With UN Regulation 48 now requiring DRL on most vehicles, the focus on DRLs lately has largely been on the international-consensus most-of-the-world where UN Regulations hold sway.
But things can be different, sometimes widely so, in non-ECE regions. Canada has required DRLs on all new vehicles for over two decades, and the Canadian public response has generally been supportive. A recent write-in query to a major Canadian national newspaper enquiring on how to disable DRLs garnered a goodly number of public comments, most of which chided the asker for thinking of deactivating the lights. Reaction is more ambivalent in the United States, where the same DRLs well accepted in Canada continue to generate vociferous glare-based complaints.
While the North American DRL specification does permit a relatively high 7,000-candela axial intensity, and the low test voltage of 12.8v means lamps operating at the higher voltages encountered on actual vehicles are emitting closer to 10,000cd, the fact that the same lamps generate complaints in one country and not in the other suggest cultural factors are at work, not just pure photometrics and human factors. And in China, the retrofitment of DRLs is being dismissed out of hand as hazardous and not safety-beneficial. The secretary of the Shanghai Automobile Maintenance and Repair Association says DRLs increase the electrical load on the vehicle and this could cause a fire.