With winter fastly approaching (for the northern hemisphere) driving is a daily challenge for most of us, but the elements of weather like rain, snow and fog make driving much more difficult.
One way of helping to alleviate and provide assistance whilst driving and to help you drive better is to use a SatNav device. If you speak to road accident campaigners you will here them say that SatNav is a danger and that it creates and causes accidents. However what you don’t hear is how it saves accidents and lives.
A good example is driving in fog, blizzards or even snow. When you are hit by a wall of almost zero visibility and have dazzling headlights whiting out the reduced visibility in front of you, it’s can be very difficult to see the road ahead.
When this happens for me (like the other day with driving in 50ft visibility dense fog) you can use your SatNav as a secondary provisional sense, almost a 7th sense. You can see the road ahead in terms of where it bends left or right, and it can help you when you’re in dense fog or snow in understanding where the road characteristics change. Obviously you can’t solely drive just using the SatNav (and it would be dangerous to do so), you have to look out of the windscreen, but in dense fog and snow it can help to at least provide you with another measure of certainty.
What I usually do when hitting a wall of fog is to ensure my fog lights (front and rear are on), slow my speed down to either the reduced posted speed limit or reduce my speed to about half the speed of the road (or slower if the visibility is heavily reduced) use the SatNav as a guidance tool to allow you to confirm where the road bears left or right (as it’s not always clear to see the cats eyes) and then I can at least feel safe in my mind that I know where the bends are in the road and to continue to allow my full attention to keep a look out for other road users ahead or behind me as well as other objects.
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