Safe Driving tip – Driver Fatigue

Safe Driving Tip – Driver Fatigue

Safe Driving tip – Driver Fatigue is listed as one of the fatal five (which is actually 7) As we constantly state, no one person hops into a car to crash, yet we do it with monotonous regularity. In fact the road toll has doubled compared to the same time next year.

Did you know driver fatigue is up by over 80% in the last five years. Indeed the Road Toll on the Gold Coast alone has doubled since the same time last year.  Link

“Autonomous vehicles promise benefits in lives saved on the road, congestion in cities, and time spent on commutes. But if you’re hoping that, 5 years from now, you will be able to nap while your self-driving car takes you to work, you’ll likely be disappointed”

Driver fatigue is also a major issue for autonomous cars, don’t worry, despite all the humbug it is still at least 25 years away..

The challenge for Autonomous technology and lawmakers is that Fatigue is also really described as monotony in driving. And when traveling in an autonomous vehicle the driver is always in control and responsible, regardless of the level of automation.

They have the same problem in the airline industry with Pilots. Everything is great until something goes wrong and it is the time taken for the Pilot to “Switch On” that is the difference between an incident and a crash.

Learn More about psychology and driving with autonomous vehicles.

Safe Driving Tip – Driver Fatigue.

So how do we address fatigue in our driving to “Switch On” and stay alive.  Welcome to our article on Safe Driving tip – Driver Fatigue

Every student in a Total Driver program, with driving lessons Gold Coast, Ipswich, Toowoomba, Brisbane and Sunshine Coast, from the beginnings of Learn to Drive to the experienced on a Defensive or Performance program, the first thing we focus on is postural Stability.

Just by how your hands are placed on the steering wheel, will reduce your fatigue by up to 30%.

Don’t believe me, try using the demonstration of holding a glass of water.

A psychologist walked around a room while teaching stress management to an audience. As she raised a glass of water, everyone expected they’d be asked the “half empty or half full” question. Instead, with a smile on her face, she inquired: “How heavy is this glass of water?” Answers called out ranged from 8 oz. to 20 oz. She replied, “The absolute weight doesn’t matter. It depends on how long I hold it. If I hold it for a minute, it’s not a problem. If I hold it for an hour, I’ll have an ache in my arm. If I hold it for a day, my arm will feel numb and paralyzed. In each case, the weight of the glass doesn’t change, but the longer I hold it, the heavier it becomes.”

So when your hands are high on the steering wheel, this is the problem, you are holding your arms up, for sometimes hours at a time.

So bring your hands down to half way position on the steering wheel, treat it like a balance bar at the gym.

Now to make this work, you need balance in your posture, how you sit in the car. It is called Postural Stability and believe it or not, it even goes to how your feet are positioned on the floor and with the pedals.

Insert picture of body with all the arrows pointing to each part.

The next factor is what you see.

We will learn more about this next month. How to look and what to see is imperative. What will surprise you is that everything we want to do, what we want to see, happens to be the exact opposite of what we need to so and see, as there is nothing natural about the art of driving

It is a learned skill.

So our natural process reduces the field of view, accelerates the window of information and causes our eyes, to tell us lies.

This of course, accelerates information, increasing fatigue and engineers the crash we are about to create.

More next newsletter.

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Graduates of Total Driver have a 400% reduction in accidents over the first 3 years of obtaining their license, in comparison to the national average*.

The question we ask all supervisors:

“Will you bet your child’s life you have the skills to teach the art of driving?”