I’ve been seeing this a lot lately and saw it twice on my way home from work last night, once on an expressway. It seems to always be newish SUVs from US manufacturers. The cars are driving at night with headlights and even fog lights on (with no fog in sight) but no tail lights! They are completely blacked out from the rear which seems really dangerous. I understand that this is just a case of idiot drivers but why would any manufacturer enable this practice by allowing such a light setting for any vehicle? Are they trying to improve gas mileage by eliminating the power drain required to light up the tail lights???
Everyone mentioning daytime running lights, but there’s another issue that’s also fairly common. For some reason, auto manufacturers at some point in history began putting taillights on a separate fuse from the headlights, so often the taillight fuse will pop, but the driver doesn’t realize because the headlights are still working.