Night driving, lights, speed and stopping distances
Discussion
I've only been driving a couple of years, so with the nights drawing in I find myself wondering about this one again.
The standard recommendation is that you should always be able to stop in the distance you can see to be clear. Dipped headlights illuminate around 30m in front of you, so on an unlit road and even allowing for some conservatism in the HC stopping distances, anything above say 45 mph puts you at risk of not being able to stop if something suddenly appears put of the shadows.
How do people deal with this? Obviously full beam when appropriate, but there are loads of situations where there might be traffic in the distance which prevents use of full beam, but where said traffic doesn't illuminate anything extra. Motorways particularly - if you're not following anyone but there's some traffic in the other carriageway for example. And should you assume for example that, just because you can see someone's rear lights some way ahead of you, a deer hasn't run out on to the carriageway between them and you.
Clearly you can't be driving at 40 on the motorway, but as someone who generally tries to observe as far in the distance as possible, I'm painfully aware at times that if something suddenly appeared in front of me I'd have precious little time to take evading action, and almost certainly wouldn't be able stop.
Thoughts? Techniques? Recommendations?
The standard recommendation is that you should always be able to stop in the distance you can see to be clear. Dipped headlights illuminate around 30m in front of you, so on an unlit road and even allowing for some conservatism in the HC stopping distances, anything above say 45 mph puts you at risk of not being able to stop if something suddenly appears put of the shadows.
How do people deal with this? Obviously full beam when appropriate, but there are loads of situations where there might be traffic in the distance which prevents use of full beam, but where said traffic doesn't illuminate anything extra. Motorways particularly - if you're not following anyone but there's some traffic in the other carriageway for example. And should you assume for example that, just because you can see someone's rear lights some way ahead of you, a deer hasn't run out on to the carriageway between them and you.
Clearly you can't be driving at 40 on the motorway, but as someone who generally tries to observe as far in the distance as possible, I'm painfully aware at times that if something suddenly appeared in front of me I'd have precious little time to take evading action, and almost certainly wouldn't be able stop.
Thoughts? Techniques? Recommendations?
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