With the arrival of autumn, car insurance experts at esure are urging drivers to take extra precautions and have shared practical steps to reduce the risk of accidents and vehicle damage in heavy rain.
- Check your wiper blades: Your windscreen wipers are essential in the rain for obvious reasons, but if they’re dirty or worn out, they won’t be as effective, so make sure to keep them in a clean working order. Whilst looking after your wipers, consider checking if your washer bottle is also topped up.
- Check your tyres: Whilst you should be checking your tyres regularly anyway, it’s even more important to do so when it’s wet. Bald tyres offer much less grip on wet roads and are more likely to ‘aquaplane’. The minimum legal tyre tread depth for cars in the UK and Europe is 1.6mm across the central three-quarters of the tyre. Aquaplaning is when your tyres can’t displace the water in front of them fast enough so they begin riding on a layer of water. If your steering becomes unresponsive, don’t slam on the brakes; just ease off the accelerator and keep the steering wheel as straight as possible. You should then slow down gradually and regain contact with the road.
- Double the gap: When it’s raining, you should at least double the gap you normally would between yourself and the car in front. Stopping distances are longer in wet weather, so make your two-second gap at least a four-second gap. You can check the timing by watching when the car in front of you passes a fixed object, such as a lamppost, and counting the seconds it takes you to reach that object. Saying ‘Mississippi’ between the numbers is roughly 1 second!
- Test brakes after driving through water: If you’ve driven through water, test your brakes when it’s safe to do so. Wet brakes are less responsive than when they’re dry, so your ability to stop quickly could be reduced. Because of this, you should allow more time to stop as best practice when it’s raining.
Visit esure for further information on how to drive safely on wet roads.
