Tips for driving safely in the rain
Rain creates demanding conditions for drivers. Here are some tips for driving safely in the rain.
First, the biggest things you need to do to ensure you’ll be safe when it starts raining have to be attended to before your trip even starts. You need to ensure that you have good wipers on your car for visibility, and good tires on your car so that you’ll be able to maintain contact with the road.
Wiper blades wear out, and often the original wiper blades on new vehicles are of poor quality. I recently rented a car for a week long trip and, because I expected rain I replaced the wipers with new good quality ones even though the rental car had less than a five hundred miles on it. It was worth a few extra dollars to ensure I’d be able to see when the rain started coming down.
Tires are just as important. If you feel your car shimmy when you hit a puddle at highway speeds, it means that the tread of your tires isn’t doing its job of channeling water away. Either you have cheap tires, or they’re too worn to be safe, or both. You need to replace them with good quality tires with a tread pattern that will channel water away and keep your car in contact with the road.
With good wipers and tires, you’re ready for a safe trip in the rain, provided that you adjust your driving to accommodate the rain conditions. Even with good tires, if you go too fast you can start hydroplaning, which is a term for what happens when your car’s tires lose contact with the road surface and instead “hydroplane” on the thin surface of water that coats the road.
Hydroplaning deprives you of steering control – you can turn the wheel and nothing will happen because your tires aren’t in contact with the road – and you can end up in the ditch. The best way to avoid hydroplaning is to reduce your speed.
Don’t be fooled by a road that is only a little bit wet. Often roads are slickest when they receive a light coating of rain, as this rain lifts up the oil on the road and makes the road surface very slippery. Reduce your vehicle’s speed as soon as rain starts to fall.
Finally, if the rains are torrential, don’t attempt to cross areas where water is running over the roadway. Moving water is tremendously powerful. Even a few inches of water can carry a vehicle off the road and into a watercourse. Many drivers have drowned by finding themselves in swollen rivers or creeks after having tried to drive through what appeared to be only a few inches of water.
If you follow the above tips for driving safely in the rain you’ll be well on your way to handling the demanding driving conditions created by rain.
Author : David Riel
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