Car accidents happen every day. We never leave the house thinking we might be involved in one, but it just happens. Careful, sober driving is, of course, the best way to minimize and prevent car accidents, but you’re never in full control of your environment, so even if everyone is driving perfectly carefully, unpredictable things can happen. So, new gadgets are invented to make sure that car accidents happen in lower numbers, so let’s take a look at some of the best new gadgets you should be using when driving.
Voice Control
The one thing you don’t want to do when driving is take your eyes off the road, but with our phones being next to us literally all the time, a lot of us look at them far more than we should when we’re driving. Even if it’s just to look at a map, you’re still putting yourself and others at risk. This is why you should always activate voice control on your phone and in your car if it has the option and just verbally give and receive instructions on where to go, answer calls, hear texts and do anything else you need while keeping your hands on the wheel and eyes on the road.
Dashcam
You’ll want to have a dashcam fixed to both the front and the back of your car. Let’s first talk about the backside cam – it not only records what is happening behind you, but it can help you see in places that would be your blind spots. Modern cars are equipped with software that helps you steer backward by showing you where you’re headed. But you’ll also want to record what’s happening with your front and back dash cams to cloud storage. The experts of https://warnetthallen.com/car-accident-lawyer/ say that the insurance company will want to inspect your vehicle after a potential accident to determine blame and damage, but if you have video evidence of what happened – there’s no thinking twice about it. Having a dashcam might also make you drive more carefully, because you subconsciously know that you’re “being watched” while you’re driving.
Auto-Steering
We might not have self-driving cars just yet, but we do have some aspects installed in cars today that can help us stay safe and protect ourselves and the people around us. Auto-steering is one of them, and it’s a system that detects obstacles in front of you – like pedestrians, cars and objects – and automatically steers around them or break in front of them. This can save lives, especially in the case if you fall asleep or get distracted while behind the wheel. This is pretty new tech and not many cars have it, but we’ll surely be seeing it used more and more in the future.
Lane-Keeping System
A step down from auto-steering is lane-keeping. Your car won’t actually drive within the lane for you, but it will alert you if you are swerving. With cameras and software that detects the lines that mark a lane, it will alert you with sound or vibration when you drift to the side. This can happen in a second if you take your eyes off the road or lose focus, and if you have someone in your blind spot, it can be deadly, so this will remind you to drive straight ahead.
Blind-Spot Warning
Speaking of the blind spot, let’s talk about a warning system. The blind spot is one of the biggest stresses of every driver, and if you’ve ever been in that situation where you didn’t see someone who is close behind you and you try changing lanes, it can take a few good years off your life. A blind-spot warning works by being your eyes in the spots you can’t see. It tracks where there’s an object in your blind spot and alerts you through either a light on your rear-view mirror or a sound. It might take a while to get used to looking for the signal, but if every car had this, it would prevent many many accidents which are “nobody’s fault” and make everyone feel a bit safer.
Preventing car accidents is a science because there are so many things that need to be considered – from the quality of the vehicles, to the psychology of the drivers to the conditions on the road. That is exactly why there are these gadgets that try to bridge any gaps in safety that might cause an accident. But even with all the gadgets in the world, nothing can replace careful driving, so rely on your eyes and ears first.
