Before Driving
Before starting your journey, make sure your body is prepared. Get enough sleep and rest, and make sure you are not too full or too hungry.
Avoid from going back to your hometown in rush, such as just after taking breakfast, or trying to catch a dinner in your village.
If you drive while fasting or dieting, take suitable vitamin to supply enough energy.
Driving Position
Ironically, the correct driving position is never been practiced at driving school. Even more, most driver do not know what is the correct driving position. Perhaps many think that their driving position depends to the comfort factor, for example there are drivers who topple down their car seat too low until it makes their neck not getting enough rest and support when driving.
The right driving position depends on suitable distances in car for each of the body parts. The seat must be configured accordingly to a suitable height, where the level of driver’s eyesight has to be at center between the dashboard and the steering wheel.
When wearing the seat belt, it must be wear at the shoulder, and then it flows through the center of the chest to the seat belt’s buckle. If the seat belt happens to flow on your neck area, it means that your seat height is wrong.
While seat belts at the neck are similar to the hanging death sentence if an accident happen.
After getting the suitable height, adjust the seat platform to a position where your foot does not need to be at fully straight to apply the brake on.
Make sure that when the brake is pressed at its maximum, your knee still has a little bent. This is to provide an impact reactance if an accident impact occurs.
As you have got the right position and height, then adjust your hands position. Straighten both of your hands and put them on the top of your steering wheel.
At the correct position, the top of wheel steering will touch the wrist area of your hands. Adjust the steering wheel height according to your suitability. Do not make it too low until it reduced your legs movement limit or too high until it forces you to drive in a ‘hanging hand’ situation.
The correct hand position when driving is by holding the left and right part of the steering wheel, not at the top, below or driving with a hand under your chin.
If your journey is more than four hours, stop to take a short break. When at stop, do not switch off your car engine immediately, wait for around one minute to ensure that the lubricant in the engine returns to its reservoir and the moving parts of the engine is idle enough.
Stretch your muscles, make a light exercise on the neck, hand, foot and back. If your eyes feel too sleepy, take a nap to revive your energy. If there is other who can drive, it is better to take turns driving in about three or four hours for each driver. This would give enough rest and energy to each driver.
When Driving
If driving in the correct position, you will not waste your energy to accommodate your body weight at wrong position.
Hence, your driving capacity is greater. However, a frequent driver’s carelessness factor is the lack of attention while driving.
The enemy of good driving is lack of control by drivers because of drowsiness. When being drowsy and fatigue, the sensitivity to the surrounding is lowered and the ability to estimate is also lowered. So when a dangerous situation happens, such as when the vehicle is out of control, the driver will become more quickly to panic.
Driving with friends is one of the ways to enable constant communication and no interruption of driver’s concentration because of fatigue.
Chatting can provide energy at the same time can avoid fatigue which becomes the source of drowsiness. Once in a while when driving, stretch your hands, body and legs muscles out. Try to change your driving position several times. Fatigue is caused by slow blood flow because of static sitting position.
