Miata Mailing List: February 1995, Message #45
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   From: "Alex Little ((919) 254-5038)" 
Subject: Running lights vs. Parking lights
   Date: Wed, 1 Feb 1995 14:26:10 -0500

One thing to keep in mind when using standard parking lights alone is
that they make it more difficult for other drivers to make basic
speed/distance judgements about your car.  The advantage that 'official'
DRLs provide is that they are typically brighter than standard parking
lights -- a lot closer in brightness to regular headlights than to
parking lights.  (DRLs are perhaps best described as headlights
intentionally created to be as bright as the standard lights on a 6 volt
VW Beetle.  Unfortunately for the VW, that's all they got.)

Think about this problem from the other driver's point of view:  if you
are about to pull out into traffic when visibility is poor, you can tell
more easily (more quickly and accurately) where an oncoming car is
located if they present a nice, bright, easy to see visual image.  Since
a vast majority of miatas fall into the 'dark car' category (ie, red,
blue, green, black, and silver cars tend to look dark & shadowy when
poorly lit), and Miatas are small with close lights anyway, the normal
perceptual tendency is for them to appear farther away than they
actually are, because they more closely resemble average size vehicles
that are farther away.  Now, if the light from your car is very dim, as
parking lights are likely to be, it becomes even more difficult to make
an accurate and reliable distance judgement.  You can see this for
yourself:  on a rainy day, try looking at other cars and comparing how
far they are away from you.  I predict you'll feel that the dark ones
using only parking lights appear to be farther away than the bright cars
with headlights on.  (Doesn't count if you can reach out and touch either
of them.)

So, what all this BS really means is the following:  if you want people
to see you and to be able to tell where you are and how fast you are
approaching with a better degree of accuracy, don't depend on just the
parking lights to be seen.  Use your headlights or some equivalent
appropriate for the visual conditions at the time (such as DRLs).  Save
your parking lights for when your car is parked and just needs to be
seen, rather than force other drivers to depend on them to tell where
you are and how fast you are approaching.  If you think it looks cool to
cruise around with the parking lights on, you may be better off hanging
out in the parking lot so people can more accurately admire you and your
car.

Alex Little
Raleigh, NC

PS There is an upper limit too.  If you crank up the brightness too
much, you'll blind other drivers and then they'll run into you because
they can't see anything.

PPS If you're following a coke-bottle-flinging texas homeboy, you may
WANT to be invisble, so read the following advice backwards