Monday, March 6, 2017

How not to drive in the snow - part 2

Last week I showed you some special little snowflakes who had no clue how to drive around snow plows. This week I'm going to talk about the drivers who come out in the morning to find their car covered in snow or ice, and just drive off. Take a look at this guy - I took this photo last week at some traffic lights on the way into work:

The rear window is completely covered in snow, so he has no idea what is behind him. When I passed him, the side windows had not been scraped and the only part of his windscreen that was clear was the bit being swept by his wipers. This is so unbelievably dangerous. At this point this driver has zero rear or peripheral vision. It doesn't matter that the wing mirrors are clear - he couldn't see them because of the snow on the side windows. Sadly the police don't pay any attention to this sort of thing (unless he was doing 0.1mph over the speed limit in which case he'd become a career criminal in the eyes of the cops).
It takes literally seconds to clear your windows of snow. Buy a snow brush - they're less than a tenner - and keep it in the car. You can clear all six windows in 30 seconds. It will make exactly zero difference to when you get to where you're going, and you'll be able to see out of your car and potentially not kill someone else because of your reckless stupidity.
If it's icy instead of snowy, here's an idea - leave the house 5 minutes earlier so you can scrape the ice off the windows, and let the engine warm up so the heater blows warm air inside to help the ice outside. PLAN AHEAD. It's really not that difficult.
(Point to note: don't leave your car idling with the keys in it, unlocked, to warm up the engine. The chances of it getting stolen go up thousands of percent when you do something stupid like this. By all means warm the engine up to help melt the ice, but either sit in the car, or wait next to it. Yes it's cold, but you'll survive, you're not that delicate).