What motivates your purchasing behaviour when you’re thinking of buying a car? Don’t worry, there are no wrong answers here. Perhaps you’re a devout petrol head for whom performance is everything. You won’t get out of bed for anything less than 292 horsepower and if it’s less than 280 lb-ft or torque they can just “torque to the hand” (yup, dropping some 1998 slang in there). Perhaps your buyer behaviour is more conservative in nature; you want a car that’s going to save on the increasingly ludicrous fuel costs while also ensuring that your carbon footprint is reduced. Or maybe you’re motivated by something much simpler than that… Aesthetics. If so, that’s absolutely fine. If you’re not so much bothered about how your car performs as how cool you look driving it, that’s a perfectly legitimate reason for buying a car.
Yet, as we get older, wiser and more responsible, our priorities have a habit of changing. As we fall in love, marry and have kids we become far more preoccupied with safety. While an accident lawyer can be invaluable in the event of a collision that wasn’t your fault, we all want to ensure that our chances of getting into a scrape are reduced in the first place. The good news is that there have been a number of exciting innovations in the realm of automotive safety over the past few years. You don’t even need to buy a new car to benefit from them. Here, we’ll look at some awesome aftermarket safety devices which can make virtually any car safer…
Tyre pressure monitoring systems
Driving on under inflated tyres can not only mean that you spend more on fuel, it can also mean that less of the tyre’s surface makes contact with the road, resulting in more friction and disproportionate wear which could even lead to a blowout. If you bought your car after 2008, there’s a good chance that you already have this technology, but even if your car is older you can buy an aftermarket tyre pressure monitoring system which places RF sensors on your tyre stem caps and leads to a unit which is plugged into your 12V charger.
Parking sensors
It’s okay to admit it, we’ve all found ourselves driving for what seems like hours looking for a less busy area of a carpark so that we don’t have to dust off our rusty reverse parking skills in front of an audience of strangers. Fortunately, while parking sensors are increasingly common in new vehicles they are easy to fit on most cars aftermarket. Backup sensors will emit a beep that gets louder and more intense the closer to another vehicle (or pedestrian) you get.
Blind spot detection systems
How many times did your driving instructor tell you to check your blind spot? And did you do it? It’s okay, we won’t tell anyone. Thankfully, there are a plethora of aftermarket blind spot detection systems that will emit a tone or flash an LED when someone or something gets within 7-10 feet of your blind spot.
Lane departure sensors
If your job or lifestyle necessitate a lot of long hours on the motorway, even the most experienced drivers can find themselves drifting within their lanes. Fortunately there are aftermarket lane departure sensors which can alert you when you’re drifting dangerously close to another lane.