Rain
Roads are slickest in the first ten to fifteen minutes of a storm, when water lifts months of oil and rubber off the pavement. Cut your speed by about a third, double your following distance to six seconds and leave cruise control off. Turn on your headlights whenever the wipers are on, which many states require, since daytime running lights often leave the tail lights dark. Hydroplaning is the tires riding up on a film of water, and it can begin at 35 miles an hour on worn tires. Ease off the accelerator, hold the wheel straight and do not brake until you feel the tires grip again.
Standing water
Six inches of water reaches the underside of most cars and can stall the engine or take away steering control. A foot of moving water can float a small car. You cannot judge depth or see a washed-out roadbed from the driver's seat, so turn around and find another route. More than half of flood drownings in this country involve a vehicle driven into water.
Fog
Use low beams, plus fog lights if the car has them. High beams bounce off the droplets and throw a white wall back at you. Follow the painted line on the right edge of the road rather than the center line. If visibility falls to almost nothing, take these steps.
- Signal and pull into a parking lot or as far off the road as you can get.
- Turn off your driving lights and leave only the hazard flashers on.
- Set the parking brake and take your foot off the brake pedal, so that no one mistakes your tail lights for a car to follow.
Night
Low beams light roughly 200 feet of road, and at 60 miles an hour you need more than that to stop, so slow down on unlit roads. Use high beams whenever the road ahead is empty, and dim them within 500 feet of an oncoming car and 200 to 300 feet behind one you are following. When oncoming lights dazzle you, look down and right to the edge line until they pass. Clean the inside of the windshield, where a film builds up and turns every headlight into a starburst, and dim the dashboard lights. Deer move at dusk and dawn. If one appears, brake hard in your lane and do not swerve.
Tip Yellowed, hazy headlight lenses can cut light output by half. A restoration kit from a parts store costs about twenty dollars and takes half an hour.
