Tips to ensure vehicle safety
There are factors you need to take into consideration to ensure safe driving. Come to think of it, safe driving is greater than taking a course in driver education. It entails both intelligence and commons sense.
Learning to drive
It is a bad idea that you assume that you are the best driver in the city. You have to continually analyze your own driving. Answer questions like ‘do I make the entry onto the freeway properly? or do I almost risk an accident because I jump into traffic too quickly?
Time
Initially, you have to fix firmly in your mind that your sense of time goes out the window at the time you get into a car. To illustrate this, you need to time how long it takes to get out of a side street onto a regularly-used road. Ask someone else in the car to estimate how long you were sitting there. If actually it was 10 seconds, the other person would most likely say 30 or more seconds.
A typical example of such point is an instance when you leave late and try to make up some time by driving extra fast to work. Here, you may save say two or three seconds. On the other hand, if you leave two minutes earlier and spend a fraction of time driving slowly, then you will get there is two minutes early. But if you really drag your feet, it will be probably one minute and 56 seconds early
A quick instance to prove the same point comes from watching the progress of somebody who has passed you out your feeling that you are driving too slowly. Pick up a marker when that person passes it and count seconds until you reach it. Someone who’s steaming down the road will pick up as much as five whole seconds in a mile or maybe even 30 seconds in a trip of five or ten miles.
Cushion
As a standard rule, you need to leave a two-second cushion between your car and the one before you. It’s a basic arithmetic – at 60 mph, you are traveling 88 feet per second. Two seconds puts you 176 feet behind the person you are following. Now think of what can happen if the guy hits the brakes immediately? Note that it takes an average driver to notice the brake lights and realize that the vehicle before him is slowing down. It will be a little late for him to move the right foot from the accelerator to the brake and depress the pedal – you have traveled 44 feet before your brakes start to slow down. Now you have one and a half seconds and 132 feet of maneuvering space left and you don’t know what’s going on. This is an assumption that the pavement is bone dry and there is no other traffic to worry about. The brakes are working well and your attention is directly on the brake lights of the vehicle before you. It is safe to say that the two-second cushion does not leave much room for errors.
It is definitely advised that you allow as much as space as possible. It’s a big NO to drive directly behind or next to anyone especially if the situation doesn’t call for such action. This all pays off when someone has some sort of emergency. Definitely you would not be caught in it. You have adequate room to use your brakes, swerve out of trouble, or just continue driving.
Brains
Alertness is of high importance to a driver. He must watch the traffic, road conditions, driver behavior, external influences, weather, visibility, and the working condition of his vehicle.
Money
Observance to traffic rules and paying attention to automotive tips like this will save you heaps of money on insurance costs, tickets, and body work.
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