“Ze
drivers will pay” said Gustav “Ve shall sell them as a safety gimmick - Rolvo or your
Life”
“Kev go down to the polytechnic and find a
couple of bright young student to write a report
to say what a “Good Thing” it will be to drive with headlights on all day”
commanded Gustav .
And lo it came to pass, dazzling shiny Rolvos
poured off the production line, students Andrew and Neil won a prize for their composition and the goddesses of Viking
Vision, Osrama and Philipa
expressed everlasting love for Rolvo.
Chapter 2 Domination
Rolvo and Saabrina
started to export more cars and Kev was
promoted sales manager, Bev was given the most important
of jobs polishing headlights.
Sven the Swedish transport
minister latched onto the “Good Thing” and in short
order persuaded Denmark, Finland,
Norway,
Italy, Canada, Czech
Republic, Hungary,
Israel, Poland and Lithuania, to use daytime
lights. Many studies
were commissioned from learned institutions by transport ministers to show what a good job they were
doing, but in their enthusiasm to paint a good picture for their political masters the researchers
frequently fed off each other’s data and many studies were exposed to use
flawed methodology.
Interestingly after forcing
daytime lights onto the population, no transport
minister was able to produce actual real world
reductions in accidents. This did not
stop outrageous claims being made by some: the Canadians claimed an 11%
reduction but in an era of falling accident rates due to better car design,
they forgot to check against other
countries who did at the time not use daytime lights like their neighbour the
USA, where accidents fell by a similar amount over the same period.
But ministers eager to earn political kudos and collect tax revenues
from the extra fuel used, decided to ignore
the bad news and so the goddesses of Viking Vision, Osrama
and Philipa writhed in ecstasy.
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Chapter 3 A hiccup
Alas Rolvo had spent so much research on
safety gimmicks that they neglected to invest in new model designs. Their unwieldy rear wheel drive cars were
becoming dated, to survive they were forced
into a collaboration deal with a
Japanese manufacturer and so launched a new range of front wheel drive cars.
However this strategy proved only a stop gap measure, profits fell and
eventually Rolvo were sold off to the Blue Oval Motor Company of the USA. Sadly Kev and Bev
were made redundant and nowadays play bit parts in Automobile Association
adverts.
Interestingly, Jimmy Vonhill Blue Oval’s
technical big wig and Herman Benson safety manager think
the case for daytime light is
overstated and does not offer them as standard equipment, Interestingly, but
maybe that is because his main rival Gimmick Motors, jumped the gun and is now committed to
dazzling high beam daytime lights.
These have engendered thousands of complaints
about glare and driver distraction from all across the US of A.
As world carbon dioxide
levels have increased by 20% since 1990, environmentalists have become very
concerned about the pollution from drivers needlessly burning powerful lights
in good daylight. The unnecessary
carbon dioxide emissions destroy national efforts
to comply with the Kyoto
protocol.
Chapter 4
Shenanigans
In 1997, the USA
insurance companies analysed the benefits of daytime lights looking at over
three quarters of a million motor
policies, horror of horrors accidents had risen by an average of 3.7% with
Rolvo’s up by a staggering 20%. So as many officials do to massage the
figures, they buried the bad news and today, the USA insurance companies say
daytime lights are the best thing since sliced bread. Unfortunately
for them, there was a
whistleblower who spilled the beans to a group of
bloggers called DaDRL.
Gimmick Motors produced
their own report claiming
thousands of accidents saved, but unfortunately
for them their researcher included
night time accidents in his analysis and was sent to the bottom of the class.
Similarly the USA Ministry of Safety headed by Dicky
Vaninterest ran a proposal to reduce the glare in
response to public complaints (called Docket 4124) but they dragged their
feet for years and years and then
strangely, maybe to protect the ailing Gimmick Motors
(whose shares are trading just above junk bond status) from bankruptcy,
docket 4124 was quietly withdrawn. All
these past complaints were quietly discarded and they started over again with
a new docket 17243 at http://dms.dot.gov/search. To date no decision has yet been made to
reduce the glare.
Over the pond in Europe, the European
Commission Pontiffs were seething at the success of a group of European Motorcyclists and Cyclists who prevented car
manufacturer’s fitting daytime lights as a sop to stave off having to make
their cars more pedestrian
friendly.
So they engaged Captain Whitewash to produce some more daytime light favourable reports, he openly dismissed vulnerable road users as
a minority that can be sacrificed
of the great god of Viking Vision. Unfortunately for
them, they did insufficient real research and again made fundamental errors in their methodology so their case was shot to
pieces.
But it did not stop them commanding France to trial introduce daytime
lights. Again unfortunately for
them they have underestimated the ferocity of Angry French Bikers
and the battle rages to this day.
Like the popular story of
the Emperors New Clothes by Hans
Christian Anderson the modern day Vikings have convinced the European
Pontiffs that daytime lights were a “Good Thing” but like the little boy in
story of the Emperors New Clothes, the bloggers at DaDRL are
beginning to ask why?
The moral of this story
is:
You can fool
some of the people some of the time but not all of the people all of the
time.
Anon
Footnote 2010
Blue Oval got sick of Rolvo
failing to make profit – Rolvo now Chinky owned
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