Signaling your intent to turn or change lanes when driving is an important safety consideration, and a legal requirement. Can you lawfully use your hands to signal in place of your vehicle’s blinkers? Signaling your intent to turn or change lanes when driving is an important safety consideration, and a legal requirement.Parking sensors mean we can squeeze into the tightest of spots without hitting anything, while autonomous emergency braking is helping to reduce the number of accidents. The rise of artificial intelligence has made driving a whole lot easier and safer. A paper map can’t do that… but at least it doesn’t have an irritating voice that keeps saying ‘recalculating’. While some people still swear by using their trusty paper map to point them in the right direction, most of us now use a sat-nav.Īs well as directing you, sat-navs can also warn you about speed cameras, let you know when you’re going over the speed limit and even give you live traffic reports. We have technology to do that for us now. Sadly, good old-fashioned map-reading skills are a dying art. READ MORE: Driving habits that are secretly damaging your car 6. The 2.45 position may even make you feel more comfortable too, once you get used to it. So if you’re still driving at 10-to-2 in a modern car, you need to get with the programme and adjust your steering clock. Why? As well as helping you to keep a tight grip on the wheel if you start to lose control of the car, it also prevents you getting badly injured from the force of the airbag if it goes off in a collision.
HAND SIGNALS FOR TURNING DRIVERS
Learner drivers are encouraged to place their hands at a quarter-to-3, or 2.45. When you learnt to drive, you were always taught to position your hands on the steering wheel in a 10-to-2 clock face position, right? But the advice has changed now. READ MORE: Nine big driving changes happening in 2018 Most modern cars have a fuel injection system alongside computerised monitoring of the fuel/air mix so they don’t need a choke. Once the air reaches the optimal temperature, the choke can be deactivated and the engine started as normal. In other words, it chokes the flow of air. In case you are too young to remember, a choke works by increasing the amount of petrol in the fuel/air mixture from the carburettor. Remember the days when your car wouldn’t start in winter and you had to pull the choke? Sometimes it needed several goes to get it started. Pulling the choke to start your car in cold weather If prosecuted, the maximum penalty is £500. If you’re caught not wearing a seatbelt you could face an on-the-spot fine of £100. The slogan ‘Clunk Click Every Trip’ was famously used to urge people to belt up, while subsequent campaigns have included ‘Julie’ and ‘Three Strikes’. In the back of the car, rear selt belts became compulsory for children under 14 in 1989, before extending to adults riding in the back two years later, in 1991. This would be unthinkable these days – although a few people still try to get away without wearing one.Įven though seatbelts have been fitted to the front seats of all new vehicles since the 1960s, it didn’t become a legal requirement to actually wear one in the front until 1983. There was a (surprisingly recent) time when we used to routinely ride around in cars without wearing a seatbelt.
HAND SIGNALS FOR TURNING DRIVER
READ MORE: 11 most annoying UK driver habits 3. It wasn’t until 1975 that candidates taking their driving test no longer had to demonstrate hand signals.
Technology has made such manoeuvres long redundant, but you can still use them if a bulb blows or you suffer an electrical failure. To show they were slowing down or stopping, they’d extend their right arm with ‘the palm of the hand turned downwards’, followed by the moving up and down of the arm ‘slowly’, keeping the ‘wrist loose’. To show they were turning left, they’d extend their right arm and rotate it anti-clockwise. Before the days of indicators and brake lights, drivers had to signal to turn by wafting their arm out of the window of their car.