Defensive Driving

The Exercise Of Driving

You must be seeing cars on the road everyday. Most of you must be driving one as well! But have you gone into the depths of driving as an exercise? Driving, like any other activity, can be broken down into preliminary, secondary, tertiary phases and so on.

On the preliminary level, whenever you learn driving, you start with understanding the mechanics of the vehicle – how to steer the car, how to raise the speed, how to stop the car, how to change gears and so on. Having learnt how your vehicle is controlled, you go on to the secondary level which includes studying the finer points of the car like the fuel indicator, the dashboard controls for lights, viper, etc. Having known the basics of the vehicle, you move on to the tertiary level- the environment of the activity or the road on which you would drive the vehicle. The conventions of the road tell you how to drive straight, how to avoid bad roads, how to dodge slow moving cars, when to rush through gaps, and other such things.

Defensive Driving

What we will read today is a step further to these basics. Defensive driving does not speak about the technicalities of the car or the conventions on the road. The objective of defensive driving is to foresee unwanted situations which may be a cause of potential peril and avoid them.

So how do we foresee these? Simple! Learn from other’s blunders. There is ample data available across the world about how accidents have been caused by poor defensive driving skills. There are institutions backed by the government or non-profit organizations which have gathered this valuable data, done a solid research on them and developed the techniques to inculcate the defensive driving habits in one and all. Defensive Driving courses backed by vehicle manufacturers and Insurance companies across the globe are also not unheard of.

In a nutshell, defensive driving is an interactive method of communicating to you, the need of safety in driving, demonstrating to you the hazards that cause damage and imbibing in you a culture of risk free driving which would not just protect your life but of others too!