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by gambiting 3205 days ago
Well, 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.