There will always be serious risks associated with driving. You’re getting behind the wheel of a vehicle that weighs thousands of pounds. You need to take that seriously and maneuver it as safely as you can.
Obeying all traffic laws is part of safe driving. However, there’s no denying that there have been some automotive technological advancements in recent years that can help you out quite a bit.
Let’s take a look at a few of those.
Blind Spot Warning Systems
An assertion by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is that one-third of collisions that take place between trucks and passenger vehicles happen because of blind spot inattention. Blind spots:
- Are places that you can’t easily see around your car when you are driving
- Cause many accidents when inattention occurs
No vehicle is without blind spots. However, blind-spot warning systems now exist, and car companies install them in many of their vehicles.
A blind-spot warning system has electronic sensors that pick up the entry of a vehicle into one of your blind spots. It warns you with a flashing light on the dashboard, an audible alert, or a vibrating seat or steering wheel. This prevents you from changing lanes when a vehicle or other large object is in your blind spot.
Intelligent Forward-Collision Warning
Many vehicular accidents also take place when a car rear-ends the one in front of it. This might happen if you:
- Allow the kids in the back seat to distract you
- Are trying to change the radio station
- Are attempting to change the vehicle’s air temperature
- Are having an animated conversation with someone else in the car
Forward collision warning systems calculate the distance between your vehicle and the car in front of you. They monitor your speed and that of the car ahead, and if a collision is going to happen, you get a visual or auditory alert or both.
This system allows you to either avoid the collision entirely or else to slow down enough so that the impact is much less. If you are driving on the highway, and you happen to lose driving focus for a couple of seconds, this feature could save you from serious injury.
Evasion Aid
You can use evasion aid if you are in heavy traffic, and a vehicle ahead of you stops suddenly. This tech uses a forward-facing camera to detect a potential impact situation that’s about to occur.
As a driver, you might have time at such a moment to start an evasion technique. However, evasion aid is a system that makes it much more likely the maneuver will succeed.
Guiding your vehicle into one of the safe spaces in the traffic pattern is this technology’s purpose, and it has saved countless collisions and lives since its inception.
The Teen Driver System
Some car companies have come up with the “teen driver system” as well. Of the various car safety features of the past decade, most parents consider this to be one of the better ones.
Teens are easily distracted, and parents worry about them when they give them the car keys for the first time once they get their driver’s license. This feature allows parents to program vehicle speed limits. They can get a report card, which shows how often their teen driver went over that limit.
They can also set the system to mute the audio volume until everyone in the car buckles their safety belts. There are variations of these systems that include such additions as automatic parking assistance, parking sensors, a rearview camera, and a rear cross-traffic alert for backing up.
Read More: 8 Great Safe Driving Road trips in Europe
Lane-Keeping Assistance
Some cars also come with lane-keep assist these days. This is tech that keeps track of the road lines over which the vehicle is moving. If you move out of your lane but do not signal, the warning light will go off, and a noise will sound.
This is an excellent distracted driving deterrent. Distracted driving causes lots of car accidents, and it doesn’t take any more than a second for a crash to occur. Lane keep assistance will help you if you’re in a potentially distracting situation. You always want to follow traffic laws and drive defensively, but with these safe driving additions, it is easier than ever to be a responsible driver. Self-driving cars are on the way, but until they get here, take comfort in these features and the new ones that are hitting the automotive market so frequently.
