Road Rage, Car Jacking And Situational Awareness In Your Car

You’ll be aware of that well-worn phrase that familiarity breeds contempt. It might be something never truer than when you are driving your car. After all, you probably spend a lot of time behind the wheel for one reason or another – the daily commute to work, taking the kids to school, popping out to the shops, and even holidays when you might spend days at a time simply touring in your car.

Like many other activities that you’ve already done more than a thousand times before, it might become difficult maintaining your concentration at all times when driving your car.

Yet, given the high stakes of getting it wrong – from having an accident to being a victim of car-jacking or similar – maintaining that concentration and developing your situational awareness in your car is extremely important.

Developing your situational awareness in your car – when you are prepared to encounter and take appropriate action in response to anything that might happen – is not only important in avoiding injury or death to other road-users but might also become an issue of personal security.

In this increasingly dangerous world, you also need to be alert to the risks of carjacking, outbursts of road rage, or other acts of violence against you by drivers of other cars, motorcyclists, or even pedestrians who might be lurking wherever you are stopped in traffic.

Road rage

According to a report by Sky News on the 28^th of November 2020, there has been a steady increase in incidents of road rage in the past three years – with thousands of cases in which innocent motorists have been spat at, kicked, bitten, punched, stabbed, and dragged from their vehicles.

Victims have been stabbed, punched, kicked, bitten, and spat at, with some dragged from their vehicles during the assault.

Try to avoid situations where you could be a victim of road rage – if people cut you up, don’t honk your horn or gesticulate at them. Take a deep breath and try and let it go.

Similarly, if someone starts honking at you etc., don’t retaliate. Using a car dashcam may give you extra peace of mind should you be involved in any kind of road related incident.

The RAC has some more tips on their website on how to avoid and deal with road rage.

Car jacking

Car jackers use clever tips to steal your car.

Tricks employed by car jackers include:

• placing something that looks like an injured animal in the road and stealing your vehicle when you get out to investigate;
• putting a leaflet on the vehicle windscreen and taking the car once you get out to remove it;
• pushing in your wing mirrors so that when you get out of the car to move them, the thief can steal the vehicle.

Basically, their aim is to get the car started and distract you.

Your situational awareness while driving should be attuned to those possibilities and helps to develop your readiness in taking evasive action.

Developing situational awareness

Before you even drive off in your car, follow these tips:

• as you are walking to your vehicle, notice who is around you – are you being watched?
• look through the car windows and check the back seat before you get in, in case someone is lying in wait;
• give your vehicle a quick check over to make sure nothing has been moved to distract you (e.g., the aforementioned wing mirrors, moved to distract you).

Get in and manually lock your doors.

Then re-focus.

Situational awareness depends on your concentrating on what you are doing, what is happening around you, and how that might call upon immediate responses and possibly evasive action in certain circumstances. But situational awareness also calls for more than observation and concentration:

• set off in early or at least in good time for any journey – one of the major enemies of good situational awareness is being in a rush to get somewhere;

• aim to remain mindful of your driving, suggests a thread on the discussion website Quora, since mindfulness is a way of preventing the potentially dangerous tendency to drive on auto-pilot – especially if you’re travelling an especially familiar route;

• concentrate on the traffic around you – if it’s a familiar route, do you recognise any of the other vehicles alongside you? Do you recognise any of the drivers, and what can you tell from the expressions on their faces and general body language?

• a trick that might help you focus on other road-users and their drivers or rides is to imagine that you have to give a detailed description of the vehicle and the person to some third party – how much of the detail do you remember, what features stand out, and what if anything is unique about what you have observed;

• be alert to subtle changes in the behaviour of vehicles ahead of you – if one begins to drift across the lane, for example, it might mean the driver is about to change lanes and has not yet signalled the intention. A dab of the brake lights might be the warning of an unexpected manoeuvre or that the driver is lost;

• more ominously, of course, erratic, or unpredictable behaviour on the part of other road-users might heighten your vigilance as to any negative intent;

• for that reason, make sure you are intimately familiar with your own vehicle and all its quirks – how nimble and quick will it be to make a getaway, can you release your seatbelt easily in an emergency, can you operate the doors’ central-locking facility, and so on;

• that familiarity is also likely to bolster your confidence in staying inside your car in the face of any physical threat or assault – you are likely to remain far safer inside the vehicle and will be able to take the earliest opportunity to drive away to seek help (at the nearest police station, for example);

• what all of this means, of course, is that your situational awareness can only be improved and enhanced if you keep your eyes permanently scanning the road ahead – and by using your mirrors regularly to check on what might be closing fast behind you.

You might want to remind yourself that your undoubted familiarity with the skills needed to drive from A to B may have bred a certain degree of familiarity. So, rebuild your situational awareness to keep safe on the road.

Don’t forget too, tools that can help you maintain your personal safety in the car such as a seatbelt cutter kit and safety hammer to help you escape if you are trapped in your vehicle and a car first aid kit.