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Its the middle of the day, but the car behind me is blinding me with its lights blazing in my mirrors.

What is this with headlights in daylight? It doesnt seem to be too sensible to me. To say that it helps you see a moving car is surely just not true. If you are a driver and you cant tell if another vehicle is moving then surely you shouldnt be driving. True, the emergency services use their headlights to reinforce their blue flashing lights, but with so many other sets of headlights these get lost in the whole illuminated scene, and so they are not very useful at all.

It was said by one major bus company that their experiment, over three months, demonstrated that accident numbers were reduced when their buses were using headlights all day. Does that mean the average person cant see a bus? What they didnt point out was that the three months was in a period when traffic accidents statistically are at their lowest, so really the trial seems to me to have been loaded to produce the desired result. Strangely, the same figures are used to prove that speed cameras reduce accident, too.

A downside of unnecessary use of headlights focuses on the current question of global warming.

A car with headlights on is throwing out at least 130 watts of light and heat. Assuming the figure of thirty million vehicles in the United Kingdom, if just ten per cent of those are using headlights in the daytime, that means they are consuming around 390 megawatts of energy. Quite a lot of heat and light, you have to agree. Consider, then, that quite a lot of these vehicles are also using fog lights (why?) burning another 110 watts or so per car, and that could add several more megawatts to the total.

With much of this power being converted into heat then surely this must contribute significantly to the rising temperature, beside the extra fuel being used to generate all this extra electricity producing so much more exhaust gases. That, in turn is producing more carbon and other pollutants to add to the greenhouse effect.

This is just considering the United Kingdom. Imagine what sort of figures you would get if you looked worldwide at this.

Do we really need headlights in daylight? I think not.

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