Your Vehicle — Things You Don’t Think Would be Dangerous

A story we recently found on MSN looked at four features on and in our vehicles that make them more dangerous. Some — you’d think — would be just the opposite but it’s not true.

The first — one you’d think makes us safer — is red turn signals. This call comes from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). It found that turn signals that are amber colored and not red can reduce vehicle crashes between two autos by at least 5.3%.

Amber is a huge contrast to red. So an amber turn signal is an easy to notice difference between whether someone is stopping and turning.

Next up is the color of a vehicle. A study in 2003 by the British Medical Journal (BMJ) found there is more of a risk of being injured in a brown vehicle than one of lighter color. Drive a black or a dark green auto and the percentage rises.

Darker autos — says a study from Monash University in Australia — don’t give you a lot of contrast when compared to the road. This is worse during the day than at night.

The third on the list of dangerous features is a navigation system. AAA says programming a navigation device takes 40 seconds on average. “When driving at 25 mph, a driver can travel the length of four football fields during the time it could take to enter a destination in navigation — all while distracted from the important task of driving,” AAA said.

As we all know, just taking your eyes off the road for a couple of seconds doubles the risk of a crash.

Last up is infotainment systems. AAA’s Foundation for Traffic Safety found several aspects of those systems can be dangerous. They include:

** Making a phone call

** Sending a text

** Turning on the radio or some sort of audio device

The AAA study looked at 30 systems and 23 of them caused a high, or a very high level of driver attention demand. What’s scary is one in three vehicles on the road today use one of those systems.

“Researchers found that most infotainment systems tested could easily be made safer by simply following clearly stated federal recommendations such as locking out text messaging, social media and programming navigation while the car is in motion,” AAA said.

Source link: MSN — https://bit.ly/3Q4udMA