DRL's are just for the lame. If you are out alone on a highway, and someone comes the other way and doesn't see you, DRL's are not going to come to the rescue -- they were going to run you over anyway. And drunks (though less are out in the day time) and tired drivers tend to drive into the light. That's why if you look at Schneider trucking company trailers they have blue and silver reflectors with grids that point down and to the left on the rear of the trailers. That's also why some of the cop car light bars tend to steer you to the left by flashing in a subtle arrow (lights strobe to the left).
On another point, if you are driving in a metro area with all the eye trash out there, what is one more (or two more) lights going to do to get your attention amongst the glare off of car windows, chrome, signs, building windows, etc?
I think that if only a few cars have there lights on, it's great for them, but if everyone has there lights on that it just makes it more difficult to pick out the true condition of what's going on, even to the point of not seeing deer, dogs, and kids. By the way, OBD2 doesn't know if drl is on or not (I suspect that it wont know if the headlights are on either).
More eye trash is not necessarily better eye trash, it just takes your attention from a lot of other things (and may even wash out the subtle but more important details). To illustrate, I was walking in downtown Denver a few years ago. I got to a cross walk and looked both ways. Fortunately I looked again, because I had a street car bearing down on me. It had DRL, but so did the cars, and the glare off of the wires, windows, signs, etc, kept me from noticing it. Could have been smashed to bits and not been here to rail against the sheepherding guboment do gooders!
I think my soapbox broke, but since I don't have any DRL to see by I may be gone a while....
