Do you find yourself turning your head, craning your neck and fixating on blind spots in the name of ‘caution’? In those few seconds that your eyes are averted from the road you could be involved in a potentially fatal car accident - and the key to avoiding this lies in properly adjusting your side view mirrors!

As a CA injury attorney, I see accidents all the time that could have been avoided by simply adjusting the mirrors so the driver did not need to fixate on a blind spot.

So, here is a quick test to see if your mirrors are properly set - can you see the side of your car? Yes? In that case you are not using the full potential of your mirrors! When you spread your mirrors, you reduce the overlap between the side and center mirrors, and are able to see what is beside you!

To set your mirrors correctly - turn them 15 degrees around about from the typical sideview mirror settings. You place your head against the driver’s side window and adjust until you can barely see the side of the car. To fix the passenger’s side mirror, put your head as close to the center of the car as possible and then, like the driver’s side, move the mirror until you can barely see the side of your car.

When a car passes you, it should enter your sideview mirror before it leaves the rearview and should enter your peripheral before it leaves the sideview.

Some of the benefits gained from this little change:

• Don’t have to turn your head to change lanes
• Don’t have to ever really look away from the road
• Eliminates glare from trailing headlights

Once you switch your mirrors, you will wonder why you ever put them the other way in the first place.

However, if you’ have experienced a car or pedestrian accident as a result of someone not taking proper diligence to safety.  Simply call a CA injury attorney at 888.881.2345 or visit our educational California car accident resource page at http://www.dekirby.net/auto-accidents

Tags: accident, adjust, blind spots, car, center, degrees, lane change, mirrors, sideview

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 25th, 2010 at 2:54 pm and is filed under Car Safety. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.