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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 waggon. 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
V2
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