The problem can be stated simply. If you take your eyes off the road, you will not see the other vehicle coming toward you. This makes you a danger to other road users. The group most likely to fall into this trap are young drivers. Not only are they the least experienced behind the wheel. They are also the ones with the most peer pressure to reply to the text message or answer the cell phone call immediately. The evidence cannot be more clear. Looking at all the different ways in which teens die through disease and accidents, crashes in motor-vehicles are the leading cause of death. The government estimates that, in 2009, about 5,500 people were killed and more than half-a-million injured because one of the drivers was distracted.

In a perfect world, this would be resolved by a discussion at home. As a parent, you would sit down with your children and explain the risks. The statistics are available on the internet to back up your warnings. Your children would nod their heads wisely and swear by all they hold holy not to continue this dangerous practice. Except this would not work in most families. What teens say to their parents is not how they act when they are outside the home. So now comes the hard choice. Do you sit back and rely on prayer every time they drive off into the wild blue yonder, or do you take positive steps? First, a little law: it’s a criminal offense to operate any transmitter that will block or jam wireless communications. So you would face big fines if you were found jamming mobile phone signals. But it’s probably not an offense if you instal equipment in your vehicle that acts as a passive block to the signal. The reason for the distinction is that if you created a cone of silence around your vehicle by transmitting a signal to jam all the cell towers, you would cut off all the other users in your area. While this might make the roads safer, it would seriously inconvenience everyone else. More importantly, it might interfere with emergency calls for the police and ambulance. So passive shielding is probably legal because it does not interfere with any other vehicle or person on the sidewalk. Taking this simple step means you no longer have trust issues with your teen (until he or she works out how to turn it off or get round the shielding, e.g. by putting an antenna outside the vehicle). Read the rest of this entry »

Having a car involves many responsibilities, some of which may be not as pleasant as driving a car and involve additional costs. Yes, we are talking about vehicle insurance. It’s definitely one of the most irritating aspects of owning a car and a cash-consuming one. Ask any driver and he will tell you that his or her insurance could be less expensive, since it takes a good bite off the family budget. If you are in the same situations as millions of drivers in the country and want your car to be not as expensive to insure as it is now the following money saving tips will definitely help you optimize your costs effectively:

Modify your policy

Vehicle insurance comes in many forms and delivers many options to choose from. When there are many different coverage options included into your policy it becomes very expensive. So your aim when optimizing your insurance costs is to strip off all the unnecessary coverage features and leave only those that are really needed. In fact, the only type of coverage that is legally required is the third party liability whereas all others are optional. Sure, it doesn’t mean that you have to strip down your policy to the bare minimums. But make sure to take some time and think about the things you really need with your policy and things you can leave behind. This will certainly cut your insurance costs effectively. Read the rest of this entry »

The world would be a better place if everyone was trustworthy and honest. Sadly, human nature seems to have come with a selfish gene. We want what we haven’t got. We don’t want to pay for what we need. There was a recent piece of research which staged accidents at intersections involving a bus. The point of the study was to discover how many of the innocent people on the sidewalks would run on to the bus and claim to have been injured. Needless to say, the results did not show city dwellers in a good light. So, when people were first working through the basic statistics of assessing risks, it was obvious there was less risk if people drove only a few miles a week. But if they were commuting long distances on busy interstates, the risk of accidents grew high. The insurers reasoned it would be good to pitch the premium rates to reflect the risks. Except how could they trust the drivers to make an honest declaration of how many miles a week they drove? The answer, sadly, was that no one was trustworthy if allowed to self-certify mileage. When insurers ran a trial, asking drivers to bring in their vehicles for their odometer readings to be taken, everyone quickly learned how to wind back the count of miles.

Well, now technology has arrived that eliminates the risk of cheating – until someone learns how to hack the black boxes, that is. For now, insurers like Progressive are selling a basic policy plus monitoring equipment to plug into your vehicle. The insurer can then monitor when, where and how far you drive. Some insurers are even fitting a GPS transmitter. This is useful if your vehicle is stolen or you report a breakdown and a tow truck has to find you.

Many consider this new technology an invasion of their privacy. The question you have to answer is whether you want the discounts. As a low mileage driver, you pay a monthly premium based on how far you drive and whether you avoid driving at peak times. Before you answer, note some insurers also collect data from your vehicle showing how often you break suddenly, whether you swerve from side to side, and other features of your driving style. Should you have an accident and make a claim, the insurer has a record of how you were driving at the time. If you claimed you hit the other car because you were swerving violently to avoid a moose, the recording may show a slightly different story (ignoring the problem of explaining how there came to be a moose loose in your part of town). Read the rest of this entry »