Is Your Teen Driving This Winter? 4 Safety Tips to Discuss

Driving in winter needs additional care from even the best of drivers let alone teens who may have just gotten their licenses. Here are four safety tips that you can discuss with your teenager to help make them a safe driver this winter.

1. Conduct Regular Maintenance

To begin with, let your teen know that during this season, just like any other, car maintenance is important to keep up with. This should be easy enough to keep up with as there are about 234,700 auto repair and maintenance centers in the United States. By taking the time to search for a good one, something that you can help your teen do, you're sure to find an amazing place to which to take the vehicle for regular maintenance. This is going to make sure that the vehicle is in good shape and can be operated efficiently, a factor that can directly impact road safety.

2. Always Travel With an Emergency Kit

Next, remind your teen driver that they need to always make sure that they have an emergency kit in the car whenever they drive out. This can make a major difference to the outcome of an incident or accident on the roads, bearing in mind that each year, millions of people get injured on the highways of the United States. You can be sure that each of these scenarios may have had a different outcome depending on whether the drivers had emergency kits in their vehicles at the time of the accidents. A proper emergency kit should have, among other things, a shovel road flares, a flashlight, a medical emergency kit, and a spare mobile and charger. With the basic items, your teen may be in a position to take proactive steps for their safety if they have any issues on the road.

3. Check the Wheels

The wheels are an especially important part of the vehicle to check and double-check in winter. They need to have healthy tread so that they have good traction on the slippery roads of winter. This is something that you need to help them with since it plays a very crucial role. Keep your teen accountable for this, noting that 74.7% of 1,200 car owners in the latest survey by Ultire gave themselves a rating of 'good' or 'excellent' in terms of their diligence with vehicle maintenance. It should motivate your teen to do their best when it comes to maintaining their vehicle!

4. Drive at Set Speed Limits

Finally, while your teen may have a real need for speed, remind them that winter is a different beast. They need to drive at the set speed limits in various areas or even slower so that they can better maintain control of their vehicles. In case of something like a car in front of them losing control, it may be hard to react if they're driving fast. They also need to drive at a reasonable distance behind the driver ahead so that they have room to react in case of something.

Remember that while you can repeat these tips and instructions to your teen a thousand times, they may learn best by seeing an example to emulate. This means that you need to follow the advice yourself since you also stand to benefit by being safer. In the end, you'll all have a good chance of getting back home safely once you drive out to go somewhere during winter.