Your Driving and the Road
Defensive Driving
The best advice anyone can give about
driving is: Drive defensively.
Please start with a very important safety
device
in your Pontiac: Buckle up. (See
“Safety Belts’’
in the Index.)
Defensive driving really means “be ready
for anything.” On city streets, rural roads,
or freeways,
it means “always expect the
unexpected.”
Assume that pedestrians or other drivers
are going to be careless and make
mistakes. Anticipate what they might do.
Be ready for their mistakes.
Rear-end collisions are about the most
preventable of accidents. Yet they are
common. Allow enough following
distance.
It’s the best defensive driving
maneuver,
in both city and rural driving.
You never know when the vehicle in front
of you is going to brake or turn suddenly.
Drunken Driving
Death and injury associated with drinking
and driving is a national tragedy.
It’s the
number one contributor to the highway
death toll, claiming thousands of victims
every year. Alcohol takes away three
things that anyone needs to drive a
vehicle:
Judgment
0 Muscular Coordination
0 Vision
Police records show that almost half of all
motor vehicle-related deaths involve
alcohol
- a driver, a passenger or
someone else, such as a pedestrian, had
been drinking. In most cases, these deaths
are the result of someone who was
drinking and driving. About
20,000 motor
vehicle-related deaths occur each year
because of alcohol, and thousands
of
people are injured. Just how much
alcohol is
too much if a
person plans to drive? Ideally, no one
should drink alcohol and then drive.
But
if one does, then what’s “too much”? It
can be a lot less than many might
think.
Although it depends on each person and
situation, here is some general
information on the problem.
The Blood Alcohol Content (BAC)
of
someone who is drinking depends upon
four things:
0
How much alcohol is in the drink.
The drinker’s body weight.
The amount
of food that is consumed
before and during drinking.
The length
of time it has taken the
drinker to consume the alcohol.
... 138
ProCarManuals.com
