When we all first began learning to drive I’m assuming it’s fair to say that we found it difficult remembering everything we had to do before actually driving off.
We’d get in the car, adjust our seat, adjust our rear-view and wing-mirrors and make sure the car was in neutral. We’d then put on our seatbelt, check both mirrors and our blind spot before hitting the road.
The best thing about it was that if we did forget something, we’d have our good old driving instructor sat at the side of us waiting to tell us what we’d done wrong. A habit of mine was forgetting to check my wing-mirrors, or to actually put the car in gear.
But aside from that, in the back of our minds, or our instructors minds, we knew that the slightest mistake could cause an accident. When we actually made it onto the road we’d have to multi-task, which meant learning to steer, break, change gear and indicate at the same time. Doing this on roundabouts was my weakness, although I’ve got it sussed now.
When we all finally passed our driving tests and were set free onto the roads, all of the above, in time, came natural to us. However there’s one mistake that a lot of drivers still manage to make. And that’s remembering to turn their lights on when driving at night.
I mean it’s an easy mistake to make, I’ve done it often enough. Then we wonder why the driver in the car behind keeps flashing their lights at us, or why passes by are doing kind hand gestures demonstrating flashing lights.
The reason is that our headlights are there for a reason, and if we forget to put them on this causes danger to all other road users. A pedestrian waiting to cross a road might not see us coming towards them and walk out in front of us, in return we might not see them, or cars won’t see us when waiting to pull out at junctions.
All of these are very dangerous scenarios, hopefully in most circumstances we will become aware of our mistake before any of the above occurs.
There is an entire law that has been created for the pure explanation of the importance of vehicle lighting; however I’m not going to bore you with that. To sum it up it pretty much tells drivers that headlights should be used in the hours of darkness or in circumstances where visibility is seriously reduced for other reasons such as bad weather conditions.
If you have been involved in an car accident where one of the opposing parties failed to use their headlights then you may be able to claim compensation for their negligence. Injury Lawyers deal with many incidents like this, and are here to give free, partial advice.
