Introduction to defensive driving

Defensive driving is driving on the assumption that somebody else is about to make a mistake, and leaving yourself the room and the time to survive it. It means reading the road far enough ahead to see trouble forming, allowing for the weather, the light, the surface and the state of your vehicle, and never relying on another driver doing the correct thing.

Collisions come far more often from human failure than from mechanical failure, and the commonest human failure is not adjusting to the conditions: the same speed in the rain as in the dry, the same following distance behind a haulage truck as behind a car, the same attention at the end of a long day as at the start of it.

The method has three steps, always in this order.

• See the hazard. Look well ahead and think about what is going to happen, or what could happen, long before you reach it. Never venture where you cannot see.
• Know the defence. Every situation has its own answer, and you learn the answers before you meet them, not while you are in one. At an intersection the sequence is know, slow, show and go: know what kind of intersection it is, slow down, show the other drivers what you intend, and only then go.
• Act in time. The moment you have seen a hazard and know the answer, act on it. Waiting to see what happens spends the distance that was your safety margin.

The factors keep changing under you: light, weather, road surface, traffic, the mechanical condition of the vehicle and your own ability to concentrate. Approach every intersection knowing that nobody has a right of way, only a precedence that another driver may fail to give you.